Borscht Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The form of borscht we know today, made with red beetroot, most likely settled in the region corresponding to present-day Ukraine across the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A Russian botanical dictionary of 1781 notes that in Ukraine people ferment the leaves and root of a herb together with red beets and cook their borscht with it, and a 1785 description of the Kharkiv province names borscht, made from beets and cabbage simmered in very sour kvass, as the peasants' most common dish. A Polish-German dictionary of 1806 defines barszcz as a soup soured over red beets, bran or other dough.

The soup's leading flavor comes from the beet, a crop long present in the Old World and on hand early on in the villages of the East Slavs. Fermenting that beet together with herbs, or simmering it slowly in sour kvass—this craft of preserving and cooking raised the red-beet soup into a dish of its own within the village hearth and peasant life.

Potatoes and tomatoes are sometimes spoken of as though indispensable, but they joined only in the nineteenth century. Potatoes spread through Russia and Ukraine around 1800; tomatoes came into regular use in Ukraine around 1870. From the start, the sourness came from fermented beets and herbs, or from kvass; potatoes and tomatoes were later additions, not the ingredients that name today's borscht. Before the red beet there was an older form still, made by fermenting the wild herb hogweed.

Borscht has attracted a string of stirring origin tales. A favorite holds that Cossacks created the dish: that in 1683, Zaporozhian Cossacks marching to relieve the Siege of Vienna, or in 1695, Don Cossacks besieging Azov, devised a red-beet soup in camp. But the food historian Alexander Lee wrote in 2018 that there is probably little truth in either, and that beetroot borscht was most likely made by ethnic Ukrainians living under Russian rule east of the Dnieper in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The legend itself probably arose in the nineteenth century, a story that tied the origin of a national dish to the heroic image of the Cossack. The early texts of 1584 and 1781 make no connection with the sieges and lend the legend no support.

Follow the written record back and the word borscht turns out to be older than one might expect. The German merchant Martin Gruneweg is reported to have recorded the name in a diary written near Kyiv in 1584—about two hundred years before the botanical dictionary of 1781. Yet this mention takes in "borscht" as a whole, reaching back to the older form made with hogweed before the red beet, and does not directly tell us when the red-beet version came to be. The year a name is written down is not the year the dish took shape. There is a place-name legend, too: that the river Borshchahivka is named for a "borscht market"—but Gruneweg himself already noted his doubts about this in 1584.

And in recent years the question of whose borscht it is became, once more, political tinder. In 2019, a post by the Russian foreign ministry claiming borscht as a national dish of Russia set off a dispute with Ukraine over heritage attribution. That the underlying type—a fermented sour soup—was widely rooted across the East Slavic world is not in doubt; but as to where the red-beet version took shape, there is little in the sources to argue against Ukraine. The folklorist Mariya Lesiv, in a 2022 study, treats the pan-East-Slavic claim as a product of cultural politics. In 2022, UNESCO inscribed "the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking" on its list of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.