Proto-borscht (fermented hogweed soup, pre-history) Period COrigin theory BVerified

Say borscht today and you picture a soup dyed deep red by beetroot. But before it took that red form, there was an older borscht built on a different main ingredient: a sour soup made from fermented hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium), a wild plant.

Hogweed was an old wild plant rooted in the East Slavic lands, at hand in rural households from early on. Around May, people gathered its young stalks, leaves, and flowering heads, chopped them, and steeped them in water to ferment. Lactic and alcoholic fermentation gave a measured sourness—a taste later described as somewhere between beer and sauerkraut. A soup born of nothing more than a plain, native piece of know-how: gather a plant from the wild, steep it, and let it turn sour.

What this soup was like is vividly conveyed by a 16th-century text. In 1595 the Polish herbal Herbarz polski, by Marcin z Urzędowa, records the fermented hogweed broth (barszcz), noting that soured in the Polish way it is good against heat and thirst, and that with egg and butter added it may be eaten on fast days. Down to that way of eating it—egg and butter floated on top for a meatless day—the account shows a dish already well settled into daily life.

Beetroot took the leading role much later. It was only from the 16th century onward that the beet, once it reached these lands, pushed aside the original hogweed and settled at the centre of the soup. Today's red borscht is thus the successor of a soup that originally simmered an altogether different plant.

The charm of this dish is that its very name holds its older form. Trace the word borscht back and you arrive not at the red beet but at hogweed. The etymological dictionaries, the studies of medieval Slavic food, and the ethnobotanical surveys of plants people have eaten all point to the same plant. Before the red beet, borscht was a sour soup of fermented hogweed—and this is now the settled view among scholars.

The word itself goes back to an old East Slavic form (Old East Slavic борщь). The oldest surviving text that records barszcz as a dish, however, is the 1595 herbal of Marcin z Urzędowa, printed in Poland. Birthplace and first written record diverge: the name's home is East Slavic, the earliest record West Slavic. This is common with old dishes—the writing down usually comes long after the birth.

For that reason, when and where the soup arose is still in the mist. The usual claim places it in what is now Ukraine, around the 5th to 9th century. But no contemporary record confirms it. It is more reasonable to see this sour soup as having risen up in many places on its own, out of the widely rooted East Slavic habit of fermenting wild plants.

That an old layer existed is certain. But neither the year nor the place can be narrowed to a single point. There is no story of one person inventing it in one year—and leaving that honestly open is what suits this prehistory.