HOW TO LADY GAGA YOUR BORSCHT.
Ask about somebody’s favourite family food, and you’ll hear about their parents, and their parent’s parents. Recipes tell us where you are from. But it’s up to you (and Lady Gaga) to keep them alive.
Recipes are survivors. They can handle drought, disease, war, revolution – even fashion. They sit there quietly when forgotten about, then rise again when needed. They travel, as migrants and refugees, across borders, and across time.
But what turns a recipe into a family recipe? Repetition and familiarity embed it in the DNA of your particular clan or tribe. Eat something every Friday night for the first ten years of your life, and that taste, that table, the smells, the people, will stay with you forever.
For me, that’s everything from the chocolate self-saucing pudding known in the family as Granny’s Goo, to my mother’s egg and bacon pie, caramel dumplings, roast lamb, corned beef, and pea and ham soup. Yep, I was lucky. Country cooking.
For my husband Terry, it’s more urban. His Mum was a pub cook in Richmond in inner-city Melbourne, and would come home with huge trays of spaghetti baked with Bolognese sauce – her own invention - for the four boys to share. Elwood High School brought big shared dinners with the families of Polish school mates - blintzes, cabbage rolls and kreplach. He then married Anna, whose Polish mother Maria, was a great cook, and whose Ukrainian father Makar infused vodka with cherries in the garage.
Theirs is a story that would resonate with so many in Australia - the flight from Poland in 1948, Maria heavily pregnant, their first daughter born while travelling overland to Villach in Austria; the anxious wait for a boat; the relief to be on that boat headed for a new life in Canada with their baby girl – and the surprise when told it was heading for Melbourne, Australia instead.
Maria’s cooking combined their histories, so the tables were covered with holubtsi (cabbage rolls), vareneki (stuffed dumplings), pelmeni (stuffed flat dumplings), special breads, and – at least once a week – borscht, that magnificently sweet and earthy beetroot soup that’s love in a bowl for almost everyone from central or eastern Europe.
Terry asked his son Max to ask Maria and Anna for the recipe, so he could pay homage to it in one of his books. I’m so glad he did. Maria and Makar, and sadly, Anna herself, are no longer with us, but the family recipe lives on for Max, and his cousins, and for his son and daughter.
It’s a great reminder to ask your grandparents – and parents – for their recipes. And also, to not wrap those recipes in tissue and store them away but use them, change them and let them evolve, to keep them alive. And that’s where Lady Gaga comes in, because whatever she does, she makes it her own. And because it means I get to use this fab image of her (below the recipe) doing her own thing to a bottle of Dom Pérignon Rosé.
Also – this isn’t all about old people. The food we cook every day for others is the food that will make them remember us, when they walk into the kitchen to pick up a knife, stir a soup, or pull a cake out of the oven.
BORSCHT, AND HOW TO LADY GAGA IT.
I’ve based the recipe here on the family recipe I married into, but every family brought up with borscht has its own way of cooking (and spelling) it.
Serves 4
1 kg medium raw beetroot
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
3 celery stalks, finely sliced
2 carrots, peeled and diced
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 cup savoy cabbage, cored and shredded
2 litres vegetable and/or chicken stock
400 g tinned chopped tomatoes
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 bay leaves
2 tsp sugar or honey
1 tsp salt flakes
Half tsp cracked black pepper
1 tbsp lemon juice, white vinegar or balsamic
Sour cream and dill or chives for serving
Peel the beetroot and cut into 1 cm cubes or thereabouts.
Heat the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan, and cook the onion and garlic for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.
Add the celery, carrot, potato, cabbage, beetroot, stock, tomatoes, tomato paste, bay leaves, sugar, salt, pepper and lemon juice or vinegar and bring to the boil.
Lower the heat and simmer gently, partly covered, for 1 hour or until all vegetables are tender, with a bit of life to them still, a bit of bite.
Taste for sea salt, pepper and vinegar.
Serve in warm, shallow soup bowls, and top with a dollop of sour cream and snipped dill or chives.
MAKE LIKE LADY GAGA, AND DO YOUR OWN THING.
For a change of pace, shred the beetroot instead of cubing it, or blend the end result into a smooth puree and swirl with sour cream.
Go mad and add coconut milk, chilli, turmeric and ginger, and scatter with nigella seeds.
Consider adding Moroccan ras el hanout and serve scattered with pomegranate seeds. Purple Rain!
Add shredded cooked roast beef or ham and heat through to serve.
Avoid veggies that look weird when pink, like white cauliflower.
Serve with sour cream, or yoghurt and masses of scissor-snipped chives or dill.
Eat with toasted dark rye bread, pumpernickel bread or a pack of salted beetroot chips from the health food store.
Grate bitey, fresh horseradish over the top to serve.
Serve with a shredded radicchio salad, to keep the puce theme going.
Drink with Dom Pérignon Rosé, if you prefer a pink theme. Or cherry vodka.
Thanks for reading (and liking, commenting, subscribing, knock yourself out). Parts of this story first appeared in Inside History magazine in 2012, and are reproduced with thanks. As is the beautifully cool image of Lady Gaga by photographer Nick Knight, for Dom Pérignon.
I would like to acknowledge that I live, work and play on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and wish to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I fully support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to be enshrined in Australia’s Constitution.