Borscht: A Thick Soup of Beets, Cabbage and Meat
In 2019, Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared borscht one of the most famous and best-loved Russian dishes - and in the same breath generously handed it out to seven countries at once. Moldova made the list too, though nobody had asked it. Ukraine answered three years later by getting borscht onto the UNESCO list; Moldova, meanwhile, did what it does best with borscht - calmly ate it for lunch.
Borscht (Romanian: borș roșu, Russian: борщ) is a thick, sour soup of beets, cabbage and meat that Ukrainian neighbors brought into Moldovan cuisine, and it has settled in so thoroughly that today it's on the menu of almost every restaurant.
Whose Borscht Is It and Why Moldovans Call It Red
In Moldova the name is trickier than the recipe. The word borș means three things here: the fermented bran liquid used to sour soups, sour soup in general - and only with the adjective roșu, red, this beet one.
The dispute over its origin has gone international: beet borscht is Ukrainian, and in 2022 UNESCO inscribed the culture of cooking it on its list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding - fast-tracked because of the Russian invasion. Even the Russian Wikipedia admits that Russian took over the word's meaning of beet soup from Ukrainian in the 19th century. There are more relatives across Eastern Europe: Polish barszcz czerwony, for example, is a clear broth next to the Moldovan version, served on the Christmas Eve table with little mushroom dumplings. In Moldovan cooking, borscht is an immigrant - just one that got the vote a long time ago.
How Borscht Made Itself at Home in Moldova
Calling it Soviet would be convenient, but borscht has been in the country longer than the Soviet Union. By the end of the 19th century, nearly four hundred thousand Ukrainians lived in what was then Bessarabia, mostly in the north, and according to the Moldovan Academy of Sciences borscht is still their favorite soup. The Soviet era then carried it from Ukrainian kitchens into canteens and onto menus across the whole republic - just like solyanka. Today Moldovan cooking websites write about it as the taste of childhood; nobody can say exactly when the neighbors' soup became their own.
Beets, Beans and a Spoonful of Smântână
Beets are the star, and they bring the recipe's big catch with them: once the beets are in the pot, the soup mustn't cook for long, or the deep red fades. That's why the beets are braised separately with a splash of vinegar and only go into the pot near the end. If you remember borscht as a thin red broth from a school canteen, a Moldovan bowl will set you straight: alongside the beets it usually has beans (though Ukraine's Podolia, just across the river, puts them in too), and it tends to be thick and hearty. Often it's more of a goulash with some soup spilled around it.
It's an everyday lunch, not a festive dish. It gets cooked at home, in restaurants and in self-service canteens, where you pay for your borscht by weight. The bowl comes with a good spoonful of sour smântână, a hot pepper to bite into and, in many places, pampushky - warm yeast buns with garlic that borscht brought along from Ukraine. The smântână gets stirred in, the pepper never; you just take a bite of it now and then, so everyone at the table can give the soup as much kick as they like.
Two Bowls in Chișinău
In Chișinău I had borscht at two places, and I can't pick the better one. At the La Plăcinte chain (see Where to Eat in Chișinău), my bowl of borș roșu cu carne for 80 MDL (3.90 EUR) came with two buns sprinkled with raw garlic and a few white slices of cured pork fat; there was a generous portion of meat inside. At Acasă la Mama the borscht cost 93 MDL (4.60 EUR), and there was so much meat in it that I went straight for a close-up shot. Both were perfect. And so, together with herring under a fur coat, borscht became the order we repeated day after day in Chișinău - and this from someone who otherwise tries never to order the same thing twice when traveling, so I can taste as much as possible. I missed out on plenty of chances to try something new that way. I don't regret it.
