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LirtLE Russian Borshtsh

A beetroot-based soup with beef, vegetables, and sour cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 336 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

LirtLE Russian Borshtsh

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Scrape the beetroots.

  2. Place the scraped beetroots in an earthenware vessel.

  3. Cover the beetroots with lukewarm boiled water.

  4. Let the beetroots sit to extract the juice.

Make the soup

  1. Pour the juice into a pot with the lean beef to make a strong soup.

  2. Slice the turnips, carrots, celery, and beetroots into long, thin pieces.

  3. Sprinkle the sliced vegetables with sugar.

  4. Add the vegetables, dried mushroom, and chopped onion to the boiling soup.

  5. Adjust the juice in the soup to taste.

  6. Let the soup boil once.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of boiled meat and ham.

  2. If the soup is pale, grate a raw beetroot into a strainer.

  3. Strain the soup through the grated beetroot into the serving dish.

  4. Serve with sour cream for each person to add to their soup as desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Beetroot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beetroot + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together699 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beetroots
Supply the deep red colour and the sweet, earthy flavour that define the soup.
Lean beef
Builds a savoury, meaty broth that gives the soup its body and depth.
Sugar
Balances the sourness and earthiness of the beetroot juice.
Dried mushroom
Adds concentrated savoury, umami notes to the broth.
Sour cream
Adds richness and a cooling tang that softens the soup's acidity at the table.

The step that matters

Let the soup boil once. Beetroot colour comes from heat- and acid-sensitive pigments that fade and dull with prolonged boiling, so the soup should be brought to a boil only once and then kept from further boiling.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, beef, turnip, carrot, celery, sugar, mushroom):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, beef, turnip, carrot, celery, sugar, mushroom. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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