Ukrainian chef Ievgen Klopotenko never expected to find himself at the center of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But that’s just what happened when the 33-year-old pushed to have borscht — the traditional beetroot and cabbage dish — recognized as part of Ukraine’s historical heritage.
“I don’t really like to call it a war for borscht, but in fact that’s what it is,” Klopotenko, a graduate of the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, said in his renowned Ukrainian restaurant in central Kiev.
The chef said he was fed up with how restaurants around the world — including those serving “so-called Ukrainian cuisine” — were referring to borscht as Russian soup.
Photo: AFP
So last month he brought a pot of borscht to Ukraine’s culture ministry to convince officials to submit an application to the UN cultural body UNESCO to list borscht as an intangible part of the country’s cultural heritage.
The list already includes French gastronomy, Neapolitan pizza and Georgian wine.
The ministry agreed and said it was preparing the application to UNESCO before the March deadline, so it can be examined in December next year.
Photo: AFP
And suddenly Moscow bristled.
“Borscht is a national food of many countries, including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Moldova and Lithuania,” Russia’s embassy in the US posted on Twitter.
BORSCHT UNITES US
Photo: AFP
The Russian government soon followed on its own Twitter account, calling borscht “one of Russia’s most famous and beloved dishes and a symbol of traditional cuisine.”
Ukrainians claim that borscht was first mentioned in 1548 in the diary of a European traveler who tasted the soup in a market near Kiev. They say it arrived in Russia much later with Ukrainian settlers.
Tensions between Kiev and Moscow have flared in the decades following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
After a pro-Western popular uprising in Kiev in 2014 followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support of separatists in the east, the confrontation has intensified.
For Klopotenko, the battle over borscht is really about Ukraine’s identity.
The country has been closely tied to Russia for most of its history. Much of what is now Ukraine was part of the tsarist Russian empire and later the country became part of the Soviet Union. “When I started studying Ukrainian food and cuisine, I realized that Ukrainian cuisine does not exist in Ukraine. It’s all Soviet,” Klopotenko said.
The Soviet Union “swallowed” Ukraine, “chewed it and spat it out ... We don’t know who we are or what we are,” he added.
But there is one thing for Klopotenko that is quintessentially Ukrainian: the beetroot and cabbage soup. “I realized that borscht is what unites us,” he said. “We may be different, we eat different types of borscht cooked to different recipes, but it’s borscht.”
MORE THAN FOOD
The application will not contain a recipe for borscht as “nobody knows the authentic one,” Klopotenko said.
“We will register something bigger. We will register the culture of borscht in Ukraine,” he said, adding that the soup “is much more important than just food.”
Olena Shcherban, a Ukrainian ethnologist and historian, said it is “absurd” to associate borscht with Russia.
“Borscht is the second dish that I ate after my mother’s milk. We wean the baby and then feed him with borscht,” Shcherban said as she stood over her stove cooking the soup.
The 40-year-old says that Ukrainians do not know their history well and have a “lack of pride” in their gastronomy, unlike the French or Italians.
She has tried to promote the dish through a festival in the village of Opishnya in central Ukraine that she has organized for seven years. And last month, she opened a museum dedicated to borscht.
“Borscht is art, borscht is language, borscht is culture, borscht is the history of my Ukraine,” Shcherban said.
The arrival of a Typhoon Gaemi last week coincided with the publication of a piece at Yale Climate Connection on the upcoming bill for coastal defenses in the US: US$400 billion by 2040. Last week’s column noted how Taiwan is desperately short of construction workers. I doubt “sea wall and dike construction workers” are on the radar of most readers, but they should be. Indeed, the extensive overbuilding of residential housing has crowded out construction workers needed elsewhere, one of the many ways the housing bubble is eating Taiwan. FLOODING For example, a September 2022 piece in Frontiers in Environmental Science, a
Last Sunday’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) national congress was the most anticipated in years, and produced some drama and surprises. As expected, party chair President William Lai (賴清德), his New Tide (新潮流系統, usually abbreviated to 新系) faction and his allied “trust in Lai” (信賴) coalition of factions won majorities and control of the party, but New Tide did not do as well as expected due to an unexpected defection (two previous columns — “The powerful political force that vanished from the English press,” April 23, 2024 and “Introducing the powerful DPP factions,” April 27, 2024 — provide indepth introductions
Allegations of corruption against three heavyweight politicians from the three major parties are big in the news now. On Wednesday, prosecutors indicted Hsinchu County Commissioner Yang Wen-ke (楊文科) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), a judgment is expected this week in the case involving Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and former deputy premier and Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is being held incommunicado in prison. Unlike the other two cases, Cheng’s case has generated considerable speculation, rumors, suspicions and conspiracy theories from both the pan-blue and pan-green camps.
Stepping inside Waley Art (水谷藝術) in Taipei’s historic Wanhua District (萬華區) one leaves the motorcycle growl and air-conditioner purr of the street and enters a very different sonic realm. Speakers hiss, machines whir and objects chime from all five floors of the shophouse-turned- contemporary art gallery (including the basement). “It’s a bit of a metaphor, the stacking of gallery floors is like the layering of sounds,” observes Australian conceptual artist Samuel Beilby, whose audio installation HZ & Machinic Paragenesis occupies the ground floor of the gallery space. He’s not wrong. Put ‘em in a Box (我們把它都裝在一個盒子裡), which runs until Aug. 18, invites