So, what is borscht? Is it deep red, with slices of beets floating in it? Or is clear, and made from cow parsnips? Sour? Sweet? Does a dollop of sour cream sit in the center? Is it flavored with beef? Is it Russian? Or is it Ukrainian? History points at the answer in two different directions, depending on where you draw the line between the past and the present. Historians estimate that borscht first appeared in what is now Ukraine, sometime between the 5th and 9th centuries. It was a humble dish; peasants boiled cow parsnips when they grew in the spring, sometimes adding eggs or meat to the soup. Nearly a millennium later, in the 17th century, the dish made it to the nobility class, who added cabbage, oats, lemon, and rye. Towards the end of the century, a “red borscht” appeared, for the first time. However, this is where the story gets tricky. The red borscht, made with beetroots, originated from ethnic Ukrainians living in occupied Russian territories. So, who does borscht belong to?

The soup continued to change as it passed between cultures. In the 19th century, some added potatoes and tomatoes, which were originally products of the Americas. Polish Christians enjoyed borscht made with fish stock on Christmas eve. Jews across the Slavic nations removed the meat to make the dish kosher, serving cold borscht topped with sour cream on the holiday of Shavuot. Their descendants took the dish west when they fled Russia, bringing borscht to the United States in the mid 20th century. Back in the Soviet Union, which enveloped modern-day Ukraine, this dish became a national treasure. Borscht appears in Soviet literature, in the state-produced cookbook The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, and in the kitchens of the Kremlin and villages alike. Even Russian astronauts brought it to space.

Through some trick of the Jewish diaspora, the dish made its way to me. I remember the first time I tried borscht, as a young child, lying on the couch while I waited for lunch. My parents burst through the door into my grandparents' Chicago apartment, their arms laden with the traditional Jewish deli food that we could never find in my hometown of Seattle. Brushing past me, they dropped sandwiches filled with sliced corned beef, layered with briny cabbage and topped with two slices of rye, onto the counter, followed by plastic containers of salty matzah ball soup, a box of heavily scented cinnamon rugelach, and latkes bigger than my hands. Finally, they set down a mysterious bright red soup. The borscht of my childhood is nothing like the Ukrainian, Catholic Polish, or Russian soup found in culinary history books. It was sweet, with a kick of vinegar in a thin red broth. Slices of beets floated in it, mingled with cabbage, and a dollop of sour cream lingered into the center. In the summer, we served it cold to combat the sticky midwest humidity, and in the winter we would warm it on the stove, swirling in the melted cream. There were no potatoes or parsnips, and there was certainly no pork. I didn’t particularly care for beets or cabbage as a six-year-old, but I loved the sweetness of the soup, and so I slurped up spoonfuls until my hands and cheeks were stained red.

Jewish borscht stems back, of course, to the Jews that fled Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and sought asylum in the United States. My great grandparents were among them. There, borscht took on the same responsibility of representing a culture’s identity, except this time for the blended ethnicity of American Jews. The borscht I described, both sweet and sour, is a blend between the pickled Jewish Lithuanian borscht and the sugary Jewish Polish Borscht. In the United States, they became one. As Jews migrated to the coast of the United States, settling in New York and New Jersey, they were unable to fully assimilate into the white, upper class, East Coast society. So, the new class of American Jews created their own traditions. In the summer, they packed cars or boarded trains and followed State Route 17 north, into upstate New York. There laid a constellation of summer resorts, affectionately titled “The Borscht Belt” because of the food’s connection to Jewish American culture, where Jews could vacation without fear of being turned away. These resort homes, depicted in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, became their own subset of Jewish American life where Jews could celebrate, dance, and eat with each other. There, they enjoyed the borscht of my memory, the sugary Manischewitz soup that bears little resemblance to a peasant dish made of cow parsnips and chicken.

Yet, despite all of this, the dish is still culturally important in Ukraine, where the media sometimes uses the cost of producing borscht in foreign countries to compare the purchasing power of different nations. It is impossible to call the dish Russian when its roots are firmly planted in rural Ukraine. At the same time, however, one cannot ignore the way borscht has firmly integrated itself into modern Russian culture, even standing as a symbol for the cuisine of the Soviet Union. For multiple periods throughout the past millennium, the history of Ukraine has been that of Russia; with Ukrainian cultural traditions merged, altered, and in some cases erased completely. Especially in the past half-century, the Russian government has reasserted their claim to borscht, as if to say, “has it ever been anything else?” On the outskirts of this debate lie Polish Catholics and New York Jews; even though borscht certainly did not originate in the lush, green forests of the Catskills or the cobbled streets of Warsaw, their conflicting additions to the dish are still part of its history.

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is not over beet soup. Surprisingly, though, borscht is a strangely important pawn. In early November of 2020, chef Ievgen Klopotenko from the town Borshchiv, Ukraine created an organization to assert Ukraine’s cultural sovereignty over borscht. With the support of the Ukrainian parliament, he submitted an application for UNESCO cultural status in March of 2021. In the six years since the annexation of Crimea, the Ukrainian people have been unable to get their land back. But, in their eyes, they could get their soup. If you traveled between Kiev and Moscow, sampling soups along the way, you could taste the culture war within the layers of vegetables. From the Soviet-era beet borscht inscribed in Stalin’s cookbook to the Ukrainian borscht which may soon have UNESCO distinction, the soups are not the same. Still, the main question remains unanswered. Can Russians, Ukrainians, Polish Christians, or American Jews really assert ownership over a (literally) fluid dish? For each, their claim to the dish is as strong as their claim to the land it grows on; infinitely disputed, but nonetheless, still a part of their story.

Sloane Goldberg is a sophomore in Columbia College studying Neuroscience & Behavior and Linguistics. In her free time, you can find her eating chocolate croissants in Blue Bottle or baking a cake in her dorm kitchen.