Cooking For Engineers

[Edenbayer]

Borsch is a traditional Russian soup dating back to the end of 18th century. The main ingredients are red beets and a broth from pork or beef on a bone.

Ingredients:

test
2 Lbs Meat
3 Potatoes, cubed
2 med. beets , grated
2 Carrots, grated
1 Lbs Cabbage, shredded
1 15 oz can Tomato sauce
1 Tbsp Sugar
3 Qrts Water
Salt to taste, about 1 Tbsp.

Preparation:

Cook meat in 3 qrts of water. Peel potatoes, cut them in 1 inch cubes. Peel and grate carrots and beets, shred cabbage. When meat almost cooked add potatoes, cook for about 15 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and cook until meat and all vegetables cooked.

Serving suggestions:

Serve with sour cream, dark Russian of whole wheat bread. For garlic lovers serve it with clove of garlic.

This and many other Russian Recipes are available on www.mamasrecipes.net

[Guest]

I just discovered the joy of borscht from a friend of mine - she and I are splitting a farmshare, and we got a lot of beets for awhile. I'd actually never had them before! So she made borscht, and I tried it and loved it.

Her borscht was basically a blended beet and onion soup (she liked to put sour cream in it as a finisher), which was tasty, but I've found it's a soup that lends well to playing with (like potato soup), so I made something I called borscht batard.

Beets, chicken stock, onion, garlic, red wine, and something called french fourspice, which has white pepper and nutmeg in it. And plenty of salt. It was also amazing.

Go borscht!

[Jim Cooley]

Well, one needn't get extravagent when making borscht.

I had some shredded cabbage and shredded beets in the fridge and asked a friend in a an off-hand way, what to do? He said Borscht, so I pulled out Joy of Cooking and looked it up.

Then I tossed the book and just did the following:

1 large onion, diced finely, browned in a little olive oil

added:

1 lb shredded, skinned beets (3-4 big ones)
1 lb shredded cabbage (about ½ a head)

let that simmer a bit and added

1lb skinned, cored and coarsely diced apples

let that simmer a little more and added 1½ tsp fennel seed (would have used caraway, but I was out...) and some salt.

Pureéd about 2/3rds of it in the Cuisinart, put it back in the pot. Delicious as is, but I then added maybe 2/3rds cup sour cream. Even better!