On Broths & Spring (it’s nearly here)

This is an essay from December 2022.

It is so wonderful to finally feel Spring. In Ukraine, one of the first spring dishes we would make would be green borsch. In different parts of Ukraine ingredients vary, but four ingredients are always present - sorrel, spring onions, dill and eggs. New life ingredients! 

But let's first dissect how flavour is often built into Ukrainian broths. The first block of flavour comes from a simple stock. Both the meat stocks and veg stocks are incredibly simple. In the distant past, cooking was largely vegetarian, meat was a real treat. It's true that things like animal fat would have been used on non-fasting days, to add flavour, but actual pieces of meat used to be a rarity. Things changed in the 20th century, like in most places all over the world.

 If people were to make a broth with meat, in Ukraine - pork is king. I suspect that just like in Spain, historically, invaders from the East (in our case various Turkic tribes) would take all the cattle, but leave the pigs behind. But interestingly, I can't say that in my family it was the most popular. Mum used a lot of beef - brisket and ox tails mainly for broth making. Having said that I met a Ukrainian from Poltava, central Ukraine, and she said their only cow was so important for their survival, they would not dream of using beef for cooking, the cow to her family was sacred.

 In Besarabia (Odesa region, closer to Romania and Moldova), where most of my family originally comes from - young lamb could be used for green borsch. And poultry - chickens would be used in warmer seasons, making for a lighter stock. However, since my mum started rearing ducks in her house in Ukraine, she shifted to making soups, including green borsch, using duck meat (a duck carcass or giblets are perfect for this). 

In Ukraine, whatever meat you use, stock is made very simply for most broths - literally just the meat, with a good bit of fat on for flavour and melt in the mouth softness, and one whole peeled onion, which gets discarded afterwards. I actually felt a bit strange about this for years, as I was taught to make a French-style stock at Leiths - using lots of chopped vegetables etc, as well as the meat. I even included this French-style stock making in my first cookbook, Mamushka. But then, I read one of Magnus Nielsen's cookbooks, where he says that he believes a meat stock should be just that - water and meat, and it finally dawned on me, that I don't need to question our traditional methods. None of it is wrong or right, but perhaps there is a reason we make stocks the way we do. I also realised that the vegetable flavour in our stocks comes at the second stage, a very important stage we call 'zasmazhka' or 'zazharka' - a Ukrainian sofritto. This is when diced onion and finely julienned or roughly grated carrot is fried until soft and slightly golden - their sugars are teased out and brought into the simple meaty stock as the second bloc of flavour building. 

Some people fry this in oil, and I do too if my stock is vegetarian. But if I make a meat stock with plenty of fat in it, I do what my mum does - and skim the fat off the top of the stock, pour it into a frying pan and fry my onions and carrots in that. I always add a good pinch of sea salt at each stage of cooking, especially when I fry onions - salt draws the juices out and reduces the chance of burning the onions. 

Just a quick note on vegetarian broth here, in Ukraine I feel like they are made very simply. Again a whole onion is added to water, then the fried onion and carrots, sometimes some dried mushrooms - and that's it. In this case, I do like to use more vegetables to make the vegetarian stock tastier. Before I add 'zasmazhka', I add offcuts from onions and carrots to the stock pot, as well as roughly chopped celery, leeks, parsley stalks - the usual. I bring it all to a simmer, cook for ten minutes, and then switch the heat off and let it all stand for 30 minutes. It's like making a vegetable tea, a tip my husband Joe, who is a whizz with vegetables taught me. I then strain the vegetables out and use this flavoursome stock to make the veggie green borsch. Once the sweetness is added to our stock, we start adding umami flavours (third block). Potatoes are chopped and added in next. Sometimes, if I have beetroots with beautiful young stalks and leaves on - I add those in too (just the stalks and leaves, not the root), finely chopped - it gives a lovely pink hue to the soup. Chard would work too. In some parts of Ukraine, nettles would be added, as well as cheremsha (wild garlic), some add spinach - but to me it's a bit too limp and iron-y and distracts from the fresh flavours of sorrel. If you have outside space - I cannot recommend enough to sew some sorrel. It is the easiest thing to grow, and in the past two years we had it all year round! At the moment it looks like a bushy green parakeet tail. 

My mum would only use sorrel - and it is essential here to add the sour element (the fourth block). Mum would add the chopped sorrel at the very end of cooking. I like to make things just a tiny bit different and more modern, so I add my sorrel to the serving plate and pour the hot broth over it, so it's cooked by the residual heat of the broth. 

And finally, some finishing touches - spring onions and dill - that bring freshness (dill) and a little spiciness (spring onions) to the broth. I miss the super skinny bunches of spring onions that I can never find here. Interestingly we prize the green part over the white part, and the spring onions in spring are all green feathers and just a little bit of the white. 

Now - the eggs! My mum would hard boil and chop them, and add them on top, but I have also seen versions of green borsch from Besarabia where eggs get beaten and whisked into the soup, just like they do in the Balkans and Greece (no wonder there are so many Mediterranean influences in south west Ukraine). 

Sometimes sour cream would be served, to add into each individual helping, but I prefer my green borsch without. Our borsch was so important, people would make it in winter too. My maternal grandmother Lusya used to pack roughly chopped dill, spring onions, sorrel, parsley, celery leaf with salt and jar it. The herbs would darken and ferment, and it was a different flavour profile, but it was still delicious!