I could share that recipe with you..but then I would have to kill you.

January 23, 2019 7:43 AM

Sure everyone has heard of or has a "secret family recipe" or two but how about one so secret it was classified by the CIA for over 50 years? Presenting: The Soviet Army’s 1948 borscht recipe with tips for service and presentation.
posted by Captain_Science (33 comments total)

The time someone accidentally FOIA'd then-CIA Director Pompeo's mother's fudge recipe
posted by BungaDunga at 7:47 AM on January 23, 2019 [12 favorites]

The addition of a little sauerkraut juice is next level genius. I'd be tempted to conform to the zietgeist of the current fashion and add kim chi brine.
posted by Keith Talent at 8:10 AM on January 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Turns out the secret ingredient was polonium!
posted by backseatpilot at 8:16 AM on January 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

BungaDunga: "The time someone accidentally FOIA'd then-CIA Director Pompeo's mother's fudge recipe"

So I saw that CIA message and my gf and I made the recipe. It was pretty darn good. YMMV.

Borscht? Pass.
posted by AugustWest at 8:17 AM on January 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

A) Borsch is delicious. B) We can stop putting a t at the end of the word. Russians don’t pronounce it and it makes everyone else slam a hard T at the end that just isn’t there.
posted by mikesch at 8:27 AM on January 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Russians don’t pronounce it and it makes everyone else slam a hard T at the end that just isn’t there.

Pedantically frantically runs in to say, on behalf of my very Ukranian coworker who would never forgive me if i let this pass, that Borscht is Ukrainian, Russians just made it popular.

I made some this week even - and i think that recipe calls for over-cooking those beets.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 8:31 AM on January 23, 2019 [16 favorites]

Borscht is Ukrainian

Is Russian now.
posted by Nelson at 8:50 AM on January 23, 2019 [28 favorites]

CIA Director Pompeo's mother's fudge recipe
This made me go read the recipe. For any other candy snobs, I'll save you the trouble: It contains marshmallow fluff, condensed milk, and Hershey's chocolate (among other ingredients). Pass.
posted by agentofselection at 9:15 AM on January 23, 2019 [11 favorites]

Maybe they thought there's something encoded there somehow? Which would probably be wrong too and I'm reminded of an unrelated story. Sometime around 1904 the secret police of the Russian Empire confiscated all the children's school textbooks that had just been published in Estonia. Apparently the reason was a blueprint in the textbook which depicted a standard school of the time, which among other things had a thing there labeled "orel", meaning organ, as in the keyboard instrument, in Estonian. The secret police, however, thought it was a message to foreign spies depicting the St. Petersburg harbour. Reason being that it supposedly depicted the location of the brand new battleship Оrёl (Орёл, Oryol) in the "harbor".

Maybe adding sauerkraut to borscht was plans for a sinister chemical attack by the russkies, too?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:16 AM on January 23, 2019 [5 favorites]

The best meal I ever had was a cup of warm borscht in a Russian restaurant in Berlin.

I don't understand why kosher delis serve borscht cold year round. It's so good warm!
posted by leotrotsky at 9:17 AM on January 23, 2019

Barszcz is Polish, don't know what y'all are thinking?
posted by Meatbomb at 9:18 AM on January 23, 2019 [9 favorites]

Though the soup is Ukrainian, the word in English comes from Yiddish, באָרשט, which definitely has a hard T at the end that you should pronounce clearly and loudly at all times, even when no borscht is present.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:24 AM on January 23, 2019 [21 favorites]

I'm not sure if this supports or refutes the theory that most spies are incompetent buffoons who are only able to maintain their mystique because they have authority to hide their mistakes.

Depends on exactly how good this borscht is, I guess.
posted by clawsoon at 9:26 AM on January 23, 2019

Director Pompeo's mother's fudge recipe
This made me go read the recipe. For any other candy snobs, I'll save you the trouble: It contains marshmallow fluff, condensed milk, and Hershey's chocolate (among other ingredients). Pass.

That's the "No-Fail Fudge" recipe that is on the side of every container of Marshmallow Fluff. Not exactly a state secret.
posted by briank at 9:35 AM on January 23, 2019 [7 favorites]

Because we have both Russian and Ukrainian Mennonites in the family we (well they not me) have very heated arguments about borscht. A lot. Especially the cabbage vs beet argument. The first time I had one family member's cabbage borscht, I said "oh cabbage soup" when offered a bowl. I was nearly kicked out for failing to acknowledge that it wasn't just "cabbage soup" (which is basically, as far as I could determine, considered dishwater) but BORSCHT (a vastly superior soup in all ways to puny cabbage soup)! In my defense, not being Mennonite of any stripe or even remotely Slavic, I didn't grow up with borscht but I certainly ate plenty of cabbage soup (and cabbage rolls). My refusal of eating it with sour cream further deepened the wrath heaped upon me. Despite the fact that it happened 18 years ago I am still reminded of this everytime I visit those relatives.

Looking at these recipes, the one which suggests adding millet looks interesting.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:48 AM on January 23, 2019 [8 favorites]

The "sautéed flour" isn't something I expected. Is it a roux, and if so how dark should it be?
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:56 AM on January 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Maybe they thought there's something encoded there somehow?

Probably just one of those data points that's not that useful in isolation, but could be correlated with other things. Like, knowing the official Red Army borscht recipe on its own is not useful, but if, to oversimplify a bit, you know that, and know that the standard menu is to serve borscht every other day, and know how many beets a particular military formation is getting shipped a week, maybe you can start to form an estimate of the unit size.

Not to say that it would ever work so cleanly in real life, but I think that was the general theory.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 10:26 AM on January 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

how dark should it be?

Until your heart is laden with it, I should think.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:26 AM on January 23, 2019 [10 favorites]

"sautéed flour"

I was thinking that it was more like a "dry roux" rather than a traditional one.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:41 AM on January 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

I did a bit of work in Ukraine a few years back, and my hosts were very keen to feed me borscht. Unfortunately it came a distant third behind (a) my home-made, and (b) what is served in Ukrainian delis in NYC. Not that I was impolite enough to say...
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 12:36 PM on January 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

> I didn't grow up with borscht

I grew up with "beet soup" because there was no way a Lithuanian-American family was going to use the Russian term.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:54 PM on January 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Probably just one of those data points that's not that useful in isolation, but could be correlated with other things.

Not to mention that it could be used to identify the source of the document, which may have also been the source of other, more useful documents.

To me, this sounds more like the interlocking effects of a bunch of reasonable directives, e.g.:

1. Any Soviet documents we discover must be forwarded to the CIA.
2. Any incoming Soviet documents must be classified secret.
3. All Soviet documents on file must be translated into English with priorities determined by [REDACTED].
4. All translations of classified documents are also classified.

So some US embassy staffer finds a filing cabinet full of Soviet military documents that got lost in a move and forwards it to the CIA who comb through it to find the high-priority stuff and put the rest in the translators' backlog. Eventually, the borscht recipe (secret) gets translated (still secret) and stays in the archives in case it's needed along with most of the other ephemera.
posted by suetanvil at 12:54 PM on January 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

I grew up with "German" (actually Russian/Polish, but German-speaking!) Mennonite borsht that was definitely cabbage-based, but same grandparents grew and ate beets so shrug emoji.

Also I came here for jokes about the other CIA and am sorely disappointed.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:16 PM on January 23, 2019 [5 favorites]

The Russian Doukhobors in my area say "borscht", pronouncing the "T". Local borscht is made with cabbage, but is so much better than cabbage soup. (It also contains potatoes, butter, onions, butter, carrots, butter, tomatoes, and butter, with a good shot of cream at the end.)
posted by CCBC at 3:03 PM on January 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

If you're meh on Borscht, you probably haven't had one of the full on versions that's more like a stew than beet soup. I recommend the Veselka's recipe. It's a full on meal and has everything but the kitchen sink.

https://dianescookbooks.wordpress.com/2018/03/07/veselkas-borscht/
posted by xammerboy at 9:05 PM on January 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Russian word (matching the Ukrainian?) is "борщ", where that "щ" is one of Russian's two kinds of /sh/ letters, the other being "ш". The "щ" is brighter with high frequencies and I guess that is rendered as the trailing "t"? In terms of what your tongue is doing, "щ" has the tip moved forward from the English /sh/, and "ш" has the tip curled back (retroflex). The lips are also less and more rounded I think but I may be hamming up the articulation now as I imagine it.

I was not aware that borsch happened without beets. But I see now there's a lot of range. Oh oh, and now this is the coolest thing, the first borsch was made with cow parsnip a.k.a. hogweed! Cow parsnip is "борщевик" and the Internet says that word came first. The stems and umbels were lacto-fermented, creating the original sourness. (I've been told borsch was made with lacto-fermented beet sauerkraut before the use of vinegar.) Try old-style fermented hogweed borsch recipe.

Usage note: pick cow parsnip / hogweed with gloves, it's phototoxic on skin. If the hogweed is taller than you, avoid, giant hogweed is the Devil's hogweed and the toy of naive Victorian gardeners, will give you third-degree phototoxicity burns. (To be honest I haven't had trouble yet from casual contact with cow parsnip, or regular parsnip, or limes, which all are phototoxic for some people. But I'm not messing with the giant.)
posted by away for regrooving at 1:36 AM on January 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

(But does a Russian speaker know, isn't hogweed "борщевик" a nouning "-евик" suffix on a "борщ-" root, like большой - большевик? What's the root, no cow parsnip pun intended?)
posted by away for regrooving at 1:47 AM on January 24, 2019

Wait, no, hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium) and cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) are not the same thing, at least in the UK, where these are the species names attached to those common names. I would be very careful about assuming that Russian "hogweed" was the same as the English version. A lot of other umbellifers besides giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) are phytotoxic, and some of them are just downright toxic, like hemlock (Conium maculatum), which is very similar in looks to cow parsley.

This is why Latin names for plants are important
posted by Fuchsoid at 2:10 AM on January 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

My Aunt feared sharing her secret Xmas recipes with my wife for fear something would happen, and lo and behold my wife is now my EX and the Aunts recipes are now in the wild. My Aunt is not a happy camper.
posted by CygnusXII at 4:40 AM on January 24, 2019 [6 favorites]

Your aunt was a cook for the Red Army?
posted by tobascodagama at 5:26 AM on January 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

When I lived in the domestic violence shelter there was a Ukrainian girl and her son there.

Everything at a DV shelter is donated. Everything. From the sheets on the bed, the package of pens we opened to fill out our paperwork, and the food we ate. It ensures that the shelter is not beholden to anyone who can then pressure them for information on residents.

There was not a lot of fresh food donated. We ate an unhealthy amount of canned stuff. A lot of pasta. Not a lot of spices available. Just basic stuff someone would donate to a food pantry.

Well one day the shelter was gifted with fresh food by a previous client. She had finally gotten to a place where she had extra money and decided to treat the ladies. We had ice cream, fresh fruit platters and fruit juices, a variety of vegetables, and an abundance of beef stew meat.

Our Ukrainian girl asked if she could cook borscht for all of us since among the vegetables were beets. It was her treat to us for our friendship.

It was delicious. The best meal any of us had eaten in weeks. Everyone had seconds and thirds and we drained the pot within two meals.

I've loved borscht ever since and whenever I eat it, I wonder what happened to those ladies and if they're okay now.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 5:47 AM on January 24, 2019 [16 favorites]

Borscht for my family isn't really a hard line recipe. It's beet based (both root and leaf) but will have carrots, potatoes, vinegar and dill but the exact proportions vary depending on how the garden is doing. Then we'll add in pork or not (vegetarians) and I always add hot peppers (again type and amount depending on what is growing that year). Served with sour cream and generally a bread product of some kind and hot (TIL some people always serve it cold).
posted by Mitheral at 7:14 AM on January 24, 2019

@Fuchsoid, the common name in question is "cow parsnip", rather than "cow parsley".

Sure yes, botanical names are good. But let's be clear nobody should ingest anything they identified from reading up on either an English or a Latin name. (Correct identification aside, don't assume the North American representative of a Latin binomial is interchangeable with the European.) Happy to emphasize I'm vending fun borsch facts around here, not a how-to guide.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:30 AM on January 25, 2019