rambling about borshch, etc.

a pot of borshch, ukrainian xmas '07. mmm.

This article just recently brought to my attention -- it is a lovely piece of food-writing with the history as well as the politics & contemporary social context of one of my favourite things to both eat & cook: borshch! It's really interesting to me how the politics, the tensions between Russia and Ukraine permeate even discussions of the edibles of the countries. Debates over borshch ingredients easily fall into the West Ukraine - East Ukraine camps, with the former claiming its true Ukrainian authenticity, and the latter being 'too Russian' to know what real borshch would be, anyway.

& so I am sitting here (feeling rather hungry) & mulling over the myriad intersections between between food & identity -- how what we eat (& what we don't eat!) can define us socially whether it's something we consciously choose or something that is thrust upon us by those who watch us eat... I remember the attention (not always positive) received from having 'different foods' in elementary and junior high school lunches, friends with spicy lentil dals and curries or the chunk of pungent garlic sausage my mother would give to me...

And then of course the whole vegetarian issue and all that goes along with that, perhaps the most polarizing food-identity question here & perhaps the one that obviously inspires people to be the most vocal about their choices... the explanations (I remember my baba in disbelief the first time I told her that no, I wouldn't like any kovbasa...) & the defenses of the morals and ethics by vegetarians (and vegans, even more so) because of my own personal experiences with vegetable-eating, and how people reacted whenever my patterns of consumption changed.

The non-carnivore issue is perhaps the most conscious for most people in terms of food identity, but there are also the regional identities often based around what an area produces, & the pride in consuming this food (Alberta beef, etc, exemplified by the infamous bumper stickers)

And food becoming instantly recognized, nearly synonymous with a culture (haggis in Scotland, the massive kovbasa sausage in Mundare, Alberta, etc) and thus becoming a prominent marker of ethnic identity... there are many many examples of this... Food seems to also be the prominent way people attempt to experience other cultures (à la Heritage Days -- the food seems to be the definite draw there for many festival-goers) or their own cultures... A friend once remarked to me that 'we are Ukrainian, I guess, but we don't really do anything Ukrainian except eat a lot of pyrohy...')


& then in Yukon, I was taught about the necessity of having 'traditional foods' in one's diet -- people talking about how white-person grocery-store food might keep them physically alive, but it's not 'real food', they needed the food from the land, be it salmon or moose or soapberries, to really be full, sated, nourished living beings. I heard similar things from urban Inuit in Montreal, about the inherent health of their own foods, and have been told about the food networks of how when someone gets some 'country food' from a relative in the north, most of the community gets together to partake of it. Going berry-picking this past autumn in Yukon, and being given moosemeat by people in the community was very profound for me -- & I think I understood a little bit about how eating of the land reinforces a certain connection to that place.

I suppose in some ways for myself food is often very ethnically-linked, because I was taught to cook by my mother who is a fantastically brilliant, creative cook raised in the Ukrainian tradition by my baba, who ended up restaurant cook upon coming to Canada... The preparation and sharing of food is incredibly important to that side of my family -- whereas cooking and nourishing is not very important to my (Scottish) father and his relatives... & for me, cooking what my baba always made is comforting, both in the preparation as well as the sharing and the consumption. Very simply, I like to make things & feed people. It makes me happy.

As for culture and identity, I do believe that we each create our selves through the actions we choose to perform -- it is through those actions that ‘culture’ itself is reproduced & transmitted, and though it is small, and mundane, culture includes the act of making food. (I've been thinking about this even more since theory seminar on Friday -- it fits nicely with what Michael Jackson (no, not that one) talks about in 'Knowledge of the Body' in regards to the embodiment of culture, being-in-the-world through collective and common actions.

Anyway, lately I've been trying to transcribe some of the family recipes I know, as I want to make a Ukrainian-vegetarian zine... I have rambled about borshch many times in my blog, because I love it so -- one version of my recipe is here (see June 6th, 2006) & I have written about my soup-love many other times I'm sure... as well as in my beet-poem, which contains similar food-identity musings... A recipe for cabbage rolls, holubchi, is here too.

& before I cease my writing-which-is-falling-quite-short-of-lucid, here is my beet-poem, which has gotten around a lot in the past few years but apparently not into the blog...

making borshch

sawing away at the jewel-red woodgrain
of fresh rosebud beets
the juice stains my fingernails,
skin dry & papyrine from scrubbing,

earthy & pungent
from carrots & onions, scented like
the mysterious water & sacred sleep
of the soil –

& i think of my baba
& how her soup-stained fingers would be
like wrinkled pink parchments, speaking softly &
stirring, smoothing my hair –

& now my own hands, chopping
the vegetables for borshch, they become
hers, creating sustenance;

pulling up taproots, coaxing out
their subterranean blood
for nourishment, sweetness of the earth –

burjaky, chasnyk, krip i morkvy
bili pidpenky, selera i tsybulky
barabolja i zh kapusta

sing my ancestors, sending their breath
through the voice of the grasses, they
grow for us sweet dill
now shredded & stirred –

i will not reduce my culture
to its victuals, there will be no
monument to beets

like that giant forked pyrohy
nor stawnichy’s speared sausage

but i am grateful

to this garden of my foremothers, &

i cannot help celebrating these
vegetables
for these, they are my
roots –