Battle over borscht

Ukrainian chef says that the soup is an intangible part of the country's cultural heritage

Kiev: Ukrainian chef Ievgen Klopotenko never expected to find himself at the centre of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But that’s just what happened when the 33-year-old pushed to have borscht — the traditional beetroot and cabbage dish — recognised as part of Ukraine’s historical heritage.

“I don’t really like to call it a war for borscht, but in fact that’s what it is,” Klopotenko, a graduate of the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, told AFP in his renowned Ukrainian restaurant in central Kiev. The chef said he was fed up with how restaurants around the world — including those serving “so-called Ukrainian cuisine” — were referring to borscht as Russian soup.

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So last month he brought a pot of borscht to Ukraine’s culture ministry to convince officials to submit an application to United Nations cultural body UNESCO to list borscht as an intangible part of the country’s cultural heritage.

The list already includes French gastronomy, Neapolitan pizza and Georgian wine. The ministry agreed and said it was preparing the application to UNESCO before the March deadline, so it can be examined in December next year. And suddenly Moscow bristled.

“Borscht is a national food of many countries, including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Moldova and Lithuania,” Russia’s embassy in the United States said on Twitter. The Russian government soon followed on its own Twitter account, calling borscht “one of Russia’s most famous and beloved dishes and a symbol of traditional cuisine”.

Ukrainians claim that borscht was first mentioned in 1548 in the diary of a European traveller who tasted the soup in a market near Kiev. They say it arrived in Russia much later with Ukrainian settlers. Tensions between Kiev and Moscow have flared in the decades following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Olena Shcherban, a Ukrainian ethnologist and historian, said it is “absurd” to associate borscht with Russia. “Borscht is the second dish that I ate after my mother’s milk. We wean the baby and then feed him with borscht,” Shcherban said as she stood over her stove cooking the soup.