Borscht, one of the favorite dishes of both athletes and spectators at the Olympic Games, is not actually Russian in origin. The soup, made bright red by its base of beets, is Ukrainian (and the country’s national dish). It’s a gastronomic staple that both unites Eastern Europe—every Slavic country has its own, slightly altered recipe—and divides it: an estimated seventy thousand gallons are being served in Sochi while, in neighboring Ukraine, anti-Russian protestors rely on it to sustain their movement. “We make it and are proud that it is ours,” says Olesia Lew, the head chef at Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant on the corner of Ninth Street and Second Avenue, in the East Village. The restaurant turns fifty this year. For three of those five decades, there’s been just one woman behind Veselka’s renowned borscht: Malgorcata Sibilski. Five thousand gallons are served to customers annually, and Sibilski makes her borscht in enormous batches, twice a week. We visited this guru of borscht to witness the process.作者: cobycoby 时间: 2014-2-23 09:25:49