Beet Soup with Cumin and Ginger

My mother made borscht frequently. My father enjoyed it, me not so much. She served it hot with quarters of cubed potato for a meat meal, and cold with sour cream for a dairy meal.

When my husband bought more beets than I knew what to do with, I decided to make borscht too. Then I remembered a recipe I saw “The Kitchen Detective,” by Christopher Kimball. Here’s what Kimball has to say about borscht:

I say beet soup and you say, “no thanks.” Well, maybe that is because you have had a particularly dreadful version of borscht, a recipe that ranges from a cold, lifeless puree to a hearty, workingman’s meat soup.

So he calls it beet soup and spices it up with cumin and ginger. Having grown up on fabulous Eastern European cuisine, I’m a little offended. But my mother modernized things too, by trimming the fat and not overcooking.

Kitchen Detective tends to get fussy, writing that roasting beets brought out a richer flavor than cooking them. Now I had a dilemma. To roast, you need to peel. With roasted vegetables, I sometimes get away with scrubbing only, letting the diner can manage the peel on their own. But for soup the peel has to go. My mother cooked root vegetables whole and slipped off the skin afterward. This preserves both the color and the vitamins, most of which are directly under the skin and lost when peeled raw. I also didn’t want to turn on the oven just for the beets, especially when the pressure cooker works well. Yet I would still have to scrub the beets quite well, and it’s hard to get off all of the dirt.

Vegetables for Roasting

In the end I decided to make a crustless quiche for dinner. So I peeled and cubed the beets, adding turnip and sweet potatoes to the roasting pan. If the oven is on alrady, it’s not so much work to add a batch of sourdough apple muffins. I often find myself cooking in one long  session for the next several days, adding new items as necessary.

Well, Christopher Kimball doesn’t have children and a large family to worry about. He’s a cookbook author and can focus on one thing at a time. It didn’t go so smoothly for me.  See my notes at the end.

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