Name: Borscht with Pickled Mushrooms and Cucumbers
Yield: Serves 6 to 8
Cuisine: United States
Ingredients: 2 quarts chicken or chicken-duck stock; 2 bay leaves; 1 cup sour cream; 8 shiitake, tree oyster, or any wild mushrooms, stemmed, stems reserved; 1 large carrot, peeled, finely chopped; 1 stalk celery, finely chopped; 1 sprig fresh thyme; 1½ teaspoons salt; 1 cucumber, peeled; 1 medium onion, peeled, finely chopped; 1 clove garlic, peeled, finely chopped; ½ cup white wine vinegar; 1 teaspoon gin; 1 small yellow bell pepper, roasted, peeled, chopped; 1 small red bell pepper, roasted, peeled, chopped; 6 large red beets

Preparation info

Serves
6 to 8

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Jeremiah Tower's New American Classics

By Jeremiah Tower

Published 1986

About

Some of the greatest Russian dishes are the soups like botvinia, okroshka, and chilled beet soup, especially when served with hot little meat pastries called piroshki. The soups contain sour elements like pickles, sorrel, lemon, dill, and horseradish, all very cooling in the summer. The soup plates in the photograph are the ones in which my aunt used to serve this violently colored soup, each thin crystal plate filled with a chunk of ice, and as you ate it, the spoon and the i