Babcia Ziuta’s Polish Beetroot Soup

Botwinka was the soup I left behind, in more ways than one. When writing my cookbook, Polska: New Polish Cooking, I left it out, as I felt I’d already had enough beetroot soup recipes for one book and I couldn’t well leave out the main ones such as borscht and chlodnik. Yet this was the long-awaited soup of my childhood and one I would eventually come to miss once we moved to England.

We would only eat this soup in the spr