Milk Recipe: Polish Chlodnik Litewski (Cold Beet Soup)

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“Borscht” is what many American cooks will want to call this soup. But it couldn’t be more different from the sweet kinds that often represent the Russian borshch in American kitchens. It belongs to a family of cold soups that are based on sour milk or cream and some other sour principle, usually sauerkraut or pickle brine or some version of the fermented drink called kvas in Russia, kwas in Poland. Beets are just one of the things that can go into them.

Poles are particularly dedicated to this kind of cold soup (“chlodnik” in Polish), which they make in an amazing spectrum of different guises. The original secrets of flavor are two: Chlodnik used to be made from sour whole milk with all the butterfat intact — in other words, something at least two or three times as creamy as the usual American cultured buttermilk. To come close, you must throw in a good slug of sour cream. In addition, Poles and most other Eastern Europeans have a summer-fall tradition of pickling nearly anything that can conceivably be pickled, from apples to tomatoes. Cooks thus regularly have (or used to have) several different kinds of brine on hand to add to chlodnik — or they might put in some kwas/kvas made from bread or beets.

The resulting soups, often enriched with crunchy raw radishes or cucumbers, are liquid quasi-salads as gloriously varied and wonderfully refreshing as the gazpachos of Spain. Perhaps the most famous and certainly the most dramatic-looking of the Polish-chlodnik tribe is this classic version made from beets and beet greens. Poles attribute it to Lithuania, at one time a Polish possession (hence the name “Litewski”).

If you live near Polish, Russian or Serbian communities with stores selling barrels of summer vegetables and fruits in brine, be sure to get some in season and add a little of the brine to the soup in lieu of sauerkraut juice. The color is most beautiful when a grated raw beet is mixed in at the end. Yields about 2 quarts (8 cups).

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