A soup made primarily from beets, often served hot or cold, popular in Eastern European cuisine especially Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
From Yiddish borsht, from Ukrainian борщ (borshch), likely derived from a Slavic word for beet. The soup traveled westward with Jewish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Borsch became a symbol of Jewish-Eastern European identity—the soup appears in countless family recipes with fierce debates about whether it should be hot or cold, with meat or vegetarian, showing how food carries cultural memory and immigrant identity.
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