The inhabitants [of Krementschuk] live almost entirely on flesh; it rarely happens that they have fish or vegetables to be served on their tables. They have a kind of soup, however, which is made of groats and vegetables, of which they are very fond: this soup is rather sour, and is called borsch, from the name of the carrot which is boiled in it.
The men were given vodka; and all took their seat,
After a few hours travelling from the mountains down towards Poland, I finally reached a Polish border checkpoint and, kissing the ground of my native land, I shed sweet tears of joy. There, a Polish guard (...) treated me to a Polish dinner where I gladly welcomed the coveted national borscht (...)
And she wouldn't even frown when she invited them both for a borscht; in this borscht there were two poisonous mushrooms and she poisoned them, seemingly by accident.
Nikanor Ivanovich poured himself a glass of vodka, drank it down, poured another, drank that down, picked up three pieces of herring with his fork... And at that moment the doorbell rang and Pelageya Antonovna brought in a steaming pot, one glance at which was enough to guess that the pot contained, in the very thick of the piping hot borscht, the most delicious thing in the world – a marrow bone.
Winchell: I can only assume that you think this is blood, Al. And if I had an IQ below 24, I suppose I might think the same. But the stain in this cap comes from borscht.
One could understand and forgive foreigners for calling borscht or varenyky Russian national dishes, but when it turns out that they gleaned this information from Soviet cookbooks or from restaurant menus, one is embarrassed for our authors and chefs, who popularize the national cuisines of our peoples [i.e., the various ethnic groups of the Soviet Union] with such ignorance.
Take Galina Onischenko's version of the eastern European staple. "This is Russian borscht," she said, setting down a porcelain bowl of "green" or summer borscht with its dill-flecked mosaic of beets, carrots, and potatoes. "No lard with garlic like they put in Ukrainian borscht."