I wrote the recipe on the back of a utility bill. It was the only paper I could find in the dark, at five in the morning, on the twenty-fifth of February 2022. My son was four years old. My daughter was seven. I had already dressed them and put them by the door with their bags. I had perhaps ten minutes before we needed to leave. I stood at the kitchen table and wrote down everything I could remember of my grandmother’s borscht, because it suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world that I not forget it.
My grandmother, Halyna, was born in a village outside Lviv in 1938. She survived the Second World War as a child, hiding in a cellar with her mother when the shelling came close. She survived Soviet collectivisation and the Holodomor’s long shadow. She survived everything, and she made borscht through all of it, and the recipe never changed. She believed that the recipe was a form of continuity — that to make the same soup your grandmother made was to say: we are still here. We have not been erased.
We crossed into Poland on the twenty-eighth of February, after three days of queuing at the border with thousands of others. A Polish family in Kraków took us in for two weeks, and then we were placed in Warsaw by a resettlement organisation. Our apartment was bare: a bed, a table, two plastic chairs. The first thing I bought, after bread and milk, was beetroot. I did not have the right pot. I did not have dill. I made the soup anyway, from the recipe on the utility bill, which I had folded carefully and carried in the pocket of my coat the entire way.
It did not taste the same. Of course it did not. My grandmother’s borscht was made with water from her well, with beetroot grown in her garden, with the pork ribs from a pig whose name she had probably known. I was making it on a gas hob in Warsaw with supermarket vegetables and a pot borrowed from a neighbour. But my daughter ate two bowls and asked for more, and said — without meaning to say anything important, because she was seven and did not know that she was saying something important — ‘It tastes like Baba Halyna’s house.’
My grandmother is still in Lviv. She refused to leave. She is eighty-six years old and has lived through things that make what is happening now feel, to her, like something she has already survived. I call her every few days. She always asks first if I am making the borscht. I always say yes. She says: ‘Good. Then you are still yourself.’
I have the utility bill still. I had it laminated at a copy shop in Warsaw, in the second month. The shopkeeper looked at it and at me and did not ask any questions. It hangs now on the wall of our kitchen, beside the window. Every week I make borscht. I am learning the recipe with my hands, not just with the page, so that one day — if I ever need to — I will be able to write it from memory again in ten minutes in the dark.
