soupsong.com

Way back in 1997, not long after I’d launched soupsong.com, Sándor Fenyvesi–air traffic controller at Budapest approach–contacted me over my website with this great recipe for borscht, which he’d acquired under the communist regime when he was sent as an 18-year-old Hungarian boy to a special school in Latvia. Thus began a great friendship between my family and his. We freely exchanged recipes between our websites, exchanged life stories and points of view, and met for the first time in Budapest in 2000 when I was in town measuring the Hungarian Police Museum for an exhibit the FBI was about to mount there.

What is it about soup lovers? Every contact I’ve made over my website has turned into a love feast. Sanyi and Kati welcomed me into their home, introduced me to their 3 young boys, and fed me Hungarian delicacies–a truly exquisite day.

Yet who could have predicted that 8 years later their eldest son Gergely would end up in Paris, a bright and raging capitalist at Société Générale? That’s him in the picture. He’s come to dinner when my family has been in town. He’s taken care of my cat Min and my apartment when I was in Amman. Now we are occasional and enthusiastic partners in soupmaking.

It was freezing when he arrived on Saturday morning with a fine bottle of Château Les Ancres 2005, a Grand Vin de Bordeaux, in hand. We stashed it in the kitchen, picked up the market bag, read over his Dad’s recipe, and headed to the fabulous open air food market on av. Woodrow Wilson, bottom of the 16th Arr. You see the results in front of him–gorgeous beef bourguignon with some bone thrown in; slab of bacon; veggies freshly pulled from the ground; herbs; seedy pumpernickel bread; crème fraîche d’Isigny. He’d also brought an ace up his sleeve–a special borscht flavor pack from his Ukrainian friend Marika.

Let me tell you, this was a day’s work, thanks to making the beef stock from scratch–and we loved it that way: time to do some Christmas shopping, time to watch Claude Chabrol’s “This Man Must Die”, even time to open that great wine as we were getting close, “just for a sip.” Then the payoff, which you can see with your own eyes. Absolutely heavenly layers of flavors and textures and colors.

Doesn’t it put you in the Christmas spirit for this eminently Christmas soup from the Ukraine and Russia? Gergely and I highly recommend that you dust off that soup kettle and get to work. You’ll find Sanyi’s recipe at Soupsong’s Ukrainian Borscht.

And stay tuned for future adventures into soupmaking with my Hungarian connection. “Are you telling me,” said Gergely in astonishment, “that you don’t know Újházy Tyúkhúsleves?” Sounds like a January project to me….