The Book of My Lives Read Online Free PDF Page B

woodstove in the infernally hot kitchen. The Hemon borscht contained whatever vegetables were available in the garden at the time—onions, cabbage, peppers, pole and other beans, even potatoes—plus at least one kind of meat (though, for some reason, never chicken), all of which was purpled by the beets to the point of being unidentifiable. I’ve discovered that no one in my family knows exactly what should go into borscht, though there is a consensus that it must contain beets, dill, and vinegar. The amounts and proportions change with the cook, just as a song changes with the singer. As far as I can tell, it never bothered any Hemon that there was always at least one mystery ingredient in the borscht on the table. (Carrot? Turnip? Peas?) Whatever the variation, no bad borscht was produced. The vinegary tartness, always refreshing in the summer; the crunchy beet cubes (beets go in last); the luck-of-the-spoon-draw combinations of ingredients, providing different shades of taste with each slurp—eating borscht was always eventful, never boring.
    I can still see my grandmother, the senior borscht cook, with an enormous, steaming pot in her hands, wobbling from the kitchen out to the yard, sweat drops sliding off her forehead and into the borscht for that special final touch. She’d deposit the pot on a long wooden table, where the Hemon tribe was waiting, aflutter with hunger. Then it would be ladled out, with at least one piece of meat distributed to each of the mismatched bowls on the table. There were often so many of us that we had to eat in shifts; one summer, my sister and I counted forty-seven people at my grandparents’ for lunch, most of them related to us. Among the Hemons, the intensity of the slurping is proportional to the enjoyment of food, and the borscht that day yielded a symphony.
    Festive though it may have been, the country version of the Hemon family lunch was not a ceremonious meal. Served in the middle of a workday, lunch was supposed to provide nourishment and reprieve for those who had worked the fields in the sun and would return to work until sunset. Thus, whatever we ate had to be simple and abundant, and borscht fit the requirements perfectly. Like all the dishes that are traditional in my family—pierogi/ vareniky , which are, really, potato ravioli, or steranka , dough boiled in milk, the very mention of which brings tears to my father’s eyes—borscht is poor people’s food. It was designed (if indeed it was ever designed, rather than just randomly concocted) not to delight the sophisticated senses but to ensure survival. Anything ingested by spoon is close to the top of the survival-food pyramid on which my family bases their nutrition, and borscht is, without a doubt, the spooniest dish there is. (The point of sushi shall remain puzzling to generations of Hemons to come.) Borscht must be cooked in a large pot, it must feed a large number of people, and it ought to last well beyond one meal. (I don’t remember us ever running out of borscht; the pot was always magically bottomless.) It is an essential leftover dish, always better the next day. It is definitely not something to be cooked for two people; you do not meet a friend over borscht, let alone share it with a date by romantic candlelight, even if you are able to suppress the slurping urge. There is no wine that matches it. A perfect borscht is a utopian dish: ideally, it contains everything ; it is produced and consumed collectively; and it can be refrigerated and reheated in perpetuity. A perfect borscht is what a life should be but never is.
    In the early, lonely days of my life in Chicago, I often struggled to reproduce the pleasures of my previous existence in Bosnia. I nostalgically sought good—I didn’t expect perfect—borscht. But what I found at Ukrainian restaurants or in supermarkets with ethnic-food shelves was merely thin beet soup, and I was forced to try to reconstruct the family borscht from my addled memory.