"Recipes, like birds, ignore political boundaries. Just as
the British empire still has a culinary pulse, beating in a curry
in Scotland or in the mug of builder's tea with sugar and milk you
are handed in some roadhouse on the Karakorum Highway; just as the
Ottoman empire breathes phantom breaths in little cups of muddy
coffee from Thessaloniki to Basra; so the faint outline of the
Tsarist-Soviet imperium still glimmers in the collective steam off
bowls of beetroot and cabbage in meat stock, and the soft sound of
dollops of sour cream slipping into soup, from the Black Sea to
the Sea of Japan and, in emigration, from Brooklyn to Berlin."
-- James Meek, The story of borshch, The Guardian 15th March 2008.
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2264726,00.html]