The front-page story in the Herald’s food section today is about the 100 best traditional foods in the world, as chosen by the website TasteAtlas. Number one on the list is the margherita pizza, number seven is saltibarscia, which the writer of the article describes as “a Lithuanian cold and tangy beet soup poured over shredded cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs.”
He seems taken aback by the soup’s appearance on the list, but Baltic peoples – not only Lithuanians but Poles, Latvians, and Russians (we buy a version of it at the Russian store in Hollywood) will be surprised only by his description of it – it’s poured over a hard-boiled egg half, but the cucumbers (and radishes and pickles and dill and maybe a few other things like crayfish) are firmly embedded in it. And he failed to mention its color – a brilliant fuchsia – that signals with great flair the end of grey winter. Colorwise, it’s as perfect a soup for summer as clear borsht is for Christmas.
Further supporting its worthiness on the list is the fact that the soup is probably one of the few foods there that’s memorialized in literature. Adam Mickiewicz, the great Romantic poet of Poland, who grew up in Lithuania, included a scene in his epic poem Pan Tadeusz of people sitting down to eat their soup with such gusto that conversation stopped:
Podano w kolej wódkę, za czym wszyscy siedli
I chołodziec litewski milczkiem żwawo jedli.
(Vodka was given, then everybody sat
And in silence Lithuanian chłodnik briskly ate.)
