I emailed to say hello to a friend and received an invitation to lunch. At the table, attention centered around individual bowls of deep-red, clear soup with chunks of deeper-red beets floating around a dollop of creamy white yogurt. My friend’s husband eased into a distant memory: in the cold of winter near the mountains in the Middle East a street vendor unwraps unusually large red beets that had been slowly roasted and cuts them to sell to people waiting in line to mostly eat it right then and there. My friend acknowledged this memory that she too was a part of when I asked if she had thought about it while making the soup, she said no, that she had just made, Borscht, the Russian beet soup.
