American cooking Recipes & regional stories

Skillet & Sage

A culinary journey through the fifty states

The regional table / North Dakota

German-Russian Cabbage Borscht

Published September 23, 2026 · North Dakota

Jump to Recipe

Nobody who says borscht in this part of North Dakota means a bowl of beet juice. They mean cabbage, pork, dill and cream.

Start with what the word promises everyone else, because that is the expectation this soup has to get out from under. The International Jewish Cook Book of 1918, one of the earliest American printings of the name, gives borsht in full: "Take some red beetroots, wash thoroughly and peel, and then boil in a moderate quantity of water from two to three hours over a slow fire, by which time a strong red liquor should have been obtained. Strain off the liquor, adding lemon juice, sugar, and salt to taste." That is a beet soup and nothing but — the beet is even strained out and served separately as a vegetable. Now set beside it the borscht in the Ladies of the U.C.T. Grand Auxiliary Minn.-N.D. cookbook, digitised into the Prairie Recipes collection on Digital Horizons by the North Dakota State Library and dated by them between 1950 and 1970. Ann Toren's entire ingredient list is one head of cabbage, a bunch of parsley, a small bunch of dill leaves, a cup of tomatoes, a chicken or a pound and a half of beef, four onions, a carrot, salt, pepper and half a cup of cream. There is not a beet in it.

The flat claim that German-Russian borscht has no beets in it is not what the archives say, though, and it is worth being exact because the exact version is more interesting. I read eight North Dakota versions: four carry beetroot, two use beet tops instead of the root, and two have no beet at all. The Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at North Dakota State University — the archive this dish belongs to, and one whose site search is simply dead, returning "Your search yielded no results" for borscht, for kuchen, for recipe and even for Lawrence Welk, so that its fourteen filed borschts can be reached only by browsing the Foodways pages — files a German-Russian Borscht from Ray Isaak, printed in the Bismarck Tribune of 12 November 2003, that holds two pounds of cabbage and eight cups of beets. The clearest statement of the matter is a cook's own aside in the Leeds Lutheran Church anniversary cookbook, where Dontee E. (Blegen) Adams heads her recipe Borscht Soup (German-Russian Soup) and notes in passing, "The beets are where you get the red Russian borscht" — the next word is lost in the scan. Beets are the colour, not the soup. What is constant across all eight is cabbage or beet greens, a meat broth started from a soup bone, a great deal of dill, and cream stirred in at the very end. The German-Russian migration itself is told in this site's Kansas and South Dakota dishes and in North Dakota's other three; this one is about what went in the pot after it.

Why this version works

Cabbage in two goes. This is the one part worked out for this page rather than read off a page. The American Cancer Society volunteers' 1989 North Dakota book adds its cabbage in the last ten minutes and Ann Toren boils hers fifteen; the Leeds recipe simmers until soft. Both extremes are right about something — long cabbage dissolves into the broth and thickens it, short cabbage keeps its bite — so half goes in early to melt and half goes in at the end to stay.

Dill by the handful, and late. A quarter to half a cup of chopped dill is not a garnish quantity, and it is what the documents call for: a quarter to half a cup in the Leeds recipe, a third of a cup in Ray Isaak's, and chopped dill by the cupful in the KFYR one, where the scan has eaten the fraction in front of it. Dill's aroma is volatile and twenty minutes of simmering takes it out entirely, which is why it goes in with the heat off.

The meat broth is made first, and alone. Every North Dakota version begins the same way and none of them explains it: boil the meat until tender, then put the vegetables in. The Leeds cookbook says to boil the soup bone until tender and remove it before the carrots go in; the 1969 KFYR "Around the World" Cookbook, from listeners of KFYR Radio 550 in Bismarck, says to boil the meat in the seasoned water until done and only then add what it calls the borscht greens. An hour of pork shoulder in plain water makes a broth with body; the same hour with the cabbage already in it makes sulphur.

Cream off the heat, and sour cream at the table. Sour cream is defined by federal standard at 21 CFR 131.160 as cream soured by lactic acid producing bacteria, not less than 18 percent milkfat, with "a titratable acidity of not less than 0.5 percent, calculated as lactic acid". That acid is exactly what makes it fall apart in a hot pot. Henry Droop Richmond's Dairy Chemistry of 1914 states the mechanism plainly: milk does not taste sour until an appreciable acidity has developed, "at about the same point it curdles on heating", and this happens because "the acid developed displacing the alkali from its compound with casein". Heat plus acid, and the protein lets go.

Ingredient notes

Dill: a third of a cup chopped, fresh. Dried dill weed is the documented substitute — Isaak allows half an ounce of it — but it goes in with the vegetables rather than at the end, because it needs heat and liquid to give anything up at all.

Pork: two pounds of boneless shoulder in three-quarter-inch cubes, or beef chuck if that is what you have — the record uses both, and the KFYR recipe offers a chicken as a third option. A bone in the pot is better still. Buy it untrimmed; the fat renders into the broth and is a good part of why this is a meal rather than a first course.

Cabbage: a pound and a half of plain green cabbage, cored and shredded no finer than a quarter of an inch. Savoy collapses too fast to survive the second addition and red cabbage turns the whole pot grey-purple. Weigh it if you can: half a large head is a phrase that covers a pound or two and a half.

The cream: half a cup of heavy cream into the pot, and full-fat sour cream on the table. Do not buy the light or non-fat sour cream for this: fat is what buffers the acid protein against the heat, and the federal standard's 18 percent floor is the thing you are paying for. A colour slide Benjamin H. Barrett took in the 1950s at the borscht supper at Saints Peter and Paul's Catholic Church in Strasburg, in the German-Russian county of Emmons, shows the ingredients laid out down a long table under hand-lettered placards — shredded cabbage, diced carrots, diced onions, diced potatoes, diced beets, salt and pepper, and a glass jar beside a card reading slightly sour cream. That last phrase describes what this soup wants better than anything printed on a modern tub.

Step by step

  1. Brown the pork. Melt the butter in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat and brown the pork in two batches, 5 minutes a batch, until there is colour on two sides of most cubes. Return it all to the pot with the onion and cook 3 minutes more.
  2. Make the broth. Add the water, the bay leaves, 1½ teaspoons of the salt and the pepper. Bring to a boil, skim the grey foam off the top, then drop to a bare simmer, cover askew and cook 1 hour, until the pork pulls apart under a spoon.
  3. Root vegetables. Add the potatoes, carrots and celery and simmer 10 minutes uncovered. The potato should be starting to give at the edge but nowhere near falling.
  4. Cabbage, first half. Stir in half the cabbage and the tomatoes, and the beets if you are using them, and simmer 20 minutes. This half is meant to go soft and disappear into the broth, which is where the body of the soup comes from.
  5. Cabbage, second half. Add the rest of the cabbage and the remaining 1 teaspoon salt and simmer 8 minutes, no longer. It should be translucent at the edge and still have a little resistance in the middle.
  6. Finish off the heat. Pull the pot off the burner, fish out the bay leaves and let it stand a minute so it stops bubbling. Stir in the cream and the dill. Taste for salt now, with the cream in, not before.
  7. Serve with the sour cream apart. Put the sour cream on the table in its own bowl with a spoon and let people stir it into their own bowls. This is how the GRHC recipe says to do it — at table, add sour cream to taste — and it is also the only way it cannot break.
If the sour cream has broken into white threads and watery broth, the pot was too hot when it went in or the cream was low-fat, and nothing whisked in afterwards will gather it back up — eat it, it tastes the same, and next time let the pot stand two minutes off the heat first. If you want the sour cream cooked into the soup rather than spooned on, use the method USDA Leaflet No. 213 of October 1941 gives for sour cream gravy: work a tablespoon of flour into each cup of sour cream, then add it unheated and "stir and cook slowly until thickened", never letting it boil. If the soup tastes flat rather than broken, it is short of salt and acid together: salt first, then a teaspoon of cider vinegar, then taste again before reaching for more of either.

Storage and make-ahead

Four days refrigerated, and it is better on the second day than the first — the Leeds recipe says as much, and adds that it should be reheated slowly. Warm it over low heat and stop short of a boil, both for the cream already in it and for the cabbage, which goes to rags on a second hard simmer.

It freezes well, which the GRHC version says outright, but freeze it before the cream goes in: cream that has been frozen in a soup thaws grainy. Cool the pot, bag it flat without the cream and dill, then thaw, reheat, and add both fresh.

What to serve with it

Dark rye and butter, and something pickled if you want a third thing on the table — dill cucumbers, or the beet pickles that turn up in every one of these cookbooks a few pages from the soup. Keep dessert out of the meal until the bowls are gone; this is a big soup and kuchen after it is an act of faith. Beer over wine.

From the recipe box / North Dakota

German-Russian Cabbage Borscht

A pot of pork broth thick with cabbage, potato and dill, finished with cream off the heat and a spoonful of sour cream at the table — the borscht of German-Russian North Dakota, which is not the beet soup the word makes you expect.

Prep
25 min
Cook
1 hr 45 min
Total
2 hr 10 min
Serves
8
Calories
430 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Brown the pork in the butter in two batches, then return it all to the pot with the onion and cook 3 minutes.
  2. Add the water, bay leaves, 1½ teaspoons salt and the pepper, skim, and simmer covered askew 1 hour until the pork is tender.
  3. Add the potatoes, carrots and celery and simmer 10 minutes uncovered.
  4. Stir in half the cabbage, the tomatoes and the beets if using, and simmer 20 minutes.
  5. Add the remaining cabbage and the last 1 teaspoon salt and simmer 8 minutes, until barely translucent.
  6. Off the heat, discard the bay leaves and stir in the cream and dill. Serve with sour cream passed separately at the table.

Nutrition

Fat27 g (13 g saturated)
Sodium720 mg
Protein24 g
Servingabout 2 cups with 2 tablespoons sour cream
Calories430
Cholesterol115 mg
Carbohydrates22 g (8 g sugar, 5 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

So where are the beets?

Optional, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. Of the eight North Dakota versions I could read, four carry beetroot, two use beet tops instead of the root — the 1969 KFYR recipe from Linda Brunmeier of Hannover asks for three cups of beet tops and no beet — and two, including Ann Toren's, have none at all. Where beetroot is in, it is one vegetable among ten. A cup of diced beets with the first cabbage will give you the colour without changing anything else.

My sour cream curdled anyway. Why?

Acid and heat, and probably not enough fat. The federal standard sets sour cream at not less than 0.5 percent titratable acidity as lactic acid and not less than 18 percent milkfat, and the light versions cut the fat that buffers it. Richmond's Dairy Chemistry of 1914 already had the reason: at the acidity where cream tastes sour, "it curdles on heating". The placards at the Strasburg borscht supper in the 1950s called for slightly sour cream, which is the old way of saying use cream that has not gone far.

Is this the same as cabbage roll soup?

No, and the archive keeps them apart. GRHC files Halupsi Soup — Gwen Schock Cowherd's recipe, ground beef with rice, tomato sauce and stewed tomatoes, simmered a couple of hours — separately from its borschts. That one is a tomato-and-rice soup built to taste like a stuffed cabbage roll. This one is a meat broth with cabbage in it, and the finish is dairy rather than tomato.

Can I stir the sour cream into the pot instead?

Yes, if you stabilise it and keep the heat off it. USDA Leaflet No. 213, issued October 1941 by the Bureau of Dairy Industry and the Bureau of Home Economics, gives the method for sour cream gravy: sprinkle flour over the pan, "add the unheated cream", then "stir and cook slowly until thickened". A tablespoon of flour to a cup of sour cream, stirred into a pot that has stopped bubbling, holds. The same leaflet cooks its sauerkraut first and only then says to add the cream and reheat — the order is the whole instruction.