bortsch

Dinner was plate after plate of food he'd hardly ever set eyes on, let alone eaten: caviar, bortsch, salmon, duck.

Traditional Russian dishes such as bortsch, chicken Kiev and goulash, served amid decor designed to evoke a restaurant in Czarist Russia.

Bortsch: also Imperial Purple (and A PUNIC WAR).

There, in the 1890s, Escoffier's mousse de jambon, "served on a great block of ice and melting like snow in the mouth", was declared a masterpiece, and his bortsch was held by Newnham-Davis to be the best soup in the world.