In a far corner of Nach Waxman's handsome, prewar apartment living room sits a two-gallon ceramic crock perched over three stout bricks. To the casual observer, the tableau might go entirely unnoticed or get written off as a bit of eccentric décor. But inside the unassuming vessel, glazed in muted browns and grays, a whole world is unfolding.
As founding partner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, a bookstore he opened in 1983 focusing exclusively on food- and drink-related tomes, Waxman, 82, has become something of a legend within culinary and publishing circles. (His limitless curiosity about food history and encyclopedic knowledge of rare cookbooks haven't hurt either.) He is a longtime fixture of New York City's Upper West Side—he and his wife moved into their apartment in 1968 when rent was $226, raised their kids, and bought when the building went coop in 1985. Waxman is also a devoted maker and consumer of russel, the tangy, fermented beet brine traditionally used by Eastern European Jews to flavor borscht.
Before meeting Waxman, I had read about russel in cookbooks—like Mildred Grosberg Bellin's 1941 The Jewish Cook Book, which includes a recipe for hot Passover borscht made from “1 cup of strained rosel liquid for each portion,” diluted with water or broth and thickened with beaten egg yolks.
All of the borscht recipes I knew were soured with lemon juice or vinegar, or occasionally sour salt (citric acid) if they were old school. So I had filed russel away as an intriguing tidbit of Jewish culinary tradition lost to history. Then last fall I stumbled across Waxman's spirited entry on russel in a 2015 community cookbook published by his Upper West Side synagogue, Ansche Chesed. I immediately reached out.
His emailed reply was swift and generous: “What a happy coincidence! It just happens that a bit over three weeks ago I started a crock of russel. If you can get over here in the next two weeks … [you could] get a look at the crock, see what the russel is like at a middling stage, have a sip if you wish, and take a picture or two.”
The timing was indeed coincidental. For generations, russel (the word, which is also written as rosl, stems from the Slavic term for brine) was traditionally prepared in the weeks leading up to Passover. The last of the previous autumn's beets, which would have been chilling and growing scraggly in the root cellar all winter, were unearthed along with a ceramic crock reserved for the purpose. The beets were peeled, chopped, covered with water, and set to ferment until the first Seder. By then, the liquid would have transformed into a potent beet broth with a sharp bite that would flavor the holiday's borscht pots.
Waxman had always followed suit, putting up his batches of russel sometime in March. But the previous Passover, an illness had prevented him from completing his annual ritual. So when he spotted a beautiful pile of late summer beets at a local farmer's market, he felt compelled to attempt an “off-season” batch. Reaching out to him, I had assumed we would set up a phone interview. Instead, I hopped on the subway near my home in Brooklyn and emerged an hour later on the Upper West Side, en route to sample a flavor of the past.
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