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Sp So how do you prepared this whitened Lithuanian cold borscht? Here's a recipe from ''The Lithuanian Cook'', a Polish-language cookbook by Wincentyna Zawadzka. The first edition was published two decades after Mickiewicz had penned ''Pan Tadeusz'', but I suppose the recipe would have been quite similar in his times. Heck, even today Lithuanian cold borscht is still made in pretty much the same fashion.
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{{data|21 października 24 November 2019}}
{{Z wizytą w Soplicowie}}
This is another post in a series about food in ''Pan Tadeusz'', the Polish national epic by Adam Mickiewicz. While wandering around Europe after his exile from Poland, Mickiewicz always kept in his traveling travelling library an "old, worn cookbook", which he would read from time to time "with great pleasure", hoping to one day give a "truly Polish-Lithuanian banquet" according to "the ancient recipes".<ref>Excerpts quoted from a letter by Antoni Edward Odyniec, Mickiewicz's travel companion, dated 28 April 1830, quoted in: {{Cyt
| nazwisko = Jarosińska
| imię = Izabela
There's another interesting difference, though. On the third day, the cold borscht was "whitened", or clouded with sour cream, but on the first and second days, it wasn't. Why? One possible explanation would be that the first two days were Friday and Saturday, that is, fasting days. In Polish tradition, dairy products were proscribed on fasting days along as well as meat. It was only on Sunday that the same cold borscht was served again, but this time, enhanced with the luxurious additive. Except that if the Soplicas fasted on Saturday, then they must have done it only in the afternoon, because [[Epic Cooking: Breakfast at Judge Soplica's|for breakfast they'd had not only cream, but even smoked goose breasts, beef tongues, ham and steaks]]! This may be explained away only by the poet's inconsistency.
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