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As you may know, the main meal of the day in Poland begins invariably with a bowl of soup. It was no different in Soplica's house, except that, just before the soup, the men were served a small apéritif.

Why was it only for men, though? Why didn't the women get any vodka? After all, already in the 18th century, did the Rev. Jędrzej Kitowicz write of Polish noble ladies that the they would "often got get drunk on vodka".<ref>{{Cyt

}}</ref> Or maybe that's precisely whythe reason?

This ritual repetitiveness of Soplica's meals was adjusted only to the season and to the Catholic calendar of feasts and fasts. In this case, it's Lithuanian cold borscht, a summertime soup that is still as popular on hot days in both Lithuania and Poland as ''gazpacho'' is in Spain.

}}</ref> Is it a regional name for the same soup or does it refer to an aspic dish? After all, the similar Russian word "холодец" (''kholodets'') refers to a meat-based jelly. It's could be possible that this term had filtered into the eastern dialects of Polish. Besides, veal feet in jelly aspic would have paired perfectly with the vodka.

On the other hand, the vodka was served to men only, but the ''chołodziec'' was consumed by all. What's more, there's no evidence that, in the 19th century, the word was used for aspic anywhere outside certain regions of Russia proper; it's not attested in either Polish or Belarusian of the time (of course, aspic dishes themselves had been known since the Middle Ages, albeit under other names). And any wayAnyway, the oldest translations of ''Pan Tadeusz'' into both Russian and Belarusian render treat both "''chłodnik''" and "''chołodziec''" as referring to a soup. It looks like both Mickiewicz himself and his contemporary translators had no doubts that these two words were synonymssynonymous.

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 lean days. In Polish tradition, dairy products , as well as meat, were proscribed on fasting lean 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.

So how do you prepared prepare 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.

| Grind a large handful of chopped fresh dill together with salt. Boil some chopped sorrel, chards or red beetroots and leave to cool down. Add some meat broth, half a gallon of sour cream, mix it all together and adjust the thickness and sourness by adding more of either the broth or the cream, so that the soup is white and cloudy. Just before serving, add a few chunks of ice, a few quartered hard-boiled eggs, a few finely chopped cucumbers, threescore crayfish tails or some large cooked fish, or if you don't have any, some roasted veal cut into thin stripes. If you have cauliflower or asparagus, then you can some that was boiled separately in water, cooled down and broken into chunks.