Kholodnyk (холодник, chilled beet borshch)

The bowl arrives pink enough to make the table go quiet. Not polite pink. Beet-crimson turned cloudy with soured milk, green with dill and cucumber, cold enough that the spoon sweats in your hand. This is summer borshch for the days when lighting the stove feels like an insult.

Kholodnyk means the cold one, and it behaves exactly like that. You cook the beets gently, then cool their liquor instead of throwing it away, because that ruby water is the spine of the soup. Beet kvass gives the sourness depth, kefir or prostokvasha gives it body, and the chopped cucumber, radish, spring onion and dill make it eat like a garden that fell into a bowl.

The one thing that decides the dish is balance. Add the soured milk slowly into the cold beet base, tasting as you go, until the color blooms and the sharpness softens but doesn't disappear. Aunt Nadia wrote only, "make it lively," which is very helpful if you already know. Now you know: it should taste cold, sour, grassy, and sweet from the beets, never milky and flat.

Make a big pot. It sits in the fridge better than we do in August, and the next day the dill has spoken to everybody.