Khrinovina (хріновина, raw horseradish-tomato relish)

The color looks sweet first: tomato-red, glossy, almost innocent. Then the horseradish catches your nose, your eyes water, and every cold slice of pork wakes up. This is khrinovina, from хрін, horseradish: raw tomato, raw garlic, raw root, ground together until it sounds wet and rough in the machine, then salted enough to hold its edge.

It belongs to the end of tomato season, when the garden gives you more than manners can handle. In the litnya kuhnia, the summer kitchen, there would be bowls of split tomatoes, a root of horseradish scrubbed like a dirty secret, garlic skins stuck to everyone's fingers. Aunt Nadia wrote only "хрін до сили", horseradish to strength, which is both useless and completely correct.

The one thing that decides the dish is this: don't cook it. Heat would tame the root and turn the tomatoes flat. Grind it raw, let it stand cold overnight, and the sharpness settles into the juice without disappearing. Serve it with salo, boiled beef, roast pork, buckwheat cutlets, or just black bread when nobody is watching.