Shpundra (шпундра, pork stewed in beet kvas)

The most arresting thing is the color. Pork belly and ribs begin as ordinary meat, pale and fatty, then beet kvas floods the pot and everything turns crimson: the onions, the fat, the edges of the pork, even the wooden spoon if you leave it resting too long. It looks like borshch decided to become supper.

Shpundra belongs to Poltava and the older Cossack table, where souring was not decoration but structure. The beet kvas cuts through the pork fat, the fat carries the beet sweetness, and the pot lands in that old Ukrainian place between feast and preservation. Not vinegar. Not wine. A living sourness from beet ferment, mellow and earthy, with enough bite to wake the whole dish up.

The one thing that decides it is the end. Sweat the onion and carrot slowly as a zasmazhka, the Ukrainian flavour base, then stir it in late so its sweetness sits brightly on the sauce instead of flattening into the stew. Aunt Nadia would have written, "until the smell changes," and of course she would have left out the amount of kvas, just to torment me from the graph paper. Taste as you go. When the pork gives under the spoon and the sauce is glossy enough to stain bread, you're there.

Make a big pot. There is no tradition of a small one, and this is better tomorrow, when the beet sourness and pork fat have stopped shouting and learned each other's names.