Beets are what give borscht its distinctive red colour, but in Russia, where the dish was first concocted, it was originally made with another sort of root, the parsnip. This original ingredient even gave the dish its name, for in Russian borscht means cow parsnip, a parsnip that grows wild in marshes. The word borscht was introduced to English in the early nineteenth century, but the soup itself did not become a popular menu item until the early 1920s when more than a million Russians emigrated to major European cities, including Paris and London, to escape their country’s civil turmoil.