The author first encountered Ukrainian food culture in the mid-1980s. Significantly not in Kyiv or Odessa, but on Second Avenue in New York, where a number of Ukrainian coffee shops had set up shop to offer hearty breakfasts to people heading to the subway. There were blini and pierogi filled with mysterious ingredients, served in a friendly and resolute manner by established, stocky women or young blonde women with model dimensions. The memory doesn’t tell us more, the impressions of a region of the Soviet Union that was not perceived as an independent nation faded. And yes, there were sometimes borscht at Gorbachev-loving friends. But should you have known that the famous beetroot-based stew was originally a Ukrainian dish?
Now that Putin and his henchmen are trying to wipe out Ukrainian culture, you should also explore how and what Ukrainians cook, what delicacies the huge multi-ethnic state has to offer. Since this was easier said than done until recently, one can call it a stroke of luck that the Ukrainian chef and gastro-journalist Olia Hercules has come up with two stately books that give us a wonderful insight not only into the Ukrainian food culture and its regional diversity . A native of Kakhovka in Kherson Oblast, Hercules lives in London but has traveled her homeland and amassed an almost exhaustive collection of recipes.
“Mamusia” (“Mama” in Ukrainian) mainly brings together recipes from her multicultural family, which has Ukrainian, Jewish, Siberian, Moldovan, Uzbek, Armenian and Ossetian roots, and spreads almost the entire spectrum of Eastern European cuisine. Armenian meat soup, in which lamb dumplings stuffed with plums swim alongside Bessarabian pork ribs with steamed dumplings, while Ukraine, among other things, with grilled catfish marinated in black beer and of course the
ubiquitous borscht.
Hercules dedicates a separate chapter to this in “Country Kitchen”, in which she presents various prepared versions, including a fantastic one with duck meat and smoked pears, and in which she explains how a southern Ukrainian chicken borscht with kefir dumplings differs from a Galician one with tripe.
She explains how it came about – the name can be traced back to the Ukrainian word “burjak” (beetroot) – stresses the importance of the right variety and explains the difference adding tomatoes makes. Nevertheless, although it is an important, but only a small aspect of the culinary diversity, which always has its distinctive characteristics despite its closeness to the Eastern and sometimes also Western European cuisines. Sweet and sour stuffed peppers from Gagauzia, tomato and mulberry salad, goat and onion pot with potato snow – just reading this makes your mouth water. And above all the brown rye flatbreads, already praised by John Steinbeck, which, with their malty sweetness and spicy aromas, represent the “Ukrainian bread par excellence” for Hercules, especially if you enjoy them with butter, the typical Salo back bacon, vodka and pickles.
Especially the pickles. In Ukraine there seems to be a real cult surrounding the sour things. Especially since Ukrainian cuisine – and this is another essential feature – is heavily based on the fermentation of almost everything that the immeasurably fertile land has to offer. Even watermelons are fermented. All you need is leaves from sour cherry, currant or oak branches, 50 grams of rye flour, 150 grams of sea salt, a ten-liter vat and forty days of patience.
For decades we saw this country only as a granary – now Olia Hercules shows us with aromatic force what a land of milk and honey is threatening to perish in the hail of bombs.