Most of us first experienced Ukrainian cooking in the kitchen of our mother or grandmother. I can’t recall my first taste of pyrohy (varenky) or kovbasa, but it was certainly the beginning of a life-long love affair with the cuisine of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Although stuffed cabbage (holubtsi: known as “holubchy” in my mom’s Jersey City family and “holubki” where my dad grew up in Primrose, Pa.) was a real stretch for me to eat as a child, I eventually became very fond of it.
In my teenage years, I first uncovered the mysteries of New York’s Lower East Side and the Ukrainian cultural and culinary gems that were located there. World War II Ukrainian émigrés first settled in the 1950s along the streets and avenues near St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church on Seventh Street, which was also the home of the Surma Book & Music Co. There were several Ukrainian coffee shops in the area serving great home-cooked meals at very cheap prices. At one time or another you could find me in Leshko’s, Odessa or the now iconic Veselka. For a few dollars, a bowl of kapusniak (Ukrainian cabbage soup) with challah bread and a plate of varenyky offered a very filling and satisfying meal.
Later, as an adult trying to re-establish traditions lost in my family, I purchased my first Ukrainian cookbook at Surma. “Traditional Ukrainian Cookery” was the classic published in English by Savella Stechisin (née Wawryniuk) in 1957. The author immigrated to Canada from the Lviv Oblast of Ukraine with her family in 1913 and spent a lifetime with her husband, Julian Stechisin, helping to preserve Ukrainian culture in the prairie provinces of western Canada.
Her cookbook became widely popular among Ukrainians in North America and sold 80,000 copies by 2009. For my family and me, no Ukrainian Christmas Eve celebration would be complete without her recipes for meatless borshch, kolach (braided Christmas bread) and the other tasty delights that grace our table.
Olha Franko, the daughter-in-law of the famous western Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko, published one of the first books of Ukrainian cooking in 1929 in Kolomyia, Ukraine. It was a cookbook of Galician specialty recipes, “Practical Cuisine.” This cookbook was reissued in Lviv in 1991. She pulled together a variety of recipes, including snacks, borshch, soups, meat, fish and mushroom dishes and pies and confiture. Ms. Franko continued to cook until her death at age 91 in 1987.
Emma Lee
Author and chef Olia Hercules.
Recently I had the opportunity to interview Olia Hercules (https://oliahercules.com/), a Ukrainian British chef and author who is expanding the range of Ukrainian cooking today. I first learned about her from a January episode of “The Splendid Table,” National Public Radio’s culinary culture and food show that airs on Sunday mornings. She talked about her first cookbook, “Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine and Eastern Europe,” published in the fall of 2015.
I downloaded a copy of the book from Amazon and it was an eye-opener. The food of western Ukraine is within my comfort zone, but “Mamushka” opens up a new world of southern Ukrainian cooking that includes offerings from Crimea, the Caucasus region, Moldova and Central Asia.
Ms. Hercules was born in Kakhovka, Ukraine, in the Kherson region near Crimea in 1984. At age 12, she moved with her parents to Cyprus and eventually went to England at 18 to attend university there. Although she studied international relations at the University of Warwick in Coventry, she later became a professional chef trained at London’s award-winning Leiths School of Food and Wine.
Her ancestry is a real melting pot, with family from Siberia, Bessarabia (Moldova), Uzbekistan and Armenia, and Jewish roots. Her surname comes from her ex-husband, who is a Greek Cypriot. Her maiden name is the very Ukrainian Grebenyuk. Her mother’s surname is Mardarenko.
The Ukrainian British chef was not always interested in cooking. “I studied Italian for my bachelor’s degree and I went and stayed in Italy, and this is where I actually decided that I was quite obsessed with food. Before that I loved eating, but I never cooked. So when I came back from Italy to the U.K., I started cooking avidly…” said Ms. Hercules.
To put together “Mamushka” she shadowed her mother and aunt in their kitchen and compiled old family recipes. “So I just had to literally follow them around with scales and spoons, and they just kept on shooing me saying ‘this is how we cook.’ It was really a lovely process. And peaceful.”
Ms. Hercules published another cookbook in 2017, “Kaukasis: A Culinary Journey through Georgia, Azerbaijan & Beyond.” During a promotional tour in the New York City area last fall, she had the opportunity to appear on WNBC-TV’s “Today” show to talk about a recipe from the book (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n96kbcBKJc4).
She is currently doing research in Ukraine for a new book about Ukrainian regional cooking, which she hopes to publish in the spring of 2020. In addition to her work as an author, she is a food stylist and occasionally teaches cookery classes in London. You can hear a 2018 interview with her on my monthly podcast, “Krynytsya” (https://soundcloud.com/krynytsya/oliahercules).
Mike Buryk is a Ukrainian American writer whose research and articles cover a wide variety of topics. In addition to “Krynytsya,” he also hosts and produces another monthly podcast, “Made in Ukraine Tech Startup Edition” (https://soundcloud.com/ukrainetech). You can reach him at [email protected].
Copyright (c) 2018 by Michael J. Buryk. All rights reserved.