#CookforUkraine with Olia Hercules' recipes

A cookbook that will transport you to the Summer Kitchens of Ukraine

There’s not much else that I can think about this week but Ukraine, so I did what I usually do when I need some grounding and the security of something that feels right when the world feels so wrong: I cooked.

I immediately grabbed my copy of my friend, Ukrainian food writer and chef, Olia Hercules’ Summer Kitchens: Recipes and Reminiscences from Every Corner of Ukraine. It is one of my absolute favourite cookbooks for so many reasons. I think it has been years since a cookbook has moved and intrigued me as much as this one. It’s a cuisine I’m not at all familiar with, I’ve sadly never been to Ukraine, but Olia makes me just want to leap into each and every recipe and try and taste everything.

The day the book arrived in my lap (this came out in 2020), I remember I couldn’t put it down. I just ignored the family for the whole day and read it cover to cover. The summer kitchens of the title are practical structures with a life and tradition of their own in Ukraine, set apart from the house, usually in a courtyard, where people cooked and ate all summer long to keep cool, a dreamy place full of generations of cherished recipes and food memories.

I began bookmarking everything and tore through the kitchen to see what I had to make something immediately from it. The first thing was the nutty, buttery buckwheat drop scones which Olia says to eat with butter and honey.

The next thing I made was her burnt aubergine butter (above, you can find the recipe on Epicurious here), which Olia descibres as “baba ganoush’s Ukrainian third cousin” — a creamy, charred, silky mixture of roasted eggplant flesh spread over what we would call in Tuscany “pane e pomodoro”, toasted bread rubbed with garlic and a cut tomato. Absolutely my kind of food, simple but luscious, especially when you do it with in-season vegetables. I’ve made it for guests too, to a reception of plenty of oohs and ahhs. The smell of the charred eggplant absolutely transported me — oddly, to my grandmother’s kitchen near Tokyo in late summer.

Everything about Summer Kitchens is what I love in a good cookbook: beautiful, transporting images (the photographs are by super talented Elena Heatherwick and Olia’s partner Joe Woodhouse, who if you aren’t already following on Instagram for the most mouthwatering vegetable-forward meal ideas you should), stories of dying traditions and personal stories that give meaning and nostalgia to each recipe. I loved reading about pich, the traditional woodfired ovens used in summer kitchens and the fascinating rituals behind them (giving birth on top of them or not swearing in front of them!), the stories of borsch, cherry pitting with a hairpin and reading about John Steinbeck’s account of traveling to the Ukraine — part of A Russian Journal, published in 1948, accompanied by Robert Capa’s stunning photographs (take a peek here).

I was inspired by the Slow roast pork with kraut and dried fruit, which is eaten all over Ukraine and along its borders. Olia suggested stuffing in sweet, soft, brioche-like buns called pyrizhky — naturally I followed her excellent advice.

Olia’s pampushky, sourdough garlic buns, are incredibly tempting (Olia rigorously uses sourdough in all the recipes that call for yeast in her book and although I was daunted at first, it really inspired me to go for it but, fear not, she has a version of this recipe from her first book, Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine and Beyond, which uses fresh or active dried yeast and doesn’t take as long — technically the sourdough version needs 2 days to prepare. You can find that recipe on Nigella Lawson’s website here).

These buns, Olia says, “are undeniably Ukrainian: no other country ever claims them. They are doused in garlic oil as soon as they come out of the oven, and the smell of freshly baked, slightly sweet buns mingled with strong garlic makes my head spin.”

After tasting these I can confirm the intoxicating nature of these delicious buns! Olia goes on to say they are traditionally served with borsch or any broth or just eaten with “a sliver of salo (cured pork fat) and a pickle.” Fun fact, the word pampushka can be used to describe a gorgeous plump woman. It makes me love these garlic buns even more.

I was debating making these again this past week because I happen to have some sourdough that my husband has been nurturing, but decided to try a recipe I hadn’t made yet, the Curd Cake with Caramelised Apples.

Known as Sernyk, a traditional cheesecake eaten across Ukraine and Poland, it is usually made with cottage cheese. Olia has tweaked her mother’s original recipe for using ricotta instead. The main flour used here is semolina but Olia suggests polenta as a substitute too. I used polenta — I am a huge fan of polenta in cakes — and if anyone needs a good, crowd pleasing, gluten-free cake, this is it. If you love ricotta cakes or baked cheesecakes, it has a similar texture but the polenta lends something of a “crumb” to it. This cake is easily devoured, as it goes so well with a cup of tea or an espresso in the middle of the morning or the afternoon, as a lovely dessert or — well, I have been eating it for breakfast this weekend too.

If you are inspired to make one of these Ukrainian recipes this week consider posting it on Instagram with the hashtag #CookforUkraine, a hashtag that began with friends Olia and Alissa Timoshkina, the Russian author of Salt & Time: Recipes from a Russian Kitchen and founder of podcast Mother Food has turned into a social movement in a matter of days. They wanted to simply increase awareness of the humanitarian crisis unfolding right now by sharing Ukrainian and Eastern European recipes, now they have a UK-based fundraising page for donations to UNICEF Ukraine. The page was set up by my friend Clerkenwell Boy and his team that also founded #CookforSyria and raised over 1 million pounds for charity through supper clubs, bake sales and the like — they hope to do the same with #CookforUkraine.

As Olia wrote recently under a photograph of her and her mum in her kitchen, “I don’t want people to get stuck in the headlines and to disassociate themselves from the humanity, from our Ukrainian human-ness.”

Alissa adds, “Let’s cook for Ukraine, for peace, for freedom, for truth, for common sense, for rational thought and for love.” If food is not love, then I don’t know what is.

Olia Hercules’ Curd Cake with Caramelised Apples (Sernyk)

• 200 gr soft unsalted butter

• 200 gr apples, cored and sliced

• 1 tbs brown sugar

• 200 gr caster sugar (I used just 150 gr as I had sweet apples)

• 3 eggs, separated

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 500 gr ricotta or cottage cheese 

• 120 gr fine semolina or polenta (I went with the latter)

• Pinch salt

Melt a knob of the butter in a pan and cook apple slices until they turn golden, a few minutes each side. Sprinkle in the brown sugar and cook a minute more each side. Let cool then lay on bottom of a greased and lined cake tin (I used a square brownie tin for this, but I think a 23cm round cake tin or so would be equivalent in size, it is quite a low cake as it doesn’t need to rise). 

Whip egg whites with pinch salt until you have soft peaks. In a separate bowl, whip the butter, sugar, yolks and vanilla until creamy. Add ricotta then fold in the semolina/polenta and then finally, incorporate the whites — a spoonful first to loosen it, then fold the rest in gently. Pour over top of the apples and bake at 200°C for 30 minutes until golden brown but still a little wobbly — it sets quite firmly when cooled. Let cool in tin before turning upside down.