Tis the season for learning something new. You might not be aware that such things have seasons, but I bet that if you look back over the decades you will identify that you too have definite preferred times for certain activities.
Why has March become my time for learning something new? Well, by “something” I really mean something to do with food, and at this time of year, despite the wild garlic, nettle tops and a few other wild greens, we are pretty much back to the same old suspects when we try to decide what to cook. How do you get inspiration when faced with a Ready, Steady, Cook style selection such as potatoes, cabbage, and onions? This is a time when we need to be really inventive, and looking back, I can see that I have often chosen to explore other food cultures at this time. Even during lockdown, I managed to participate in a Zoom course to learn to make Kimchi – the ingredients and equipment having been delivered to my door.
I was delighted when a new book was published that absolutely fulfils my learning requirements for this year. It is called Kapusta which you may know translates as Cabbage in several Eastern European Slavic languages including Belarusian, Polish, Russian, Slovak and Ukrainian. The book is by Alissa Timoshkina and the subtitle is “Vegetable Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe”.
There are several reasons why it struck me so instantly that I had found my March cooking inspiration for this year. The most obvious being the place that Ukraine holds in our hearts at the moment. I have actually been feeling for a while that I need to learn more about the cooking of the Ukrainian people who are currently part of our community, and now that it looks as though they may soon be able to return home, although in circumstances that fill no-one (apart from Trump and Putin) with much optimism, that time has come.
The second reason is the list of basic ingredients which provides the focus for each chapter: Cabbage, Beetroot, Potato, Dumplings, Carrot, Mushrooms, and Pickles and Ferments.
I’m not interested in learning to cook food from another culture if it involves importing the key ingredients. Eastern European cooking uses the same basic ingredients that we often find ourselves contemplating, whilst the supporting ingredients, such as the defining spice of paprika, or sour cream, are easily available.
I haven’t, yet, had the chance to cook many of the recipes, although several are earmarked, but reading the book has broadened my understanding of the essence of the culture. I hadn’t realised quite how strongly regional much of the cooking is, although I guess it makes sense when you consider the huge size of countries such as Ukraine and Poland. Apparently, the regional boundaries speak more strongly than the country ties so that you might find more similarities between neighbouring regions of different countries than you will between the further extents of the same country. And it’s not really down to the ingredients found there, but long held cultural traditions.
Taking the titular cabbage as a starting point, Alissa points out that whilst a variation of stuffed cabbage leaves poached in a sauce exists in every country in Eastern Europe (and probably the world when you widen cabbage to include vine leaves) the precise ingredients could provide its own exploration of the history of Eastern Europe, as could the names by which the various “stuffed cabbage leaves” are known. In the Transylvanian town of Praid there is an entire festival dedicated to cabbage rolls – www.kaposztafesztival.eu
Another example of how echoes of cooking techniques travel the world are Piroshki which Alissa says, are the Eastern European equivalent of Latin American empanadas or Asian samosas. She gives a recipe in which they are stuffed with cabbage, spring onion and eggs. The word is pronounced pirozhki and is a diminutive of pirog (a pie) which in turn originates from pir which is Russian for Feast and so commonly thought to be the origin of these Eastern European “pies”. Significantly, given Putin’s refusal to accept that Ukraine as a sovereign state, Timoshkina is delighted to point out that the Slavic political entity of Rus, which encompassed the territory of modern-day Ukraine, Belarus and parts of the Baltics, has at least as much claim to be the originator.
Alissa Timoshkina has a wide Eastern European heritage, having been born in Serbia, with Ukrainian-Jewish and Polish on her mother’s side and Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian on her father’s. Her loyalties are clearly with Ukraine, and she has raised over £2.5 million through the fundraising campaign #Cook for Ukraine.
Through writing this book she has come to know more of her Ashkenazi heritage and now confesses that Knishes have supplanted the Piroshki that she grew up with. Ashkenazi immigrants took Knishes to the USA in the early 20th century where they found fame in New York’s Manhattan Knish Alley, of which only one bakery today survives. Knishes with Potato and Sour Cream is one of the must try recipes from the book but you can find many others shared on Alissa’s blog.
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