"Dill Is Life": Exploring Ukrainian and Georgian Flavours with Olia Hercules
Preparing a vegetarian feast amongst the dahlias.
A couple of years ago I attended a both stunning and delicious workshop at Perch Hill in East Sussex (which British gardeners will know as the home of Sarah Raven and her cutting garden where she tests all of the dahlia varieties that eventually go on sale) featuring Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, the husband and wife, chefs and cookery writers behind London’s Honey & Co. restaurants to celebrate their then new cookbook Chasing Smoke: Cooking over fire around the Levant. On that sunny, heavily aromatic afternoon my mother came along as my partner-in-crime, so when she forwarded an email a few months ago advertising another workshop with Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules, obviously we bought tickets on the spot.
I’ve been unwell since returning from Italy - and I made the frankly idiotic mistake of grabbing a pan handle that had just come out of a 200 degree oven on Monday night leaving me with blisters - which has been slowing me down a bit, but I promise testing for this month’s recipes is well underway! In the meantime, do make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss out, and I’d really appreciate it if you became a paid subscriber (which will also unlock all of the months recipes!)
Before she started cooking, Olia talked. She talked about her childhood in Ukraine, about the state of the country now. She talked about how her son does not understand why people eat cold cucumbers from the fridge here when he likes the ones plucked from her family’s sun-drenched garden better, and about how there are now Russian officers living in her parent’s house. It was hard to hear. She talked about the sometimes joyous and sometimes heartbreaking history of Ukraine and it’s deeply and proudly agricultural people which made me sit there and think about my family’s own connection with the country we had to flee from in a way I had no idea would become so salient come the weekend.
I heard someone once describe the Jewish people as the canaries in the coal mine. That they always come for us first, but in the act of persecution and in some cases, attempted annihilation they prove that anyone else can be next. It’s why anti-semitism is so dangerous. They came for us, which is why I’m writing to you now in English, not Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish or Polish, with family history rooted in Jewish London, with what I’m pretty sure all that is left of the old country being the old photographs filled with faces and features like mine my Grandfather showed me shortly before he died.
But food? Food is what connects us all, what we can all share with each other and what we all have in common. Food is where we all find joy, and our shared joy last Thursday started with a jar full of fermented cherry tomatoes, seasoned generously with bay, garlic, and celery.
The recipe is in one of Olia’s books I don’t own, Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine & Beyond (so I’m afraid I can’t provide a page number!) but it proved both how simple fermentation of summer produce - a cornerstone of the Ukrainian kitchen - can produce something joyous: what her mother describes as champagne tomatoes, little bursts of rich, slightly tart, fizzy flavour created by just choosing your produce carefully, warming up a simple brine, and leaving the tomatoes for a week or so with some aromatics to do their thing.
The leftover brine also was incredibly full flavoured (apparently a good hangover cure): it was fresh, tart and actually had a lot in common (as well as an ingredient list) with this tomato shrub I made from this year’s harvest and I’ve still got going in the fridge. Olia used it in place of stock and water in the tomato-based vegetable stew we enjoyed later on which was a nice ‘waste not, want not tip’ which would have been right at home in any of my families kitchens, as well as in hers.
Next, some of the grapes from the aforementioned vines at Perch Hill were transformed into the Cheese (feta) and Grape Muffins on pg 98 of Home Food: Recipes to comfort and connect (a book I adore by the way - I have to mention that it was gifted by the publishers when it first came out, but I’ve cooked so much from it absolutely by choice) reimagined as a slice. The recipe is adapted from an idea Olia found in a book called Lviv Cusine from a pre-Soviet bakery in said city. In a story I can relate to with my work, the original recipe failed, but the idea stuck and was good enough to keep going with to create something magical.
Reader? I kept on sneaking back to the table and managed to cram in three slices of this wonderfully light cake that was the perfect more-ish interplay between savoury and sweet, another common balance of flavours found throughout Ukrainian cooking.
Moving temporarily on from Ukraine, we heard all about Olia’s recent trip running food tours in Georgia and about her love for Georgian flavours and cuisine which honestly I new nothing about before that morning. Like in Ukrainian cooking, massive handfuls of fresh herbs (dill and tarragon ruling the roost) and mountains of seasonal vegetables are prominent, as well as walnut pastes stirred into dishes for flavour and thickness, hits of spice coming from blue fenugreek (it smells nothing like you’d expect being more familiar with the fenugreek used in Indian cooking), dried marigold petals, and svanetian, a highly aromatic flavoured salt, and with familiar notes of heat and warmth provided by adjika, a type of chilli paste.
With generous shakes of the dried herbs and spices she’d bought back with her (though she cited The Vinegar Shed as a great online ingredient resource) we watched Olia make Ajapsandal (described as one of her favourite things) which is something like a ratatouille but finished with a pungent herb paste stirred in at the end. Wholesome, and fantastic with a dollop of sour cream.
Happily, I’ve found her cooking it on YouTube for you all:
Adjourning to the greenhouse - after we’d been watered with glasses of English sparkling wine, kombucha and carafes of water flavoured with Sarah’s Attar of Roses - we got down to business on my two favourite recipes from Olia’s demo.
On the left we’ve got a sourdough toast that is a lot more flavourful than it looks. The adjika chilli paste I mentioned? It also comes in mint and green chilli form - simply ground into a paste with plenty of sea salt and a headily pungent amount of garlic, which came served spread lightly across the toast to form a base for creamy goats cheese and thin, perfectly ripe slices of fresh plums. Both a homemade flavouring and way of preserving warmer weather’s brightness. There was brightness, pungency, earthiness, charr, fruit flavours and cream.
Depending on which time of year you’re coming to this wherever you hail from, you can find the recipe made with plums over at Delicious Magazine, with broad beans and curd cheese on the Borough Market website, or done with apricot or persimmon in The Guardian. I honestly can’t see why pomegranate can’t work in winter, either.
My absolute favourite dish from the day though? One I already had bookmarked from Summer Kitchens: Recipes and Reminiscences from Every Corner of Ukraine (a wonderfully lyrical book beautifully photographed by Olia’s husband which encapsulates pre-war life and cooking in Ukraine in a way that brought me to tears reading it when the war first broke out) you can find on pg 106: Burnt Aubergine Butter on Tomato Toasts.
Toast, wiped with a cut garlic clove and topped with grated summer tomato in very much a Pan con Tomate-fashion is slathered with flame-charred aubergine stirred through with your best butter (but a lot less than you’d think because the aubergine does not need any help, just embellishment) before being showered with herbs.
I’ve made some delicious meals from it, but it is worth buying the book just for this recipe: little bites of concentrated flavour that are extremely more-ish.
And because I think we all need a little more colour, beauty and joy in our lives this week, I’m going to leave you with some of the beautiful dahlias which were in full bloom in the Perch Hill garden as we made our way back to the car and the slow (I realised I’d forgotten house keys so we needed J to beat me home!)
Magnificent food and images captured so poignantly. Nice work, Rachel.
You made me salivate for the food and the flowers, Rachel. I have the Mamushka cookbook, which I ordered shortly after the war against Ukraine began. I have mostly been reading the recipes and text and haven’t cooked much from it yet, but the recipe for the fermented tomatoes caught my interest as something I’d never heard of but that sounds delicious. Thanks also for the comments on your Ukrainian background, which touched home for me too. My roots aren’t Ukrainian, though my husband’s are, but, as you say, if not for circumstances, we would be speaking a different language and living a different life. And the weekend events sadly remind us of our vulnerability and how quickly the world can change.