The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
COOKING THE BOOKS
Putting new recipes to the test
With two cookbooks already under her belt, Ukrainian-born Olia Hercules has put the food of her home country firmly on the culinary map. Her third, Summer Kitchens (Bloomsbury, £26), however, really feels like her apex. Bursting with vibrant recipes, stories and memories, right from the off it’s everything I want in a specialist cookbook. Even the pigs’ ears look rather tempting...
CONCEPT
Despite the name, this is not a book about cooking in summer. Summer Kitchens refers instead to the one-room brick houses or litnya kuhnia that were common in the gardens of many Ukrainian households. These structures were used for both cooking and eating all summer, and came in especially handy during the pickling season in September. The houses themselves may no longer exist, but Hercules’s recipes, photographed to look ethereal and alluring, detail the many things that would have been created within them; from huge jars of sauerkraut and pickled vegetables to soups, stews, dumplings and roasted meat and fish. Offal features prominently, which may not be to everyone’s taste, but at a time when we waste a third of the food we buy, perhaps we ought to embrace the idea of roasted tongue or a plate of pigs’ ears.
THE RECIPES
Delicate salads starring fresh herbs, light soups and wonderful cakes fill the pages.
Eggs with horseradish mayonnaise and wild garlic
Quick, easy and undeniably retro, these simple boiled eggs with a home-made horseradish mayonnaise had the perfect balance of creaminess and kick – and I loved that Hercules admits to still needing to check how to boil the perfect egg. I couldn’t get hold of wild garlic flowers, but a few sprigs of home-grown parsley did the job.
Fried flatbreads with cheese
Having failed miserably at her sourdough starter, the prospect of a flatbread without proving, kneading or fermenting appealed – the filling of halloumi, feta, dill and (a suggestion in the intro) spring onion, sealed the deal. Similar to a Turkish gozleme, my homely looking, uneven scraps of fried dough were a triumph, oozing with salty, tangy cheese and burning our mouths as we went in for more.
Slow-roast pork with kraut and dried fruit
Pork, sauerkraut, prunes, apricots and apples – though the idea of this had my mouth watering, my fellow tasters raised their eyebrows at the sound of such a strongly flavoured dish.
After four hours in the oven (Hercules recommends three, but my pork was far from being pull-apart tender at that point), however, the fruit and kraut melted into an aromatic, sweet slump of deliciousness, scented heavily with caraway, fennel and coriander. Piled into a bun, it was a hog roast from heaven.
VERDICT
More than a cookbook, Summer Kitchens is an insight into what it is to be Ukrainian, through the time-capsuled lens of Hercules’s summer kitchen. Rarely does one come across a book with such a strong sense of place and personality, the pages radiating with memories of pitting cherries, snacking on curd cheese and enjoying blinis made by her grandmother – and the recipes, seasoned with nuggets of information about their history, Hercules’s tireless research, and her own memories, are a triumph.
Even the ox tongue I tried went down a treat.