Tasting notes

The communities that share the shores of the Black Sea have inspired a new book of surprising recipes

Recipes from the shores of the Black Sea

‘IN BULGARIA THEY have the best tomatoes in the world! Honestly, it’s a salad country,’ says Caroline Eden, a travel and food writer whose latest journeys through the countries that border the Black Sea led her to discover herring and apple dishes in Odessa in the Ukraine, a Balkan love affair with roses, and those Bulgarian tomatoes, big and pink and as ‘plump and sweet as sugar’.

The seed for her new book, Black Sea, published this month (Hardie Grant, £25), was sown five years ago when she first glimpsed the body of water through the grimy window of a Turkish bus. ‘It didn’t seem all that remarkable,’ Eden admits now, yet the lake-like expanse was to become her obsession, inspiring further travel and research to explore the deep and often conflicting histories of its communities and landscapes. On the one hand, she explains, ‘it is a heavy, masculine place, crossed by Jason and the Argonauts and considered the birthplace of barbarism’. On the other it’s ‘a place of hope that has sheltered a lot of people’.

Eden’s book contains a rich seam of historical detail, depicting everything from Tsar Nicholas II’S imperial gala menu (complete with champagne granita) to the storytellers Anton Chekhov and Alexander Pushkin, who fell in love with sun-soaked Odessa. But it traces a delicious heritage, too, with recipes influenced by restaurant feasts and the dishes, scribbled down for her in broken English, kept alive by the people who thrive all along the watery frontier.