Ukrainian chefs rediscover their country’s cuisine – after Soviets tried to destroy it
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Howard LaFranchi Staff writer
| Kyiv, Ukraine
Celebrity chef Yevhen Klopotenko has spent a decade searching for old Ukrainian recipes, lost food-preparation practices, and ingredients introduced to Ukraine by foreign traders plying Black Sea trade routes.
He is at the forefront of a growing movement to jettison the standardized cooking imposed during the Soviet era in favor of varied – and even sometimes spicy – traditional Ukrainian cuisine.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onFood is a key part of culture. Ukrainians are uncovering their country’s culinary history – and how its distinctive features were suppressed by the authorities during Soviet rule.
“If you allow people to use spices, you are allowing them to be creative,” says Mr. Klopotenko. “And if you are allowed to be creative,” he adds with a grin, “you might also learn to do a revolution.”
The movement is meant to fortify Ukrainian identity in the face of a war launched by a foreign leader who claims Ukraine does not exist except as part of Russia. A variety of chefs, community kitchen organizers, food producers, and researchers are making food a key element in the cultural reawakening.
“The war we are facing now ... is a reminder of how food has been used in the past to suppress the Ukrainian spirit and way of life,” says Olena Braichenko, a Ukrainian food researcher and author. “Now as we uncover these food traditions, we are reestablishing who we are.”
Celebrity chef Yevhen Klopotenko has a theory as to why the use of cooking spices was banned in Ukraine under Soviet rule.
“If you allow people to use spices, you are allowing them to be creative,” says Mr. Klopotenko, whose signature shaved head – save for a riotous top of blond curls – is reminiscent of a legendary Cossack warrior emblazoned on anti-Russia T-shirts here.
“And if you are allowed to be creative,” he adds with a grin, “you might also learn to do a revolution.”
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onFood is a key part of culture. Ukrainians are uncovering their country’s culinary history – and how its distinctive features were suppressed by the authorities during Soviet rule.
Mr. Klopotenko offers that anecdote as a way of explaining his passion for Ukrainian cuisine. Like many budding chefs with international educations and ambitions, he focused early in his career on mastering the world’s renowned cuisines.
Then came Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2013, when tens of thousands of Ukrainians filled Kyiv’s Maidan square for days before toppling the pro-Russia regime. A year later, Russia occupied Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and launched the first operations aimed at occupying Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“Something changed inside me” as a result of those events, he says. “I didn’t want any part of the old Soviet system; I knew I wanted to be in the real Ukraine.”
Thus began a decadelong search for old Ukrainian recipes, lost food-preparation practices, and ingredients introduced to Ukraine by foreign traders plying Black Sea trade routes but later suppressed by Soviet rulers.
Mr. Klopotenko is at the forefront of a growing movement – a revolution, one might say – to jettison the bland and standardized cooking imposed during the Soviet era and to rediscover the rich, varied – and even sometimes spicy – traditional Ukrainian cuisine.
This food movement is part of a broader quest to uncover and fortify Ukrainian identity – through language, art, literature, music – in the face of a war launched by a foreign leader who claims Ukraine does not exist except as part of Russia. Asserting that food is inseparable from national identity, a variety of chefs, community kitchen organizers, food producers, and researchers are making food a key element in a cultural reawakening.
“The war we are facing now, that seeks to erase Ukrainian culture and raze it, is nothing we haven’t faced before, but it is a reminder of how food has been used in the past to suppress the Ukrainian spirit and way of life,” says Olena Braichenko, a Ukrainian food researcher and author.
“Food is the real language of love and a basic part of how people show their care towards their loved ones,” she says. “When so much of that part of us was taken away, it buried who we are as a people,” she adds. “But now as we uncover these food traditions, we are reestablishing who we are.”
Food as identity and culture
Ms. Braichenko, author of “Ukraine: Food and History,” cites borsch as an example.
In the Soviet Union, borsch – the signature Ukrainian soup with beets as a base – was standardized and limited to a few ingredients. “But when we look into past references and recipes,” she says, “we find that in Ukraine, it is in fact a dish of tremendous regional variety based on local ingredients and time of year. It can be green or red,” she adds, “based on the harvesting season, and it can have meat, or no meat, or fish, or mushrooms.”
(And in Ukraine, just don’t write it or pronounce it as “borscht” with a T, the Moscow spelling.)
When Ms. Braichenko says Ukraine has lived through earlier Russian efforts to “erase” identity, she is referring to laws during the Russian Empire banning the public use of the Ukrainian language. Then came the Holodomor, the human-engineered famine of the early 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians as Soviet leader Josef Stalin collectivized private farms.
Ukraine’s is a village-based culture where survival has long been linked to keeping a productive garden, the noted food author says. That instinct for survival by garden plot explains why so many Ukrainians insist on maintaining their vegetable gardens in the midst of war, she says – and why so many refuse to evacuate their villages despite the dangers they face.
The sense of community engendered in villages where the cuisine was based largely on garden produce and other locally sourced ingredients is the main point of the restaurant Trypichcha (whose name means “three ovens”) in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and a frequent target for Russian bombs.
“We’re like a museum of food for people to experience and remember the foods and preparations of the past,” says Mykyta Virchenko, Trypichcha’s chef and co-owner. “But we’re not only about food,” he adds. “More important to me is that we are about creating a community based on our identity and our culture.”
After responding to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 by setting up a community kitchen serving soldiers and war victims, Mr. Virchenko opened a four-table restaurant that August. His objective: provide a besieged city with a place to gather over a meal inspired by both Ukraine-specific dishes and a rich tradition of absorbing the influences of other cuisines.
Two years later, Trypichcha is five times larger and often packed with diners sampling a traditional beef-and-pepper stew, or a tahini made from the seeds of Ukraine’s signature sunflower.
But what matters most to Mr. Virchenko is how his food is the vehicle for creating “connections” and strengthening identity.
“Someone eating here said to me once that we are helping to bring about the birth of a new community, but to me that community was already there,” he says. “We are just providing the place for that community to come together and be nurtured.”
Rediscovering disregarded recipes
The idea that traditional Ukrainian cooking would one day be part of a movement to assert national identity might have amused many Ukrainians in the postindependence era of the 1990s, Ms. Braichenko says. “As we opened up to the world and craved so many things from the West, we turned our attention to French cuisine and lived in the shade of an inferiority complex about our simple village foods,” she says.
Even Mr. Klopotenko, who had earned international cooking honors, admits he thought the idea of “Ukrainian gastronomy” was “a joke” – until that change inside him after the Maidan protests and Crimea’s occupation.
He started combing old church libraries for recipes and lists of locally produced foods from before the Russian Empire. He investigated 19th-century food market offerings, discovering that before Soviet rule – which imposed strict limits on which crops farmers could grow – Ukrainians had access to a wide variety of products from around the world. He visited used-book shops looking for cookbooks and food histories.
And he opened his restaurant 100 Rokiv Tomu Vpered (whose name means “100 years back to the future”) in Kyiv’s Potil district on the site of the ancient castle grounds of the kings who ruled Ukraine more than a millennium ago. The menu celebrates the Ukrainian gastronomy Mr. Klopotenko once thought laughable with dumplings, pickled vegetables, and braised meats.
And of course, it features borsch.
“When I was a boy, my grandmother prepared borsch, and since she was cooking in Soviet times, I thought it was a Soviet dish,” he says. “Now I know she was cooking Ukrainian all along.”
Oleksandr Naselenko assisted in reporting this story.
