Act of Resistance
Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules talks about how food can connect everyone – regardless of where you’re from.
For Olia Hercules, cooking is normally her therapy, her safe space – but she lost this when Russia invaded her native country, Ukraine.
“For the first two months or so, I couldn’t really cook – it was a weird feeling,” the 38-year-old remembers. “Normally it’s an act of meditation and stress relief. If it’s a normal, everyday stress, I cook – especially if I make something a bit more involved, like dough, breadmaking, dumplings – something like that, it’s amazing.
“But when you’re going through trauma, it was completely different. I felt guilty eating at first, then I felt guilty cooking. It was a horrible feeling, and I couldn’t shake it off.”
She eventually felt differently while making her parents a meal in Italy after they fled Ukraine. “That’s when it lifted, and I was like yes, I’ve got it back. I’m enjoying making this borscht for them, I know it’s going to do so much good.”
Now, Hercules says she realises cooking is “an act of resistance and defiance, and not letting Putin and his goons take all the joy away from us – because that’s what they’re trying to do”.
Recently, after some particularly bad news about the war, Hercules regressed to those feelings – but her mother brought her back to herself. “She said, ‘This is what he’s [Vladimir Putin] trying to do. Don’t let him do this – this is how we’re going to lose if we’re going to be paralysed by fear all the time and stop living.’ So we can’t stop living – and food is life.”
Now, Hercules is learning to take better care of herself, whether that’s returning to cooking, booking herself into an embroidery course, or writing. She also set up the Cook for Ukraine campaign with friend and food writer Alissa Timoshkina, as a way of raising awareness.
“At first we thought, OK, this is going to be a hashtag, and maybe we’ll think of something – a donation situation,” she says. “We were like, it’s good enough to just do a hashtag, cook a Ukrainian meal, and educate people and keep Ukraine in the news, keep talking about it – and also this thing of connection.”
For anybody who makes a Ukrainian dish, Hercules suggests: “It’s much easier for them to imagine a family that would have been having this dish somewhere in Ukraine – and now they can’t do that anymore. The headlines are there, and with time it’s only natural for people to start disassociating, and being like, OK, I need to preserve my sanity, I can’t look at this horror all the time.
“But having something cultural – especially something to do with food – keeps you connected, and also gives you strength in a way.”
The campaign’s success exceeded Hercules’ expectations, and as well as raising awareness around the situation in Ukraine, it’s also a window into the country’s unique cuisine.
She accepts there are preconceptions about Ukrainian food. “People have said it is all about potatoes and dumplings and overcooked cabbage, which was actually really hurtful. But stereotypes are stereotypes – I don’t blame people for having them.”
Instead, she wants people to know the cuisine is so much more than that – it’s “diverse, and can be fresh and herbaceous”.
Now though, Hercules doesn’t feel like she has to convince everyone that Ukraine is a rich and diverse country. It is – but she also says: “It’s time to embrace all of our potato and cabbage dishes, because they’re actually extremely delicious.”
She has one of these potato dishes in her latest cookbook, Home Food. A staple growing up, the recipe for crispy potatoes and onions is “something everybody could do – students do it – and the perfection of this dish is because you cut the potatoes in an imperfect way. [Even if] you’re striving to do really thin slices, inevitably some will be thicker than others – and that’s what you want, that’s what makes it so good. Because some of the potatoes become more crispy, and some become soft.”
Hercules rediscovered the recipe during the start of the pandemic, asking her mum about it (who, by the way, didn’t think it even counted as a recipe) – and now it’s well and truly back in her repertoire.
Through writing her new book, Hercules realised how much food can connect people – regardless of where you come from. She reflects on her time in Italy (she spent a year there during university as part of an exchange program), saying: “When I lived in Italy, I immediately connected to my fellow students” through food.
In her halls of residence, “We became friends with loads of Italian students living there – they were from all over, especially from the south of Italy. A few of them used to receive parcels from their families – one of the boys’ papa was a butcher, so he’d receive hunks of amazing cuts of meat and jars with what they call ‘sugo de la mama’ – like tomato sauce, either with meatballs or whatever. And we’d all benefit from it, because it’s so delicious.
This immediately transported Hercules back in time, to when her older brother went to university in Odessa when she was 12. “I remember my mum packing these big boxes, and once she even packed a whole roasted duck into the box, and you’d go to the bus station, and you’d pay someone to take the box on the bus, and then he’d receive it on the other end.”
When she first arrived in Italy, Hercules admits her grasp of the language was rudimentary – but she managed to communicate this story to her new friends, and find common ground.
“[Food] breaks barriers, and immediately makes you feel closer,” she reflects. “I think the book has become that in many ways, reflecting through cultures. I realised food and humour have been the two ways for me, in each culture I experienced or tried to assimilate into – as soon as there was some kind of a connection in what we ate, and as soon as I understood the humour in another language, I was like OK, this is it. I feel at home now.”
Home Food: Recipes To Comfort And Connect by Olia Hercules is published by Bloomsbury Publishing. Photography by Joe Woodhouse. Available now.
Lamb shoulder with herbs and preserved lemons recipe
This is Olia’s go-to meal for dinner parties.
“The marinade ingredients might sound fusion-y and improbable, but they work so well,” she says. “When you pull the lamb and mix it through the marinade juices, it’s just incredible. This recipe is fantastic for using up tired, soft fridge-forgotten herbs: feel free to use any, such as parsley, chives and basil.
“Serve it with any grain, too – I like couscous or freekeh – but any slightly plain carb that can soak up the sauce is good: rice, boiled and crushed potatoes, flatbreads… You name it. Lamb shanks or pork or beef ribs will also work here if you want something smaller or cheaper than a lamb shoulder!”
Ingredients:
(Serves 6-8)
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1tbsp soy sauce
½tbsp honey
15g finely grated ginger (I don’t bother peeling it, but that’s up to you)
1½tsp ground coriander seeds
1½tsp ground cumin seeds
Leaves from ½ small bunch of mint
Leaves from ½ small bunch of tarragon
½ small bunch of dill, leaves and stalks
½ small bunch of coriander, leaves and stalks
1tbsp olive oil
1 preserved lemon, chopped
1 shoulder of lamb (2kg), or 4 lamb shanks
Sea salt
Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 200°C fan. Put all the ingredients (bar a handful of soft herbs and the lamb) into a food processor, add half a teaspoon of salt and blitz them up into a paste. Cover the lamb with it. If you can leave it in the marinade overnight, all the better, but if you don’t have time, it is ready to be baked straight away.
2. Put the lamb and marinade into a cast-iron pan and cover it with a lid. Otherwise, especially if you are using a shoulder, you can also use a roasting tin and cover it tightly with a foil tent (just use two large pieces of foil and tent them over the meat without touching it). Cook for 30 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 160°C fan and cook for another two hours. Then lift the lid or foil off and have a look. The meat should be soft and coming away from the bone. If it is not quite there, cover it again and put it back in for another 30 minutes. Be careful not to dry out the lamb and keep checking, as a shoulder can take up to three-and-a-half hours.
3. Take the lamb out of the oven, cover and rest in its juices for at least 20 minutes.
4. Pull the meat off the bone, discard the bones and large bits of fat, roughly shred larger pieces, then return to the tin. Taste, it may need a light sprinkling of salt.
5. If the lamb has been resting a while, you can pop it and the juices in the roasting tin under a hot grill to warm through and crisp up the meat on top.
6. Of course you can shred the lamb and mix it with the juices up to a day before and keep in the fridge, then just reheat in a lidded pan with a splash of water mixed in, or in a foil baking tray, before serving. Serve with any plain grain you fancy, or even crushed boiled potatoes, sprinkling over the reserved herbs.
Pasta with confit garlic, goat’s cheese and thyme recipe
“I don’t normally find much pleasure in cooking for just me. Except when it’s this dish,” says Olia. “This is adapted from an old Nigel Slater recipe, a writer who inspired me and so many others to look beyond cookbook recipes and to cook more freely and creatively. I turn to this recipe time and again when I have some moments on my own.”
She always serves lettuce leaves on the side, to mop up the pasta sauce with a bit of crunch.
Ingredients:
(Serves 2)
2 small garlic bulbs (yes, that’s correct, 1 per person)
100ml good olive oil
Leaves from 4 thyme sprigs
200g spaghetti or linguine
200g soft goat’s cheese (logs are good)
To serve:
Lettuce leaves
Good vinegar
Sea salt
Method:
1. I haven’t yet found a garlic peeling hack that works. What I do is separate the cloves, then attempt to lightly bash on each with the heel of my hand and cut off the dry root end. The skins then slip off quite easily. If you accidentally squash some (or a lot, like I do, heavy-handedly) of the cloves, don’t worry too much, they can still be used. Put the oil into the smallest saucepan or frying pan you have, heat it gently and spoon in the garlic. The cloves should be submerged in oil and cook very gently over the lowest heat possible.
Sometimes I tilt the pan carefully, helping the cloves to submerge, and stand there holding the pan. But you can always use more oil. It won’t go to waste, as the garlicky oil is so good in other recipes, or to dress boiled vegetables. The garlic will be spluttering away, its water escaping the oil. It has to soften, mellow and colour only ever so slightly. The whole process should take about 20 minutes, but use your judgement. When ready, the garlic will smell very sweet and the cloves can be easily pierced with a knife. Take it off the heat and add the thyme.
2. Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions. Put the goat’s cheese into a food processor. When there are three minutes to go before the pasta is done, ladle 200 millilitres of the pasta water into a measuring jug. Blitz the goat’s cheese with half of the measured pasta water and two to three tablespoons of the garlic oil. You will have a smooth and rather liquid sauce, but do not worry, it will all be good. (If it is not quite liquid, I find the pasta eats too dry.)
3. Drain the pasta and put it back into the pan in which it was cooking. Pour the sauce over the pasta and, using tongs, pick the pasta up and down, making sure to cover the pasta in the sauce. Keep agitating it like this for a minute. At this point I take a mouthful and check if it slips down smoothly. If it feels a bit dry rather than slippery, I add another splash of pasta water and swirl it around with tongs some more.
4. Put the pasta into serving plates and pour over any goat’s cheese sauce that remained behind in the pan. Serve with the confit garlic cloves scattered over the top and a drizzle of the garlic oil.
5. When you finish the pasta, pile the lettuce leaves directly into the pasta plate and add a little vinegar and salt. The remainder of the goat’s cheese sauce is so good with the leaves.
Brown butter, miso and walnut cake recipe
“At the beginning of 2020, I gave myself permission to have as much cake as I wanted to eat, and I have never regretted that decision,” says Olia.
This is one of the cakes she returned to time and time again. When making it yourself, She says: “Just be mindful of the potency of your miso: some are saltier than others, so try the recipe with less if you feel yours may be extra-flavourful and salty. I often use a reduced-salt version for this cake.”
Ingredients:
(Serves 9)
For the cake:
250g unsalted butter
30g reduced-salt miso paste
225g caster sugar
3 eggs
225g self-raising flour
50ml full-fat yogurt
40g broken walnuts
For the syrup:
50g white sugar
50ml water
20g reduced-salt miso paste
40g walnuts, chopped
Method:
1. A couple of hours before you bake, put the butter in a small pan and heat until it bubbles gently. Use a whisk to scrape the base and sides of the pan, so the milk solids don’t burn. From the moment all the butter melts it should take three to four minutes over a medium heat. Have a bowl ready, to tip the brown butter into when it is ready. It will start smelling like butterscotch, its colour changing from light gold to amber, and its bubbling sound will quieten. Pour it into the bowl.
2. Whisk the miso into the warm butter; you should have 225g of butter mix. Put it into a container and leave it to cool and firm up (stir it a couple of times while it sets, to re-emulsify). You want it to be soft, like room-temperature butter.
3. Preheat the oven to 170°C fan. Line a 20-centimetre square or round cake tin, or a 900-gram loaf tin, with baking parchment.
4. Put the cooled brown butter-miso mix in a mixing bowl, or the bowl of a food mixer, together with the sugar. Beat for five minutes with electric beaters or the food mixer at a high speed. (If you’re doing it by hand, beat it for a little longer.)
5. Beat the eggs one at a time into the mixture, scraping down the bowl in between each. Add the self-raising flour and fold it in carefully by hand with a spatula. I know this bit will feel weird – to add yogurt at the end, after the flour – but don’t worry. It works. So mix in the yogurt, again by hand. Spread the batter into the prepared tin, scatter the walnuts over, then push them into the batter slightly.
6. Bake for 40–50 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool.
7. While it is cooling, in a pan dissolve the sugar in the measured water. Take it off the heat, add the miso and whisk it all together. Add the chopped walnuts and put the pan back over the medium heat for a couple of minutes, stirring the whole time. Spread the syrup over the cake, let it cool slightly, then enjoy!