Food for thought: Olia Hercules

Olia Hercules is a lyrical storyteller; skilled in taking her readers on a culinary crusade through the flavour-packed region of Eastern Europe. Born in 1984, in the town of Kakhovka in southern Ukraine, she started her culinary career at the prestigious Leiths School of Food and Wine. She then worked as a chef de partie in restaurants – including Ottolenghi – before making her way as a recipe writer. Hercules has been the author of three successful cookbooks Mamushka, Kaukasis and Summer Kitchens. Through these books, she has taken an underrated cuisine – one largely misconstrued as revolving around potato-and-pickles – and made it à la mode.

Hercules spent her childhood picking green walnuts, smelling fresh bunches of dill, coriander and basil in her local market and getting her feet dirty in fallen gooseberries. It was as colourful a childhood as it was bleak; growing up against the backdrop of post-Soviet southern Ukraine was not going to be without its challenges. “ Aside from the cherry trees at my home and at my grandmother’s, the walk into town was not the prettiest”, Hercules recalls. “My town was full of little houses and big Soviet blocks. In Winter, it would look pretty grim but come Spring, nature would return, apricots would fall on your head, and the lanes would be full of flowers; sour cherries, peaches and mulberries – everything you can think of.”

As Hercules basks in the mid-March sun from her garden in North London, her eyes dilate as she remembers the kaleidoscopic springtime’s back in Ukraine: “By the end of May, you’d get your first cucumber. Mum would always chop it in the air, and I would love hearing the sound of it dropping into an enamel bowl – so prickly and little. The cucumber would be so sweet and so warm from the sun. The flavour was so pronounced and so fresh.”

As Hercules tells me this, it becomes increasingly apparent just how much seasonality and sunlight mean to her. Much of her childhood was spent in the dark, and Ukrainian winters often revolved around fermenting anything they could – pickles, sauerkraut to aubergine. She remembers how there were “constant power cuts” in her childhood, which often meant doing “homework by candlelight, snacking on sunflower pips that old babushkas would sell in newspaper cones.” She explains that how she saw the power cuts as an “adventure” and, owing to childhood, was blissfully unaware of how hard it must have been for her parents who were trying to stay safe amidst the political turmoil of the 90s: “It was a really weird period. There was lots of racketeering, there was the mafia, and there was immense corruption. It was all quite dangerous.”

The legacy of the Soviet Union in Ukraine partly inspired Hercules’ latest cookery book Summer Kitchens: Recipes and Reminiscences from Every Corner of Ukraine. “A lot of recipes were lost in Ukraine due to the Soviet Union’s standardisation policy”, she tells me. “You only had a fixed number of dishes: A simplified Ukrainian Borscht, Russian Pelmeni and Uzbek Plov. The same recipe was used all over the Soviet Union’s canteens to unite people.”

Yet, in fostering a sense of culinary collectivism, regional culinary traditions were suppressed and lost to the wind. Knowing this, Hercules travelled around the country in the hunt for forgotten regional dishes: “I would ask families, what did your mum/grandmother/great-grandmother cook that you don’t anymore?”. She explains how – contrary to opinion – there is huge culinary diversity in Ukraine. “In the North, you have a lot of forests, so there is mainly earthy-flavours. Down South, where I was, there is a lot of fish and vegetables. Closer to Romania, you have a lot of Italian-esque dishes.” As Hercules hoped for, Summer Kitchens is incredibly diverse in taste and flavour, including a whole host of recipes from: Borsch with duck and smoked pears, pot-roast chicken with herb crème fraiche to poppyseed babka.

Hercules’s first cookbook Mamushka, has been her biggest success yet. “It was translated into seven languages”, she says quietly. “It did quite well for a niche cuisine book.” Hercules is being humble; the book was a hit-success and sold over 100,000 copies. The book features 100 recipes she grew up with and draws on her mother, aunts, and grandmothers’ culinary secrets. With the help of her own mamushka, she wound in nostalgic stories of her childhood to each recipe, making the book as personal as it is palatable. The result was a celebration of the food, flavour and heritage of Eastern Europe, including recipes with everything from: Moldovan giant cheese twist to garlicky Georgian poussins with spicy plum chutney to apricot & sour cherry pie.

When we got onto the matter of her last ever supper, Hercules was quick to respond: “For starter, I would have a chicken broth – one like my mother made. She would boil chickens who have had a long life, which means the meat is tough but flavourful. She would then make it with a batter – egg and flour – and drop it into the broth, so you get nice little dumplings”, she salivates. “For my main, I would have a massive bowl of varenki; My mum would roll the dough very thin, fill it with salted fresh cheese, mix it with egg yolk and lots of salt. Served with lots of butter and crème fraîche”. “For my pudding, I’d have a Napoleon cake with pistachio pastry cream – it’s been the year of the cake!” she exclaims. Hercules then picked a “burgundy white” to wash it all down. “Ooo!” she adds. “Can I also throw in a bowl of pickles?”

Olia Hercules has single-handedly destroyed the stereotype that Eastern European cuisine is all-borscht and no-bite. Her three cookbooks prove that the cuisine is not just chunky soups, smoked sausage and boiled potatoes, but it is instead a cornucopia of flavour. Hercules has an effervescent charm, and her lyrical passion for pan-eastern food has propelled her into a success she rightly deserves. She tells me there is a project in the pipeline but is sworn to secrecy. I hope it’s a restaurant, a sanctuary for people to eat and honour a cuisine that has been stolen, suppressed, and stereotyped, but now, can finally be celebrated.

Olia’s cookbooks are available to buy here, here and here.

Chicken broth with easy dumplings 

Ingredients

1 bay leaf
A few poultry necks, gizzards, hearts (but not liver)
1 geriatric chicken, left whole
2 onions
1 tbsp butter
1 carrot
1 large potato, skin on, diced
1 large egg
50g plain flour

Method

Peel one of the onions, but leave one of the whole. Dice the other one as small as you can.

Put the chicken and the gizzards, plus the whole onion, one bay leaf into a medium saucepan, add 2L of cold water. Bring to the boil.

Lower the heat and simmer for about an hour. The chicken should be falling off the bone unless your chicken is geriatric – then it will be pretty tough still but will impart the most wonderful flavour.

Grate a carrot on a rough side of the grater. Add this to the onion and cook for a while. When the onion and carrots are soft and a little caramelised, add them to the broth. Your broth will turn a beautiful golden colour. At this stage, you can cook the broth for about 10 minutes and then use it as a base for any other soup in this book. It freezes very well once you cool it.

Add the potatoes too and cook them until they can easily be pierced with a knife – about 10 minutes. We never really had the distinction between potatoes, so sometimes they would be floury, and sometimes they would be waxy! Whatever you use will be fine.

At this point, you can add more vegetables if you like – chopped celery or celeriac, bits of fennel or parsnip, but I do like this Spartan version.

To make little spoonable dumplings, mix 1 egg and 50g flour and a generous pinch of sea salt together. It will look like thick but ‘droppable’ batter. If it is too thick, add a little bit of water.

Using a soup spoon, drop tablespoonfuls of the dumplings into the boiling broth.

Depending on the size, they should take about 5 minutes to cook. You can always fish one of the bigger ones out and cut it – if it doesn’t have any white, dry flecks of flour inside – you are good to go!

Serve with plenty of herbs, I like dill, but almost any soft herb or a combination of soft herbs will add a lovely flavour and colour to the broth.