Easter Baskets in Kharkiv

Here in the United States, Easter baskets are most often filled with chocolate rabbits and jelly beans.  In Ukraine, the Easter baskets--and their contents--are an important part of Easter religious ceremonies, one of the most important holidays in the Christian year, but with traditions hearkening back to pre-Christian times.  The two years I spent in Ukraine at Easter time,  the entire week between Willow Sunday and Easter was enthusiastically filled with cleaning of houses and grounds,  general sprucing up, and often, the purchase of new Easter baskets. 

Although my Easter this year was spent at home here in the US, my friend Olga Chermaska shared photos from the morning worship service for children and the blessing of Easter baskets at the Ukrainian Orthodox church her family attends in Kharkiv.

She writes,

There is a tradition on Easter basket to put all the products that have been banned in the past [for Lent].  For example, sausage, Easter cakes, dairy products and eggs. The basket should be beautifully decorated. Eggs are usually painted in different colors. Each color means something green: eternal life, yellow - joy, red - the blood of Jesus, blue - water and sky.

I'm sure the church rang with the traditional greeting, Khyrstos Vostres!  Christ is Risen! In every basket, a paska, Easter bread, is traditionally included (although I have seen Easter baskets containing Coke and other modern foods as well).   Each region has its own special paska,  but here, thanks to Festive Ukrainian Cooking by Marta Pisetska,  is a recipe from the Chyhyryn in Cherkas'ka Oblast,  south of Kyiv.

Chyhyrynska Paska

1 1/2 cups cake flour

1 2/3 cups sugar

12 egg whites

1 1/2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp almond extract

1/4 tsp salt

powdered sugar

Line the bottom and sides of a 10 inch tube pan (or 2 tall cans, to be traditional) with buttered brown paper.  Sift flour and sugar separately, then sift flour with 1/2 cup sugar.  Beat egg whites with wire whip until foamy.  Add cream of tartar, fold in vanilla, almond extract, and salt.  Whip until glossy and stiff but not dry.  Gradually whip in remaining sugar, a little at a time.  Sift some of the flour-sugar mixture over egg whites, fold gently, and repeat until all flour is used.  Pour into prepared pan or cans and bake in preheated 350 degree oven.  Note:  the tube pan requires 45-50 minutes,  the cans about 30 minutes.  When done, hang pan upside down or invert cans for one hour until set.  Remove, place on platter and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

You can see a full set of photos here. Thanks again to Olga and her family for sharing these!

Boy’s Eye View

This post is the second in a series about the distinct Greek communities of Mariupol, a region and oblast in eastern Ukraine, near the Sea of Azoz. Special thanks to Yangnecheer family and Galina and Carrina.

Under bright blue skies, the fruit trees were flourishing with bright red cherries. As we ambled the lanes of the Greek village of Sartana, we admired the tidy, brightly colored houses, fence rows and thriving kitchen gardens we passed. Chatting idly with a friend in English, we heard a friendly little “hello” from behind a cloud of green leaves. Following this welcoming voice, we met the charming 11-year-old Vova. Vova lives in Sartana with his sister, Irina (21), her husband, Alexander (25), and their children, little Tatiana (1) and Varvara (2.5).

The family was hanging laundry in the patio, as we strolled by. Alexander told us that he is from a Greek family and has lived in Sartana his whole life. He said that, during the harvesting months, the family spends much of their summer tending the garden and preserving the food they grow for the winter months.

With a shy smile and generous nature, Vova, gave us a tour of their garden. They raise cucumbers, potatoes, beets, cabbages (two rotations), onions, squashes, eggplants, carrots and an array of herbs, including parsley, chervil (!) and dill.

Walnut and cherry trees line one end of the garden, the other flanked with bushes of raspberries, gooseberries and currents. Grapevines lace the fence between their patio and garden, where jars were set out for ongoing preservation of the summer’s bounty. Just the day before, the family had made raspberry jam and pickles.

As we explored the garden, Vova picked the perfect gooseberries, passing them to me to enjoy and occasionally popping one into his own mouth too. He described the progress of each vegetable in the garden, thoughtfully describing the desired growing conditions of each plant with impressive insight.

He expressed concern about the season’s meager harvest of apricots and apples. “Last year, people kept all the honey for themselves. So, this year, there are not so many bees. There are not enough to pollinate all the fruit trees.” “But” he said smiling, “this year has been pretty good for berries” he explained. “The raspberries are much sweeter than last year.”

Odessa is Odessa!

“Odessa is Odessa”   “Odessa is different.”  Those are the kinds of things I’ve heard from both other Ukranians and Odessans themselves.  The first time I visited Odessa, it was on April 1;  the day that entire city comes out to play, celebrating April Fools Day with funny hats, satirical floats and a general good time.  So I knew it was different.

And sure enough, just like our Kyiv and Donetsk conversations were different from each other, this one was also different. Because of Odessa’s history and its status as a major port, this city is home to dozens, if not hundreds, of different ethnicities and nationalities.  (For a great look at Odessa’s colorful history,  read Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King).

Hanna Shelest, head of the NGO PIC, our Odessan partner, had a particular interest in working with us to engage the different cultural groups in the city and reached out to Yaroslava Reznik, Head of the Department of National Minorities of Odessa Region State Administration.  And so our conversation here was held at the Bulgarian Cultural Center, one of several similar centers in the city. We reached the ornate meeting room by walking up past portraits of somber Bulgarians hung along the stairway,  but our conversation proved anything but somber.  

We were joined by representatives from many communities here in Odessa:  Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Byelorussians,  Moldovans,  Germans, Indians,  Armenians, and more.   It proved a great place to collect stories about the food that made memories for so many different people.

A German woman remembered her grandmother’s streusel cake,  while an Indian recalled his confusing arrival in Odessa as a teenager, when it was very hard to be a vegetarian in the city. But when a girlfriend made him stuffed peppers, he knew he could make a life here—and that he should marry her! One of the loveliest memories was shared by Yaroslava Reznik.When she was a child, her family lived just outside of town, in a small private house.  She told of a day the family ate varenyky. Not an unusual day, but just a day in the summer,  when the family ate outside, under the pear tree, and to this day, she still remembers the look of the bowl, dappled by the leaves of the tree, sparkling over her mother's handmade varenyky,  the beautiful sense of the day and the food.  Her description was so lovely I said, "you must be a poet,"  and with a shy smile Yaroslava said, "My parents were poets."

We talked a bit about the foods that are Odessan, which are the same foods that many Jewish Americans associate with their own family traditions—a fish like gefilte fish;  chopped liver, and more.  And the new foods also came into play, particularly as groups intermarried, and a new bride learned to make her husband’s favorite dish, while sharing her own traditions.

To me, one of the exchanges that symbolized the Pickle Project's efforts to do something different, to share our thoughts, ideas, beliefs and hopes by talking about food, came here in Odessa.  An ethnographer came with his students.  As he joined my small group,  he listened for a bit, and then spoke up to say that we were doing this all wrong, that it was not scientific!  As he explained exactly why it wasn’t scientific, I looked at the faces around me, who previously had been actively listening, laughing and sharing family stories—multiple generations, multiple ethnicities, multiple beliefs.  And their looks were polite, but with a bit of impatience and annoyance.

Ukraine is still a place where, in many situations, “experts” are revered.  And it was surprising—and a bit thrilling-- to watch these participants realize that they, not the ethnographer, were the “experts.”  That their stories, their perspectives, their beliefs, were the strength of the conversation.  No matter where you live, or where your family originated,  the ability to share your experiences through meaningful conversations with a larger circle is one small way in which civil societies are built.

So from the light coming through the pear trees to the stuffed peppers made by a girl in love,  Odessa’s conversation will always remind me of the powerful connections food can make, no matter where we're from.

Tea on a Summer Afternoon

We recently had the good fortune of spending the afternoon with my friend Nataliya’s family in Yanif. Located northwest of L’viv, Yanif (also called Ivano Frankove) sits at the edge of the Roztochya Forest Preserve and on the shores of a sizable lake historically known for the salty, smoked fish produced there.

From the marshrutka stop, we made our way through the village, along the dusty roads and winding alleys, past raggedy dogs and fenced yards filled with chicken coops, roses and potatoes to Nataliya’s grandparents house. Cheerful and generous, Pavlina and Volodymyr Litynski are are in their 70s and maintain an energetic and lively household.

They live in a simple house with a small but bountiful kitchen garden, a little greenhouse made of windows for growing tomatoes and a few fruit trees. It is there that I have learned much about Ukrainian food traditions. In addition to being industrious vegetable gardeners and orchard keepers, three generations of this family, including my friend Nataliya, her mother, Halya, and her grandfather, Volodymyr, are all foresters and are knowledgeable experts on native Ukrainian berries, mushrooms and wild herbs.

It was one of those clear, blue summer afternoons and we found Volodymyr sitting in the grass, sorting just-picked red currants. After surveying the various stages of vegetables and fruits in the garden, as we always do when I visit, Volodymyr carried the kitchen table out into the dappled shade of the yard, much the way my own grandparents would on a summer day.

Under the trees, we nibbled seernik, a light Ukrainian cheesecake, with fresh raspberries and sipped a refreshing herbal tea that Pavlina made. The tea was a local mélange of wild raspberry leaves, wild strawberry leaves, nettles, mint and the delicate fruits of basswood. (For the forestry geeks out there, they are technically nutlets with a thin leafy bract. We often see these marketed for tea in big Ukrainian city markets as well.) All of these were collected around Pavlina and Volodymyr’s garden and, then, hung and dried in the "shadow" of the trees. They store this mixture in a canister in their cool, dry pantry.

Despite the heat, we drank our tea hot and it provided that strange, cooling effect that warm and spicy foods produce. (Actually, I have always wondered about the physiological effects that spicy and hot foods precipitate. According to this 1999 Scientific American article, it has to do with the skin’s pain receptors, which can be stimulated by actual heat or by chemicals such as capsaicin, that simulate heat, to trigger a response from the nervous system.)

As we chatted and sipped, various neighbors passed through the yard, calling out greetings as they strolled by. Some carried borrowed garden tools, others bags of food or children. A few friends and cousins stopped to join us for a cup of tea, conversation and an idle moment during a busy season.

Special thanks to Pavlina and Volodymyr Litynski and Halya, Serhy and Nataliya Stryamets, as always, for their warm hospitality.