I think the most non-Ukrainian thing about me and my pure Ukrainian heritage on both sides is my food preferences. My mother always said I should have been Italian because as a kid, I loved pasta and pizza, and as an adult, continue to favour these dishes over others.
I remember going over to my grandmother's house as a child for Ukrainian Christmas where she had prepared the traditional 12-course meal. I, of course, would not eat any of it and had spaghetti instead, hold the sauce.
To this day, I am still not too keen on these dishes. It has only been recently that I have begun to really enjoy other Ukrainian food from perogies to deruny (potato pancakes) and certain kinds of nalysnyky or mlyntsi (crepes with various filling).
I think a lot of my trauma revolving around Ukrainian food stems from the Ukrainian camp I went to every summer as a child. Don't get me wrong, the camp itself is among my greatest childhood memories, but the food served by the women from Ukraine certainly was not.
As a very picky eater, spoiled by my mother who would make me special meals, camp food was hard to get used to. An already thin child, I would always come home even thinner. Even foods I loved like pasta, pizza and hot dogs, were not the way mom made them. The spaghetti was always overcooked, the pizza had weird toppings on it, and the hot dogs were rubbery.
But the worst day, food-wise, was no-meat Fridays. Dinner was always perogies, borscht and rye bread- none of which I could stomach back then. Perogies, along with mashed potatoes, always gave me the sensation of vomiting, rye bread was far too different from the bleached white bread I favoured, and borscht- there was no way I would even consider eating it.
Sometimes the counsellors would feel sorry for me and find me some vegetables from the back, carrots only though, I wouldn't touch anything else. Other times, I would have to resort to my secret candy stash I hid in the pouch for my stuffed rabbit's stuffing, a crime punishable by missing swimming time.
I slowly got over my fear of borscht, mostly after being forced to eat it out of politeness over the years, and this past summer in Ukraine, out of hunger. And last week, I decided it was time to channel my inner Ukrainian housewife and make some borscht for Ukrainian Christmas.
There are so many different variations of borscht, and versions I have tried over the years. I decided to use my Teta (aunt) Oksana's recipe. It's pretty straightforward, but being the disaster in the kitchen that I am and as my readers know me to be, something obviously went wrong.
The beets need to be shredded down so in the absence of a food processor, I borrowed a blender and vegetable hand chopper from a friend. Despite my mother's warning that I wouldn't be able to shred beets without a food processor, I was determined to make it work with what I had.
Well, even after chopping the beets into small pieces, they jammed the hand chopper and caused smoke to emerge from the blender. So I resorted to grating them with a hand-sized cheese grater. It was very painful and splattered all over the kitchen and my reindeer pyjamas, but I remembered my ancestors in Ukrainian villages wouldn't have even had cheese graters or a dishwasher to clean the mess afterwards. I forged on, imagining the huge bicep I would wake up to the next morning. After that it was pretty smooth sailing.
My Nouvelle taste-testers seemed pretty impressed the next day. I suppose I may have scared a few of them when I cautioned them to look out for any bone pieces I might have missed from the pork chop broth. Perhaps this was an unnecessary warning, but I figured it could spare me from legal recourse if someone choked on a bone.
Maybe next year for Ukrainian Christmas I'll make another traditional course in addition to borscht, and in 11 years I'll make all 12. Hrystos Razdaeytsya!
Teta Oksana's borscht
What you'll need:
- 2 pork chops or ribs
- 4-5 beets
-green cabbage
-1 onion
-2 carrots
-1-2 cloves of garlic
-3-4 celery stalks
- 1 bay leaf
-4 cups tomato juice
-parsley
-dill
-salt and pepper
Directions:
1. Boil 10 cups of water with pork chops or ribs. Simmer and skim for 30 minutes
2. Dice beets in food processors. Chop onion, garlic, celery and carrots. Shred cabbage. Add to pot and simmer for 15 minutes until beets whiten.
3. Pour in tomato juice
4. Add bay leaf, parsley, dill and salt and pepper. Simmer for another hour and 15 minutes.
