RECIPES AND FOOD STYLING OLIA HERCULES PHOTOGRAPHS ELENA HEATHERWICK
OLIA HERCULES
Food writer in residence No 3
I’m often asked whether I was taught to cook by my mother or grandmother. They are the best cooks I know and they influence my cooking and writing so much now, but the truth is, I wasn’t interested in cooking when I was younger. I only started cooking, even obsessing over cooking, here in the UK when I was in my early 20s.
I remember the first cake I attempted, a Genoese-type sponge that my mum called ‘biskvit’, which I missed enormously. I called my Italian friend Gabriella (an amazing cook) into my kitchen and presented her with something that looked like a flan at best, or like a pancake at worst. I clearly did not whisk hard enough. We laughed and we cried, and she promised to guide me the next time.
That same year (I must have just turned 20), feeling particularly homesick, I tried to make a Central Asian dish my Siberian gran used to make called ‘beshbarmak’ – layers of pasta sheets, poached chicken and onions slow-cooked in chicken fat. Being a poor student, I bought everything from the supermarket. The dish tasted awful.
I didn’t understand why it went so wrong, why it didn’t taste as I remembered it; my cooking was much better by then – even the pasta would turn out fine.
Only later did I realise that food and our memory of it goes beyond a recipe. It’s about the people you eat it with; it’s about feeling happy, protected, care-free – everything that a child should feel. But often it’s also about the quality of the ingredients, which are superb where I come from. We grew some of our own produce, we made our own curd cheese and we only ever ate chickens that ran around outside. They were tough and old, but so flavoursome.
That supermarket chicken put me off cooking the food that I grew up with for a long time. I thought that it could never be the same; the produce was different, not good enough. Then, rather belatedly, I reconnected to my heritage and to why what we ate in Ukraine tasted so good: the produce was local, organic and always seasonal, and the food was diverse and distinctly regional. It’s an enormous country – even without Crimea it is bigger than France.
Indeed, Ukraine used to be part of a bigger melting pot. The only positive things that came out of being bound together by the failure that was the Soviet Union were the connections that people managed to make. My grandmother left Siberia for Uzbekistan and met my Ukrainian grandfather on the way. His brother married an Armenian woman, but for a long time they lived in Azerbaijan. Recipes travelled around this behemoth of a country and what a treasure trove of dishes and stories it was. Why did it take me so long for me to realise all this?
I’m often asked another question: what or who inspires your cooking now? I wish I had a more cerebral answer, but normally it’s simple: ingredients and people. Not fancy ingredients, not professional chefs. It can be as simple as an amazing bunch of herbs in late summer and a good apple in autumn.
I’m inspired by excellent home cooks who are connected to their roots and who instinctively understand what makes a good dish. There are so many of them: in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Wales, in every country. Find them; they may be closer than you think. They may save you from unnecessary tears over deflated cakes and flavourless chicken. They might even help you reconnect with something you are clearly missing.
Olia has written two cookbooks, the second of which, Kaukasis, came out last month