Olia Hercules’s Mamushka is a celebration of the food from her birthplace of Ukraine and beyond: from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Uzbekistan. It’s also a celebration of the resilient, inspiring women – the mamushkas – in her large, tight knitfamily.
Many of the recipes come from Hercules’s maternal grandmother, a mother of six. “That mamushka was strong,” she says. “She’d take my mum, and go to St Petersburg on the train, which would take about a day and a half from the south of Ukraine, and she would sell her apricots at markets. Suitcases full of these ripe apricots that probably filled the whole train with this amazing fragrance. She’d sell them, then buy my mum a little coat.”
The 30-year-old Hercules grew up in Kakhovka, a port city on the river Dnieper in southern Ukraine. Her father is an engineer and entrepreneur who started off by making plastic shoes and toys in his garage and later had a sunflower oil factory, and her mother runs a small B&B. It’s a rural area that is, she says, connected to the land. Summers were spent outdoors with “all the cousins, all the second cousins, all the aunties”. Food is an integral part of these memories: as well as apricots, the family had peach and mulberry trees, raspberry bushes and peas. When they visit now, Hercules’s three-year-old son, Sasha, loves to run to his grandma’s cucumber patch, pick one – “all prickly and warm” – and eat it.
The book is filled with colourful recipes that bring those warm summers to mind, including a dill-flecked radish and tomato salad that Hercules’s mum would make with the first crop of cucumbers. It shows the wide range of influences on the food she grew up eating. Yes, there are borshch and dumplings – but there are also Korean pickled carrots (a variation on kimchi invented by the large population of Korean immigrants in Russia), a giant cheese twist often made by Hercules’s two half-Moldovan grandmothers, and a Russian millefeuille.
There’s a British influence as well. After five years in Cyprus – a move provoked by her bad asthma – Hercules came to the UK to take a BA in Italian and international relations, followed by an MA in English and Russian translation and Russian culture. She worked as a reporter at Screen International before deciding to retrain at Leith’s School of Food and Wine, after which she tested her mettle as a chef at Ottolenghi in Islington. She now works as a food stylist and writer, and after living here for 13 years, “using a few English ingredients in some of my Ukrainian food makes sense. Black treacle and Georgian plums. Why not?”
I get to try the Georgian-British chutney at the north London flat where she lives with her son, along with garlicky chicken, pressed down in the pan with a chopping board and a pestle and mortar (a safer option than the circus dumbbell her mum occasionally used). It is delicious: rich and nourishing but not too heavy, a difficult combination to balance.
It was a gift from her aunt Nina, a copy of The National Cuisines of our People by Russian historian William Pokhlebkin,(“the Alan Davidson of Soviet cuisine”) that inspired Hercules to start collecting her family’s recipes. She admits that it’s been hard to enjoy the success of the last year with the uncertainty over Ukraine: at the time she signed up to write her book, Crimea – close to her where her parents and her brother’s family live – was being annexed. But she hopes the book will show that “despite everything, people are still growing their stuff, and smiling and trying to make do”.
We talk about the preconceptions of eastern European food, and why it isn’t better represented. Soviet-era restaurant food, she says, has a lot to answer for. The state had another effect too: “I think the Soviet Union gave us this big inferiority complex. We’d just never think the food was special enough. But it’s amazing. All of the Georgian and Armenian and Uzbekistani stuff takes the best from Turkey, Iran and eastern Europe; it’s just a great fusion. A little bit of Ukrainian borshch, a little bit of Soviet Korean, Georgian – it all makes a great meal.
