Ukrainian and international home cooking recipes
Ukrainian cuisine is built on what a farming household could grow, store and stretch through a long winter: beets, cabbage, potatoes, wheat and buckwheat, sour cream and farmer’s cheese, mushrooms gathered in autumn, fruit put up in jars. The work was heavy, so the food is substantial — but it is not blunt. Almost every dish is finished with something sharp or sour: a spoonful of sour cream, brine from a pickle jar, dill and garlic crushed together, a splash of vinegar in the borscht pot.
Four names carry the whole cuisine abroad. Borscht (borshch) — the beet soup that UNESCO added to its list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding in 2022. Varenyky — boiled dumplings, savoury with potato and fried onion or sweet with cherries. Deruny — potato pancakes fried until the edges go lacy. Holubtsi — cabbage rolls braised in tomato. Almost everything else in this section sits around those four.
Regions differ more than outsiders expect. The west, long under Polish and Austrian rule, bakes more and uses more smoked meat. The south borrowed Turkish and Crimean Tatar habits — peppers, aubergine, lamb. The centre and the Poltava region are the heartland of the dishes most people mean by “Ukrainian”: halushky, solozhenyk, thick soups eaten with black bread and salo.
Two calendars shape the cooking. One is the preserving calendar: from July to October kitchens fill with jars — lecho, marinated mushrooms, salted tomatoes, borscht base ready for February. The other is the church calendar, which sets long fasting periods, so a large part of the repertoire is deliberately meatless and dairy-free, and Christmas Eve and Easter each have a fixed table of their own.
Below are the dishes worth starting with, grouped so you can find one instead of scrolling through pages. Quantities are given as they are written in Ukrainian kitchens, in grams and millilitres.
All 273 recipes in this section are listed below.
“Ayuks” earns its keep in the weeks when the garden buries you in zucchini and cucumbers and the freezer is already full. Nothing gets blanched: you grate, chop, and simmer everything together for a quarter of an hour. The quantities run large, into the kilograms, because this is a bulk-canning recipe from the start. The […]
The tongue-in-cheek name “Bachelor’s Dinner” says it all: this is a self-contained preserve you just open and reheat for a full meal. The vegetable-and-rice mixture of tomatoes, carrot, sweet pepper and garlic is filling enough to serve as both side dish and light lunch. The order of adding things matters. The carrot and onion go […]
“Cathedral” borscht is a vegetable-heavy version of the Ukrainian classic: eggplant and green beans join the usual beet and cabbage, and instead of the standard fried base, it’s finished with shpik — cured pork fatback, similar to unsmoked salt pork — pounded in a mortar with garlic. That garlicky lard paste, stirred in off the […]
“Chudesny” (Ukrainian for “wonderful”) is the archetypal pantry salad: four canned things plus crab sticks, tossed together in five minutes. Sweetish corn, tender beans, marinated button mushrooms, and crab sticks play off each other well enough that a big bowl never gets dull. The whole game is draining. Tip the corn, beans, and mushrooms into […]
“Obyedenie” (the name roughly means “scrumptious”) is a crunchy raw vegetable relish that’s ready in an hour, with no cooking or sterilizing at all. Cabbage, carrots, bell pepper, tomatoes, and tart-sweet apples marinate in a cold dressing of oil and vinegar, keeping their fresh flavor and bite. The grated tart apples are the clever touch: […]
This hearty preserve rests on a pairing you rarely see in canning: beets and green string beans. The beets bring a dense texture, earthy sweetness, and deep color; the young beans add snap — so the finished jar eats more like a dish of its own than a side. The recipe was shared by S. […]
The secret to these chicken rolls is marinating the lean breast in the syrup from canned peaches: the meat drinks up a gentle fruity sweetness and won’t dry out in the oven, while soaked prunes and crunchy walnuts hide inside each roll. It’s a shape-shifting appetizer, equally at home hot, chilled, or as a lightly […]
Don’t fuss over making this batter look neat – it comes together in a single bowl in a couple of minutes, and that speed is the whole point of a “guest at the door” pie. Grated carrot and coarsely grated tart apple hold moisture in the crumb, so it stays soft for several days instead […]
The name “Harlequin” is literal, not poetic: white cabbage, orange carrot, red tomatoes, green cucumbers and peppers go into the jar in layers, each vegetable visible through the glass. The one trick that sets this apart from an ordinary pickle is that the cabbage is cut into large chunks rather than shredded. Shredded cabbage would […]
A thick beet-and-tomato relish for the winter pantry, where the vegetables aren’t pickled but slowly stewed in boiling tomato until the mixture reduces to the density of a firm, spreadable caviar. Because beets make up the bulk, the finished relish takes on a deep burgundy color and a sweet-savory flavor, nicely offset by hot pepper […]