Aubergine caviar, post-Soviet kebab kiosks: what Ukraine’s food culture taught me 30 years ago

The place names are now familiar for the worst reasons. Back then, when I learned to cook, it was a world of dumplings, borsch and compulsory third helpings

Thirty years ago, I spent the year I turned 21 in the former Soviet Union, starting in St Petersburg and ending up in Ukraine. I was studying Russian but most of my friends were Ukrainian. This was the time when the former USSR had recently started to call itself the Commonwealth of Independent States. Although Ukraine had been independent for three years, overt declarations of national identity were mostly buried beneath the surface. Until it came to food and drink.

Among my friends it was a matter of great importance as to whether you privileged borsch over shchi (beetroot soup v cabbage soup) or horilka over vodka (Ukrainian wheat-based vodka versus Russian potato-based vodka). The main thing that kept me going through one of the coldest Russian winters on record, however, was not the drink but the thought of a lazy hot summer in the south of Ukraine. It was the year I learned my way around a kitchen. And, by the time I got to Odesa (then Odessa) – with its famous meze dishes, such as aubergine caviar, its post-Soviet kebab kiosks and an endless supply of Eskimo ice-cream – it was the summer I really learned to eat.

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