Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine & beyond

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Having spent time in Eastern Europe/ Balkans, the influences are easy to spot - in which direction might be putting my head above the parapet. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I really shouldn’t have been surprised, as the Soviet Union was much bigger than Western Europe, and France (or Italy) alone have so many traditional foods specific to tiny regions. If you are curious and want to discover something new and learn more about Ukraine, I highly recommend this book. If there is a lot of fat, skim some of it off, then add the water, season the meat well with salt and pepper and cook over the lowest heat possible, covered tightly, for 2 hours or until tender and you can easily pull the meat off the bones.

I’d probably sub halibut or sea bass next time, my catfish wasn’t great but I wanted to be authentic to the recipe and culture. It takes some time to make and chop but it made plenty for two meals plus at least one more serving in refrigerator. It is a beautiful book to begin with; there is at least one picture to accompany each recipe plus pictures of Olia Hercules and her family in Ukraine. I suspected without weights for the ingredients especially the salt and water that this recipe would fail.This book is an ode to all those women (and men) that I was raised by and grew up with, and the food they lovingly prepared. I live in France so I cannot talk about the rest of the world but most ingredients are pretty common and quite easy to find. Serve the poussins drizzled with the herby juices, or mop the juices up with bread, along with the tkhemali. It was still amazing and well worth the work of chopping, grating and matchsticking all the veggies. Lightly beat the eggs in a bowl, then slowly sift in and mix in the flour – just enough to create a firm dough.

I did not find they were necessary and the soup was delicious, satisfying and quite filling without them. Finally, I used the beef short ribs, but they were pretty fatty and wouldn't be my choice next time.

She worked as a reporter for Screen International before her interest in food as an amateur reached its apogee and she decided to retrain to be a chef at Leith's School of Food and Wine.

Place the parcels on top of the sauce, folded side down, tucking them next to each other snugly so they don’t unravel.Mix the cinnamon with the apples, then tip the apples into the prepared cake tin and pour the cake batter evenly over the apples.

The first time I made it I used the dough hook and it was a bit too dry and quite difficult to combine. And I did start making sorrel soup after going to Poland and having soup there (although a vegetarian based broth with kasha/buckwheat groats used to enrich the soup). It was probably not the safest option and I now use my granite mortar, but a couple of food tins should also do the job. Add the red pepper and tomato purée to the onion and carrot and cook it out for 2 minutes, then add the grated fresh tomato, stir and reduce slightly before adding all of this to the broth.

It was made worse by the fact that Russia was also playing, and many of my cookbooks did not differentiate between Russian and Ukrainian food (or that of any other ex-Soviet country).