In a war, there are many different fronts, and many different forms of resistance. Ievgen Klopotenko, a Ukrainian chef, is fighting his war with soup.
In defiance of the Russian cruise missile and drone attacks that have hit Kyiv recently, Klopotenko, 35, was last week presiding over his bustling city centre restaurant. On the menu were dishes such as beetroot and herring salad with smoked pear from the Odesa region, venison from the Carpathians, and a dessert named “Kherson is Ukraine”.
Alongside a citrus semifreddo, the pudding included watermelon he had bought last season in Kherson and fermented. The region, which Vladimir Putin claimed to have annexed last month but is now the site of fierce fighting, is famous for the fruit.
And, of course, Klopotenko was serving borscht. In this case, with a touch of plum jam to balance out the sourness of the beetroot. For a hint of smokiness, it had been cooked slow and low in a wood-fired oven, as if “under a duvet”.
He insists it is a Ukrainian dish rather than a Russian one. Like many aspects of Ukrainian culture, it was absorbed and appropriated by the Soviet Union during the 20th century, he argued.
Not everyone agrees. In 2019, a Russian government account tweeted that the beetroot-based soup was “one of Russia’s most famous & beloved dishes”, while the Russian embassy in Washington said borscht was a national dish of many countries, including Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Moldova and Romania.
In retaliation, Klopotenko spearheaded a move to persuade Unesco to inscribe Ukrainian borscht on its list of intangible world heritage assets.
Despite a Russian foreign ministry spokesperson denouncing Ukrainian’s failure to “share” borscht as “xenophobia, extremism and nazism” in April this year, Klopotenko’s attempt was successful. Ukrainian borscht was fast-tracked on to the Unesco list in July. (“Borscht cooking is also practised in communities in the broader region,” the official inscription states, diplomatically.)
“It’s my frontline and I think I won,” said Klopotenko.
In truth, though, that was just a battle. His longer-term war is to rediscover and revive traditional Ukrainian recipes and ingredients – in turn contributing, he hopes, to the Ukrainian people’s renewed sense of identity. “If we eat Ukrainian food then we will become Ukrainian,” he said.
About eight years ago it dawned on him that the only traditional Ukrainian dishes most people could name were borscht and varenyky – dumplings stuffed with potatoes, meat or sometimes cherries. What was actually being eaten was “Russian, Russian or Russian – or actually, Soviet Union food”, he said. “Potato puree, cutlets, pickled vegetables.”
The key note of Soviet food was blandness, he said. Until recently, for example, Ukraine’s Soviet-era guidelines for school dinners still explicitly excluded spices and herbs, with the sole exception of pepper. But in 2018, in a Jamie-Oliver-style effort at change, Klopotenko introduced dishes such as shepherd’s pie, curry and macaroni cheese to school menus.
Not Ukrainian dishes, to be sure, but nutritious meals that were also, in their small way, a geopolitical statement. “When you are open to the world, you’ll be part of the world,” he said. “If you are not afraid of oregano, you will not be afraid of Greece and Italy.”
To rehabilitate Ukrainian food, Klopotenko turned detective, delving back into the country’s pre-Soviet past. (The name of his restaurant, 100 Rokiv Tomu Vpered, or 100 Years Back to the Future, refers to this dive into culinary history.)
He started with books. As we talked, surrounded by diners tucking into galushki – dumplings with meat and cherries from the Poltava region – he dumped a trio of volumes on the table.
The first was a poem by the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. His Eneïda, published in sections from 1798, is a jokey reworking of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid – with Cossacks instead of Trojans. “The characters do a lot of fighting and drinking and eating,” said Klopotenko. About 150 dishes are mentioned by name, “only two or three of which are eaten now”.
Still, that gave him the conviction that at one time Ukrainian cuisine had been rich and various. The second work was Practical Kitchen, Ukraine’s first cookery book, published in 1929. The author was Olha Franko, the daughter-in-law of the prolific writer and translator Ivan Franko, a towering figure in Ukrainian literary history. She offered recipes for a handful of the dishes mentioned by Kotliarevsky.
The third was a volume published in 1913 called Food and Drink of Ukraine. It is ascribed to a figure called Zinaida Klynovetska, now thought to be a pseudonym for writers assembling Ukrainian recipes facing the threat of persecution for nationalism under the Russian empire.
Klopotenko then took research trips around the country, learning about surviving regional food traditions in regions from the Carpathian mountains to Odesa, as well as investigating Tatar food from Crimea which, he insisted, was part of Ukraine. Russia’s annexation of the region in 2014 remains unrecognised by most UN countries.
It is highly refined versions of some of these recipes, using ingredients from Ukraine’s rich agricultural lands, that he serves in his restaurant.
Since the invasion he has also been running a canteen for refugees and volunteers in Lviv, in western Ukraine, and posting dozens of recipe videos online – giving people “an opportunity not to think about the war” while learning to cook Ukrainian.
“I understood that I had to fight on this frontline – this cultural frontline,” he said.
And then there is the unifying power of soup. Each Ukrainian family had its own, slightly different recipe, he said. “But it’s still borscht. Just like us Ukrainians – we are all so free and so different.”
He added: “The only thing this country unites around is borscht. You can like [President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy or not, but no one in Ukraine would say: ‘I don’t like borscht.’”
