Bite-size Stories

Italians grew up with ai frutti di mare ; the French with boeuf bourguignon . My Iron Curtain childhood is personified by Herring in a Fur Coat — a pickled herring dressed in seven layers of pungent veggie swagger. Nothing captures the kitsch of Soviet life — the outrageously tacky, overdone aesthetic — better than this playful dish. Its taste and colour stood in stark contradiction to the drabness of daily life. Naively optimistic, desperate to inject brightness into the shadeless Soviet grey, people served this magenta salad as the centrepiece of any gathering or celebration. The Empire may be gone, but this souvenir from the Motherland endures. From communal flats in Kyiv and Moscow to New York, Melbourne, and Monte Carlo — where the people go, Herring in a Fur Coat goes too. It doesn't sound promising. Pickled herring layered with onion and dill beneath grated beetroot, potato, carrot, egg, and homemade mayonnaise shouldn't work. Yet somehow it does. It's earthy, salty,...

These small, sweet pancakes were my favorite growing up. I remember whole apple slices being browned in the still-sizzling pan. Fond memories of the place where I grew up, in the country that doesn't exist.  I often think I have two lives. My first twenty years spent on steep hills above Dnepr. Heavy chestnut tree blossoms and heady lilac flood the streets as you climb back up from the river. Kiev. The next twenty-five are coming to an end in sunburned, windswept Melbourne.  One day, there will be a pen, sharp and witty, factual and insightful, that will tell the whole story. Chaotic, intense, and often agonizing times that pushed a whole generation away from home.  And I, for now, just keep my food memories to connect what I had been with what I have become.