Olia Hercules’s fantasy dinner: a midsummer feast in my grandmother’s Ukraine garden

My fantasy dinner location is the long table under the old walnut tree in Lyubymivka village in the south of Ukraine, where my grandparents’ house still stands. The table is right by the entrance to the summer kitchen, a modest one-room building where all the summer cooking and preserving happens. Most of the cooking for this dinner will be done by the matriarchs of my family — my grandmother Lusya and my aunt Zhenia (both gone), and my mum and aunt Lyuda (recently displaced). The British writer and artist Elisabeth Luard has come to give a hand, along with Nigella Lawson.

It’s midsummer and the giant tomatoes in Lusya’s smallholding are ripe and cracking at the seams. Heavy-headed flowers — asters, peonies, sunflowers — are planted all around. The chickens are clucking, the little goats are bleating and a fierce small dog is yapping in the background.

We will have a big basket of freshly baked palyanytsya bread as well as a very good rye spread with whipped Ukrainian lard (called salo) and wild garlic. There will be bowls of green borscht to start — pleasantly fresh and sour from the sorrel, adorned with little jewels of chopped boiled egg and local crème fraîche. The main is nudli, Lusya’s signature dish: pork ribs stewed until soft alongside homegrown, freshly dug-up wedged potatoes topped with puffy kefir-dough dumplings. Sliced tomatoes and prickly cucumbers, still warm from the sun, will be finished with a touch of sea salt and some heady toasted-sunflower-seed oil. There will also be plates of kraut and savoury pickled plums strewn around the table.

The guest list is almost all women. Valeriia Voshchevska, a present-day Ukrainian activist and Women’s March organiser, arrives first, and my husband Joe Woodhouse (the best wine expert I know) serves the drinks. He has three options: a local Isabella-grape wine, a Novak from Bessarabia and a Syrah from Languedoc. I have a feeling that Sofia Yablonska, the Ukrainian travel writer, photographer and architect who spent much of her life in France and has just arrived, will savour the Syrah.

Artist and dissident Alla Horska tells us about Ukraine’s 1960s bohemian underground

Yablonska is thrilled to sit next to Maria Primachenko, Ukraine’s most prominent artist, whose bright, colourful folk paintings were admired by Picasso and Chagall. She survived great personal hardship — childhood polio, her partner’s death during the second world war, her brother being shot by Nazis — but her works convey joy and love. She is quiet until Joe gives her three-grain vodka in a small crystal glass. Voshchevska recounts how, this year, a man risked his life to rescue some of Primachenko’s work from a burning museum near Kyiv.

Lesya Ukrainka, Ukraine’s most famous and brilliant writer, arrives a little late but with much to say. A poet, playwright and political activist who died in 1913 after a long battle with tuberculosis, she was originally named Larysa Kosach-Kvitka, but at the age of 13 gave herself the pseudonym “Ukrainian woman”, a bold act of resistance at a time when the country was part of the Tsarist Russian empire. As she pronounces the nudli the best she’s ever had, she asks another Ukrainian artist and dissident, Alla Horska, to tell us all about the country’s bohemian underground in the 1960s. Horska reveals the names of her KGB killers.

Pudding arrives — my mum’s Napoleon cake, a tower of pastry soaked in butter-enriched crème pâtissière — just as Yablonska tells us of her travels in the 1930s around the Pacific islands, Australia, north Africa and the 15 years she spent in China, where she met her French husband. The sun is starting to set and we pick from a massive bowl of fruit from Lusya’s orchard — flat peaches, apricots, tart young apples. Ukrainka recites her most optimistic poem, “Contra Spem Spero”, which includes the lines:

Thoughts away, you heavy clouds of autumn! / For now springtime comes, agleam with gold! / Shall thus in grief and wailing for ill-fortune / All the tale of my young years be told? . . . 

On poor sad fallow land unused to tilling / I’ll sow blossoms, brilliant in hue, / I’ll sow blossoms where the frost lies, chilling, / I’ll pour bitter tears on them as due.

The cooking done, Nigella Lawson pulls up a chair and talks about her eastern European ancestors, while Elisabeth Luard is eloquent about the food she tried in Ruthenian Ukraine and Romania in the 1980s. We toast again, and cry and laugh and sing into the balmy south Ukrainian summer night.

“Home Food: Recipes to Comfort and Connect” by Ukrainian chef, food writer and activist Olia Hercules is published by Bloomsbury on July 7. “Contra Spem Spero” was translated by Vera Rich

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