Ukrainian cuisine 2

Ukrainian dishes show a refined simplicity: fresh, pickled and smoked ingredients make pleasing combinations. Cooking techniques are mostly uncomplicated, but dishes can have many components and unexpected pairs - for example, shuba salad with pickled herring and beets. The food is neither too spicy nor bland, but skillfully seasoned.

Bread is the foundation of the Ukrainian table. The country deserves its fame as the "breadbasket of Europe". The French writer Honoré de Balzac, who lived in Ukraine for several years, counted 77 different ways of baking bread. Bread is so central to the diet that honored guests and travellers arriving or leaving are customarily offered bread and salt. This tradition is still seen at official welcomes.

Another staple is kasha. Ukraine's national dish is borshch; you may even find it on the menus of Chinese and Italian restaurants in Kyiv. Neighbours adopted this Ukrainian soup, though as late as the 1960s it was hardly served in restaurants of other Soviet republics. The many versions of borshch across the country reflect regional taste and cooks' ingenuity. The beet-based soup can have up to 20 ingredients - depending on the season, place and preference. It may be meatless or made on a rich meat stock with beef or smoked pork.

Ingredients for traditional cooking often depend on the season, so vegetables in dishes frequently appear pickled. Menus also list items that are unavailable at certain times of year. Salads are common, but rarely lettuce-based: more often fresh, cooked and preserved vegetables are mixed with meat, cheese or fish. For all the variety of recipes, a nearly constant trait of Ukrainian salads is vinegar or mayonnaise.

Varenyky are boiled or fried dough parcels, similar to ravioli without tomato sauce. Fillings may be meat, potato, cabbage, sometimes mushrooms; for dessert - sour cherries or sweetened cottage cheese with raisins. Any kind may be served with butter or sour cream.

The word holubtsi can be translated as "little pigeons", but it has nothing to do with fowl: they are cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice or buckwheat, often under a thin tomato sauce.

There are many kinds of pastries and cakes; they are usually less sweet than those outside continental Europe. Kyiv cake is a local specialty of layers of crumbly wafers and hazelnuts, known since the 1960s; it is also recognized by its trademark green box.

Among drinks, try kvass - a slightly sweet non-alcoholic beverage with a wheat-like taste; in the mid-2000s it was still sold in summer from large wheeled tanks around the city.

A broader overview of Ukrainian dishes is on the page Ukrainian cuisine.