Ukrainian cuisine

Ukrainian cuisine is a hearty table with clear regional accents: pork and salo, wheat dough, beetroot, cabbage, mushrooms, berries and herbs. Neighbouring cuisines (Polish, German, Turkish and others) left traces in techniques and names, but the set of familiar dishes stays recognisable across the country - from the Carpathians to the steppe.

The heart of many feasts is generous portions and slow cooking: borshch on a meat broth, varenyky with varied fillings, pechenya, holodets. Regions differ more in recipes than in names: Poltava borshch, Hutsul deruny or Galician nalysnyky are variants of one culinary language.

First courses

• Borshch - beetroot soup, often with meat; more than thirty local variants.
• Hrybivka - mushroom soup; in Volyn sometimes with vushka.
• Kapusniak - soup of sauerkraut.
• Rozsolnyk - soup with pickled cucumbers.
• Yukha - fish soup from river fish.
• Vushka and galushky - small dough pieces in soup or on their own.

Appetizers and salads

• Oseledets with onion and oil; salted salo or with shkvarky.
• Pickled cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage; marinated mushrooms.
• Vinegret, olivye salad, herring under a fur coat - familiar festive cold dishes.

Bread and baking

• Paska - tall festive Easter baking.
• Kolach - round festive bread, including for Christmas.
• Pampushky - small buns, often with garlic sauce for borshch.

Main dishes

• Varenyky - with potato, cabbage, cheese, cherry or other fillings; with sour cream or shkvarky.
• Holubtsi - cabbage (sometimes grape) leaves stuffed with meat and grain.
• Syrnyky, mlyntsi and nalysnyky - with cheese, meat or fruit.
• Deruny - potato pancakes with sour cream.
• Pechenya, kovbasa, cutlets, buckwheat kasha with shkvarky.
• Studenets (holodets) - aspic of meat or fish.

Sweets

• Kutia - Christmas dish of wheat, poppy seeds, nuts and honey.
• Sweet pampushky, verhuny, cakes (including Kyiv cake).
• Uzvar and fruit jellies.

Drinks

• Horilka and samohon, sometimes with pepper or berries; beer from Ukrainian producers.
• Wine from Ukrainian regions, including Crimea as a winemaking area.
• Medovuha, kvas, kompot, kefir; mineral waters Truskavetska, Morshynska, Myrhorodska.