Customer Reviews

The Best of Ukrainian Cuisine (Hippocrene International Cookbook Series)

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

An American with family members who make regular trips to Ukraine, I have some knowledge of the hearty and delicious cuisine of that wonderful country. I love this book because it presents the cuisine as it actually is in the towns of Ukraine. You are not presented with bastardized, Americanized recipes, but with the authentic cookery you would experience during a visit to a normal, middle class home.

The book starts with a brief foreword on Ukrainian food traditions. In the back there is an 8-page bilingual dictionary of food terms and phrases to use in restaurants. In between, the book is packed with both traditional and contemporary recipes for everything from appetizers to main dishes to sweets and even a substantial section on beverages both alcoholic and not, and recipes for making several different kinds of beer.

I highly recomment this book.

Being Ukrainian, I got this cookbook with the expectation of seeing some new and interesting recipes I'd never seen before. Instead I found things I've NEVER heard of being called Ukrainian recipes. It was definitely not even worth the shipping cost, let alone the time I spent looking through it. I hope the next Ukrainian cookbook I get is better than this one.

Excited to find the best of Ukrainian cuisine won't work with this book unless you're still on a farm in some other decade. Or you like cooking with lard, grinding meat, and of course removing organs and bones from pigs - oh, yum! The author's translations in the back of the book from English to Ukrainian for ordering meals are worth a laugh. However, I think he's serious. Pass this book up.

I didn't think there would be a lot of recipes I could use, but I like ethnic cookbooks and decided to check it out. I was pleased and surprised to see a few recipes labeled vegetarian. Then I looked at them. Dear publishers, it's a pretty firm rule that vegetarian and lard should never appear in the same recipe (Volyn-style vegetarian borsch).

This book is definitely old school. Most of it features very simple cooking very heavy on egg, sour cream, butter and/or meat. If you eat this way or would like to, you probably don't need this cookbook to tell you how to do it! Venturing away from these types of dishes, for a number of the recipes the instructions and/or ingredient amounts don't really make sense or don't include enough detail. Proceed with caution and use your common sense. (I think some things got lost in translation--through time, place and/or language.) There are a few interesting ideas and combinations, some of them more appealing than others. e.g. Beets with cloves worked for me. Potato with prunes, and kidney beans with poppy seeds not so much. Are the recipes "authentic"? I wouldn't know, and the book offers no supporting information. Either way, I think the book requires far too much filtering and deciphering to be of much use, however.