7 Questions for Olia Hercules

An intro to our forthcoming Drink with the Idler guest Olia Hercules

Ukrainian born chef, activist and author of Home Food Olia Hercules will be our guest on A Drink with the Idler, Thursday 6 October, 6pm London time. Buy your ticket here. Free for subscribers.

Tell us about your new book in a few words.

OLIA HERCULES: It’s all about being connected, however clichéd that sounds. I left Ukraine when I was almost 13 and I’ve lived in Cyprus, in England, and in Italy – food has often been a way in for me culturally because it is such a universal thing. So, for example, I cut an apple for my son and I took a little piece and I tasted it and it tasted like onion. I realised as that happened that it tasted like home because it was what my mum used to do when she was cooking dinner for me when I was little. So I interviewed people from all over the world to see if they understood what I was talking about and they did. It’s about these little moments in life with food that make us feel connected.

In Home Food, you track the various moves you have made from one country to another throughout your life with recipes. What would you say “home” means to you?

OH: My whole life, I thought home was all about people. When I was a teenager in Cyprus, people would ask if I missed Kakhovka (where I was born, in southern Ukraine) and I would reply that I missed my family, not so much the town. I had left and I didn’t have any friends there anymore. But recently, since the full scale invasion started in February, I just realised that it is more than people – it is the nature, it is the physical house itself, it is the vegetables that my mum grows there. It is about the place itself.

In a previous book, Summer Kitchens, you showcased much about Ukrainian food culture and social life that hadn’t been so prominently covered in the UK before. What was your favourite detail to uncover and share?

OH: The immediate thing that comes to mind is borscht [a Ukrainian soup] – I learnt so much about it when writing that book. Even though I was born in the Kherson region, my mum was born in another part of Ukraine and her family are originally from Bessarabia [a region in the western part of Ukraine, split with Moldova]. So I didn’t have anyone close who was local to the Kherson region and consequently didn’t know much about borscht. But then I met Katrya Seldonenko, a neighbour in Kakhovka, whose family have been local to the area for a while. She has taught me so many interesting things about our local cuisine and about the really specific ways borscht is made. For example, dried gobi fish and sun-dried tomatoes would be pounded in winter and used to flavour the borscht. Those sorts of details can’t be found in books and can only be discovered from doing ground research. Similarly when I went to northern Ukraine, I found they used baby eel to make borscht. I found everything out from people just telling me – it’s so bittersweet in retrospect, with the pandemic and then the war.

…and your favourite traditional recipe that you recorded?

OH: I’m such a huge fan of fermentation, which plays a massive role in Ukrainian cuisine, so I’d have to choose a recipe I found from the Poltava region of Ukraine: apples fermented with pumpkin puree.

This year has obviously been completely life-changing and very stressful for Ukrainians. What way have you found most comforting to unwind and rest?

OH: Anything with my hands. At first, cooking was hard but now I’m back into it. I’m also painting – I had wanted to paint a door in my home with Ukrainian ornaments for ages in the style of petrykivka [traditional Ukrainian decorative painting style]. It was only when Putin started to give his horrific speech last week announcing the annexation that I dragged myself out of bed even though I was feeling depressed and thought, okay I’m going to finish the door now. It was an act of resistance – to create something beautiful even when he was saying those awful things. Embroidery is something I’m doing as well. Anything where I can be present in the moment, and not having to go back into the past or think about the future. It’s something I advise everyone to have a go at.

At the Idler, we have many radical, punk inspirations. Tell us about a Ukrainian hero of yours.

OH: I’m really fascinated by the life of Alla Horska, an artist and activist. She was one of the Sixtiers, a Ukrainian dissident movement in the 1960s during which writers, artists, and cultural figures stood against the destruction of Ukrainian identity in the Soviet Union, and rallied for greater freedoms. Horska was definitely pretty damn punk. And of course Lesya Ukrainka, one of the foremost writers of Ukraine who worked in the 19th-20th centuries, and Maria Prymachenko, a self-taught Ukrainian folk art painter, whose life spanned the 20th century. Prymachenko was punk in a quiet, gentle way. I don’t think you have to be loud or aggressive to be punk, just out of the ordinary.

Finally, you said in your Vogue 25 Most Influential Women of 2022 interview, “even when Ukraine is free, I’m not going to stop my activism, I’m a changed person.” What advice would you give to your younger self?

OH: I really regret not being more involved in 2014 when the last major Ukrainian revolution happened that moved Ukraine away from Russia and towards the EU. I was a single mother at the time and I had my own problems in the UK – I had lost my job and I was in my own head a bit then, not reading the news. A whole month of turmoil went over my head. But now I wish that I had been involved right from that moment. I hope writing my first cookbook was helpful as cultural diplomacy.

Going back to when I was younger, though, I would always pose these questions to my family and to myself: why do we only speak Russian at home and no Ukrainian? Why don’t I know more about Ukrainian culture? Why I was always told at school that Ukrainian writers are boring? Why have I read all the Dostoevskys but none of the Ukrainian writers? That’s something I wish had delved into it a lot earlier, too.

Hear Olia talk on A Drink with the Idler, 6 October. Find out more here.

Our September/October issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.