Ukrainian cooking comes from a black-earth country with hard winters: everything grows in summer and has to be preserved. Pickling, smoking, fermenting and rendering are the operations, and the results are heavier and better than the reputation suggests.
Borscht
Beetroot soup with cabbage, potato, carrot and usually pork or beef, sometimes beans, finished with a spoon of smetana and dill. It is served with pampushky, small garlic bread rolls. Every household has its own version and green borscht with sorrel is a separate spring dish. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking on its list of intangible heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
Varenyky
Boiled dumplings of unleavened dough, filled with potato, curd cheese, sauerkraut, mushroom, cherry or blueberry, and served with fried onion, butter or smetana depending on whether they are savoury or sweet. Cherry varenyky in July are the argument-ender.
Salo and the rest
Salo is cured pork fat, eaten sliced thin with black bread, raw garlic and horilka, and treated with a seriousness that visitors find comic and residents do not. Holubtsi are cabbage rolls with rice and meat. Deruny are potato pancakes with smetana. Kotleta po-kyivsky, the chicken Kyiv, is a real dish and is usually better in Ukraine than the version exported.
The Carpathians
Hutsul cooking is different: banosh, a cornmeal porridge cooked in cream and served with sheep cheese brynza and crackling, is the regional dish, alongside mushroom soups and smoked cheese. It is the food of a livestock economy rather than a grain one.
Drink
Horilka is vodka, frequently infused with honey and chilli, and is drunk with food and toasts rather than alone. Kvass, fermented from rye bread, is the summer soft drink and is sold from tankers on the street. Uzvar is a compote of dried fruit. Ukraine has a real wine industry in Odesa and Zakarpattia regions and a large craft beer scene, and Lviv has brewed since 1715.
Where to eat
The dining scene in Kyiv and Lviv is genuinely good and reasonably priced. Beyond that, look for a stolova, the canteen format inherited from the Soviet period and now often modernised, where you point at what you want and pay by weight.