From Ukraine, with love

IN February 2022, having annexed Crimea from Ukraine eight years earlier, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country.

- Olia Hercules

Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope Olia Hercules (Bloomsbury, £20)

It captured the Kherson region, where the London-based Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules was born and where her family still lived. At the start of Strong Roots, she persuades her parents to leave: they manage to break through 19 Russian checkpoints and escape to northern Italy, where she meets them.

For the first time since the invasion, Ms Hercules goes out with a shopping list. 'For months I have not been able to cook,' she confesses; any hint of pleasure 'felt like a betrayal'. However, she wants her parents to 'step into a house of familiar smells: fried onions and grated carrots, beetroot, chicken fat, freshly cut dill... Small signals that would tell them “you are safe”'. She guiltily offsets the peace that cooking brings her by listening to a podcast about the war as she chops the vegetables.

Strong Roots is the history of four generations of Ms Hercules's family, circling their kitchens. The title comes from one of her maternal grandmother's sayings—'If the roots are strong it doesn’t matter if a storm breaks the fragile stem'—and the story takes us from Russification to the fall of the Soviet Union and the ongoing war. As someone whose own roots reach back into what is now Western Ukraine, I learned a lot about the ‘mind-bogglingly complicated’ history of the region in the 20th century, as well as its food. Descriptions of Ukraine’s summer bounty (giant bunches of herbs, juicy sliced tomatoes, crispy kefir-dough buns and noodles drenched in confit goose) contrast painfully with accounts of manmade starvation and famine and the precariousness of people’s lives: Ms Hercules's relatives narrowly survived a Nazi purge and deportation by Stalin. Cooking in this context is an act of resistance.

The borscht Ms Hercules makes at the beginning of