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Cookbooks We Love: 'Budmo!' deliciously captures the spirit of Ukraine (we laughed! we cried!)

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By Leslie Brenner

Budmo!: Recipes from a Ukrainian Kitchen, by Anna Voloshyna. Rizzoli, $39.95.

Here’s one to judge by its irresistible cover: Budmo!, a Ukrainian cookbook from San Francisco-based chef, blogger and cooking instructor Anna Voloshyna. With its borscht-pink rose motif, enticing assorted zakusky (cold apps) and built-in exclamation point, it promises — and delivers — an exuberant, delicious good time.

Why We Love It

Budmo! means “let us be!” — the Ukrainian equivalent of “cheers!” At this moment in history, that beet-pink exhortation speaks volumes. So much more than just a toast, it’s the spirit of Ukraine existentially defending itself against Russia. No way will we let you beat us; we’re Ukraine! Look at our fabulous, irrepressible, irresistible culture! Our food! Our drink! Our resolve! Budmo! Let us be!

Author Voloshyna was born and raised in a small town called Snihurivka in the southern part of the country, 120 miles from Odessa. Her introduction is a terrific mini-tour of “the breadbasket of Europe,” as the country is known. Its various regions are their own distinctive micro-cultures, from Western Ukraine (the Carpathian Mountain region that borders with Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova) with its sheep’s milk cheese and Hutsul polenta, to the meat-potato-and-cabbage lands of central Ukraine, to the sour cream, dill and herring of Odessa.

Yet there’s plenty of overlap, and anyone of Eastern European ancestry will likely recognize touchstones.

My family has Ashkenazi Jewish roots in Western Ukraine on my dad’s side and Odessa on my mom’s side, and when I came upon Voloshyna’s recipes for chicken noodle soup, cold beet borscht, eggplant “caviar” and “Famous Odessa Forshmak” — a herring mousse served on toasted rye bread — I was quite literally brought to tears. I never knew exactly why my family ate these kinds of things when I was a child, and turning the pages of Budmo! for the first time was like a culinary coming home.

How About Those Recipes?

Never one to resist a Russian Potato Salad, I dove in with Voloshyna’s vegetarian version, an herbal, pickle-y regional spin. So good! Its elevated pickle level makes it highly crave-able.

I also had to try Georgian eggplant rolls, studded with pomegranate seeds, which are now in season. Filled with a paste made from walnuts and herbs and drizzled with pomegranate molasses, they were wonderful — and fun to make.

RECIPE: Anna Voloshyna’s Georgian Eggplant Rolls

Conveniently, both of the above recipes can be prepared in advance, making them ideal to bring to a potluck or serve at a holiday party.

Feasting Ukrainian-Style: Zakuska!

Or do as the Ukrainians do, and serve them as a zakuska. “All kinds of salads, spreads, cold cuts, cured meats, and fish are called a ‘zakuska,’ which simply means ‘appetizer,’” Voloshyna writes in a chapter devoted to them.

“Zakuska arrive at the beginning of the meal to arouse appetites and accompany first toasts. Some zakuska, especially various cold cuts and briny pickles, stay on the table throughout the whole meal for following every shot. Those small, flavorful bits are perfect for mellowing out fiery horilka (vodka) or other hard liquors. Don’t forget to say ‘Budmo!’ right before you drink your first shot.”

I adored another appetizer, that Famous Odessa Forshmak pickled herring spread — a herring-lover’s treat, for sure, fabulous with dark rye. Suddenly, those little jars of pickled herring perpetually in our fridge when I was a kid made sense: our roots in Odessa! But Southern Ukraine isn’t the only herring-loving place in the world; in France, marinated herring with boiled potatoes is a bistro classic, and in Sweden pickled herrings in myriad forms can be found on smorgasbord spreads. In Japan, herring roe (kazunoko) is a prized delicacy, and the forshmak’s assertive flavor would likely be appreciated by aficionados of hikarimono — the category of sushi known as “shiny silver fish,” which are often marinated.

Also, I love the name of the dish — say it out loud and you can’t help but feel Ukrainian: Famous Odessa Forshmak!

RECIPE: Famous Odessa Forshmak

Of course Budmo! is about much more than zakuska. There are wonderful-looking soups, including three borschts — a beautiful cold beet version for summer; a warm, mushroomy vegetarian one for winter and a green sorrel borscht for spring. There’s a chicken soup that looks like it might rival my mom’s, with the added advantage of hand-cut noodles. I also have my eye on a hearty chicken and vegetable soup with buckwheat dumplings that look suspiciously like matzoh balls.

There are enticing rye pelmeni filled with beef and pork and sauced with brown butter, spices and herbs; a recipe for crispy potato kremzykly (kremzykly is the Ukrainian word for latkes), and a really cool-looking set of garlicky yeasted rolls baked in a cast-iron skillet, called Garlic Pampushky. (A better name even than forshmak?!)

A Warming, Transporting Stew

The book’s homey, rustic main courses made long for the Ukranian grandparents I never knew. (My parents were both orphans, raised by aunts and uncles, with no great cooks among them that I found. For the record, my beloved great-aunt who raised my mom was a wonderful baker, not so hot as a cook.)

Don’t look for Chicken Kyiv (or even Chicken Kiev). Instead there’s a garlicky Georgian chicken in a pot; voluptuous cabbage rolls stuffed with barley and mushrooms; Voloshyna’s grandma’s roasted duck; pork shank braised with sauerkraut and beer; and one that I tried but wouldn’t make again — bell peppers filled with ground pork and rice (the recipe worked fine, but the dish was dull).

I did love a Crimean Beef Stew with Chickpeas. Voloshyna writes in the headnote that she had tried the dish many years ago in a small Tatar restaurant in Crimea, but after Russia annexed the country she was unable to return for the recipe, so she re-created the dish from memory. First it’ll fill your kitchen with enchanting aromas; and then it’s soul-satisfying to eat. It’s excellent served with buttery rice and topped with pickled red onions, as Voloshyna suggests, but honestly just as good without the pickled onions if you’d rather skip them.

RECIPE: ‘Budmo’ Crimean Beef Stew

In terms of sweets, there are baked apples filled with Tvorog cheese (you can sub French fromage blanc) plus raisins, pine nuts and cinnamon; vyshyvanka, or baked bars filled with plum or black-currant jam. Most exciting to me is a many-layered, dreamy-looking “Glorious Honey Cake,” the signature dessert at Voloshyna’s pop-ups.

I do need to note that inexperienced cooks may hit some snags with the recipes in Budmo!. Yields were sometimes wacky; if cooked exactly as printed, the forshmak and Russian potato salad recipes would each have served a small army, so I halved the ingredients for each in our adaptations. Instructions were sometimes unclear, as with the Georgian Eggplant Rolls, which, had I exactly followed the instructions would have made eight gigantic knife-and-fork rolls rather than a passel of hors d’oeuvre-sized ones as shown in the book’s photo. (Again, our adaptation corrects that.) And ingredients could be more precise: What does a “medium potato” weigh, and is it red, Idaho or Yukon gold? Perhaps One the book was rushed to press due to its newsworthiness, and didn’t benefit from as careful an edit as it deserved.

Still, the recipes themselves are solid and absolutely worthwhile, so hopefully Voloshyna will sell a jillion copies, and she can do a bit more hand-holding and recipe-zhuzzhing in a future edition.

I do hope that will be in the stars, because all in all, Budmo! is a wonderful book, delightfully animated by Voloshyna’s engaging voice and charming stories, and brought to life by her vivacious photos. Yes — save for the shots of herself cooking (nicely shot by Maria Boguslav), the author is also responsible for the appealing photography.

Clearly it was all a labor of love — from apples to zakusky.