A Slice of Lviv
An extract and recipe from Caroline Eden's memoir Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys
If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s only $30 a year. That’s like one shitty cookbook! Upon becoming a paid subscriber you will receive a copy of my digital Burnt Basque Cheesecake Cookbook Zine! Your funds will also go towards future zine publications as well as making sure that the vast majority of content is free for all.
Friends! This week’s newsletter is extra special because I get to spotlight the work of a very talented writer and friend,
. Caroline is the author of two of my favorite cookbooks, Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes-Through Darkness and Light and Samarkand: Recipes and Stories from Central Asia & the Caucasus.I have read only a handful of authors who are able to meaningfully, poetically, and creatively blend travel and food writing, and Caroline is one of them. Her ability to describe the world around us so vividly transports the reader to parts of the world thousands of miles away and her latest book is no exception.
Caroline’s new book, a culinary memoir called Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels, is coming out next week here in the U.S. It will be released on Tuesday, January 14th. You can pre-order the book here on Bookshop. I have been waiting for ages (the book was released in May 2024 in the UK) for this book to finally be available here in the states. I am so thrilled to finally get my hands on a copy—as should everyone! But especially those of you who love to read beautifully written prose and are fascinated with all things travel, food, Eastern European, and Central Asian.
As a way to celebrate and promote Caroline’s new work, and because her method of making and writing about food resonates with me on a deeply personal level, I wanted to share with you an excerpt from her memoir along with a scrumptious Apple, Blueberry and Rum Strudel recipe! The places she visits, that she brings us to, are often left out of the big conversations in travel and food writing. Everyone would benefit from experiencing her incredible writing and charming, frank, kind, unyielding and empathetic voice.
I have long believed that a kitchen is a portal to the outside world. When I was going through the immigration process here in the U.S. I wasn’t allowed to travel for over 3 years. I learned how to visit my parents by making my mom’s recipes. I taught myself how to make rye sourdough, paska, borsch to taste the flavors of Ukraine. I baked Pasteis de Nata over and over to get as close as I could to the taste of Portugal or Crema Catalana to visit my favorite bodegas in Barcelona. This experience is probably what helped me prepare for surviving the claustrophobia of the pandemic, a world of restricted travel wasn’t new to me or to many other immigrants.
Being in my kitchen helped me stay and feel connected to the broader world especially when even if I wanted to I couldn’t go anywhere.
When the war broke out in Ukraine in 2014 it became incredibly difficult and dangerous to visit my family in Mariupol which means I haven’t been able to visit since 2013. Worst of all, the full scale invasion and besiegement of Mariupol in 2022 left the city destroyed and unrecognizable. The only way I could visit was through memories and that’s where the kitchen plays a crucial role. The different flavors and the various smells of different dishes trigger old memories, feelings, and imagery. When I prepare and consume those meals, I am often transported to places that no longer exist like for example my grandparents house.
Caroline’s writing does exactly that, it teleports you from Caroline’s subterranean kitchen in Edinburgh (which sounds super cozy by the way) to Uzbekistan’s wintertime melons, to freshly baked simit in Turkey, to Rīga Central Market, to Kashveti St George Church in Tbilisi, Georgia, and many more places.
The book is divided into four sections, according to the four seasons; winter, spring, summer, and fall. Each section has three beautifully written chapters and each chapter ends with a recipe. How good does Dark Beer and Rye Bread Pudding or Apricot Cookies with Barberries or Duck and Barberry Plov sound! I am obsessed with her recipes alone. To further peak your curiosity check out the full extract below and a complimentary recipe to go along with it. The extract is from a chapter titled Night Cooking. As a baker, I can’t tell you how many nights I have spent baking over the last 5 years. The quietness of the night goes especially well with the alchemy of baking. Or maybe I just read too much Gogol as a teenager that I associate evenings with hot ovens and baking. If you enjoy baking or cooking at night make sure to give it a read.
In today’s extract, Caroline takes us to Lviv, Ukraine. A historical city in Western Ukraine that I dream of visiting almost every day. In the meantime, I am eternally grateful for Caroline’s writing that so accurately captures the mood, the people, and diverse cultures and time periods of the city.
U.S. EVENTS:
Catch Caroline at the Museum of Food and Drink (NYC) in conversation with one of my favorite people
Druckman tomorrow Tuesday, January 14th, get your tickets here.You can also see Caroline in Conversation with Jonathan Deutsch on Thursday, January 16th at the Parkway Central Library (Philadelphia), get your tickets for only $5 here.
I wish I could attend both of these events!
FOLLOW:
Make sure you also sign up for Caroline’s moving newsletter, Journeys Beyond Borders. You can also check out her website to learn more about her work and see a full list of her works. You can also follow Caroline on Instagram where she posts and shares her travels.
From Caroline:
An adapted extract from the last chapter of Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys (Bloomsbury). The chapter is called Night Cooking and it is based on a journey to Lviv in November 2021, four months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I am baking a strudel in my basement kitchen in Edinburgh, Scotland, and reminiscing about Lviv....This gives a feel for it I hope.
EXTRACT:
Night cooking, when the kitchen offers a particular sort of shelter, carries a rare appeal. I don’t do it often, but when I do, it is baking that feels most right. Main lights off, shoulders relaxed, hands doing the work. Combining slender half-moons of Bramley apple with midnight-hued blueberries and stirring through lemon juice (which quickly finds a cut on my thumb), I am making fruit strudel.
A crackly nocturne plays from the kitchen radio, and the spotlights beneath the wall cupboards shine onto the worktop, making the fruit glitter as it is gradually coated in sugar. I tip out a tot of Jamaican rum from the bottle into the cap, then another, pouring them into the mixing bowl. These are movements practised over time, done almost hypnotically.
Sometimes, cooking belongs to the night. But night-time is not just for sweet midnight feasts and eerie melodies. It is a time for prayers, lullabies, insomnia, flickering neon signs, strange hotels, dragging hours, fraught vigils and whirring movies of the mind. Overnight journeys, real or imagined. And storytelling. A time to summon up the past, to cross over into other lands.
So, with this strudel, I am casting a line back to Lviv, the Ukrainian city I visited most recently. Profoundly bookish and intellectually lively, it is a city of half-remembered stories that has changed hands and names many times over the centuries, coming under the control of Austria-Hungary, Russia, Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union. As historian Karl Schlögel once wrote, it is a place of ‘washed-out borders’.
Lviv, Lvov, Lwów, Lemberg. City of lions.
Its history lives on in its great cafés, some of the finest in Europe; in the glass domes of elegant buildings, their floor tiles as striking as the finest Portuguese ones; in the faded ghost signs on the front of shops; and in ancient wooden beams engraved with the six-petal rosettes said to be a ‘thunder mark’, a sign of the Slavic pagan god Perun. Little signs, if you know where to look, that help you to hear the city speak of its past.
Today, for Lviv, there is a new timeline. Life before Russia’s brutal warmongering – the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of wider Ukraine eight years later – and after. Lviv, where the flame of Ukrainian culture burns bright, is now, as I write, a place of armed civilians, air raids and continuous war preparations. Located far out west, only fifty miles from the Polish border, as the invasion began it became a natural hub for the displaced. Millions of internal refugees arrived at the train station, the westernmost point of the country’s rail network, and emergency shelters, with cots and kettles, sprang up in office blocks and theatres. Sandbags were stacked against cathedral windows and, on the outskirts of the city, barricades were constructed, and road signs obscured, to throw off the enemy. Though far from the heaviest fighting, missiles hit critical infrastructure, including electricity supplies, and an area near the airport, killing and injuring civilians. ‘We have to be vigilant because the enemy is getting more and more atrocious,’ Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, was reported as saying.
After months of relentless attacks, Ukrainians carry on. What choice do they have? Thousands of immense, and immensely creative, efforts are made daily, by those fighting, by those carrying on with their lives inside the country, and by the diaspora outside Ukraine’s borders. In Lviv, territorial defence volunteers go out on patrol, searching for Russian spies, while the Pravda (‘truth’) brewery converts beer bottles into molotov cocktails...
...Suddenly, there was a change in the light, and snow started falling. Children went running past the old cream-and-pink- painted town houses, their mouths open to catch snowflakes on their tongues. The whiteness of fresh snow shone against the blackened seventeenth-century Catholic burial chapel of Hungarian merchant Georgi Boyim, its walls so densely covered with sandstone sculptures that it resembled a blurry, three-dimensional Hieronymus Bosch painting. And, right by it, Svit Kavy...
...Stepping inside, I found men in suits having meetings, students studying, women dressed in fur coats, writers scribbling in notebooks, people meeting up, chatting and sharing news. Nobody ordered takeaway, because they came for the experience: to sit and be enfolded by other worlds, other lives and loves – yours to slip into, momentarily, for the price of a coffee.
Not too many choices on the simple menu, either, therefore no need to weigh up appetites versus desires. Svit Kavy reflected my longings back at me. For the world to slow down a bit, for there to be quiet places still. For there to be magic in the ordinary and pleasure in the senses, available to everyone.
I sat at a table in the corner, so that I could see the whole room, under wooden beams and next to a wall of antique coffee grinders, clasping my hands around a hot cup of coffee made by baristas who exuded a subtle fizz of pride. My slice of strudel, manageable at about the size of a deck of cards, was matchless. Best in class. The crispy dough was so paper-thin as to be almost translucent, and the icing sugar, lightly dusted on, was as white as the snow that was still falling outside.
How smells and flavours pull at the imagination, delivering us to other places. I would give my all to go back to Svit Kavy, the room overheated and cosy as a Carpathian wood cabin. I still have the scent of that sharp-sweet strudel in my nostrils. The smell, the taste, the ‘feelings’ of a city – so often the essence of a place is passed down the generations through mealtimes and memories – are also for the outsider, the one looking in, as valuable as its history, architecture and civic life. They offer a way to identify with the city, to connect with it...
...As the night pushes on, finally the strudel is ready. Its papery edges are golden and blueberry-stained, and a little apple juice is foaming nicely around the crinkly edges. Memory tells me that there was no rum in the version I ate in Lviv, at Svit Kavy – but no matter, precious fragments of the city are now here in my mind, and inside the kitchen...
Apple, Blueberry and Rum Strudel
A satisfying strudel for the long-haul months of winter. Of course, you could buy something similar in the shops, but homemade strudel is undoubtedly better, and this is fairly effortless to prepare and relatively economical (if you already have the rum knocking about).
MAKES 1 LARGE STRUDEL
2 large acidic apples (around 400g), such as Bramley, peeled, cored and sliced into thin half-moons
200g blueberries
80g caster sugar
grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
1–2 tablespoons rum
6 large sheets filo pastry
120g butter
40g white breadcrumbs
pinch of ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons flaked almonds (optional)
1 tablespoon icing sugar cream or vanilla ice cream, to serve (optional)
Put the apples and blueberries in a large bowl and toss with the caster sugar, lemon zest and juice – and rum, if you fancy it (though don’t let the rum have too much input). Set aside to let the flavours meld for 15 minutes.
Bring the filo out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature, then unwrap it and cover with a damp tea towel to stop it drying out.
Next, make the buttered breadcrumbs. Heat a frying pan over a gentle heat and add 10g of the butter. When it has melted, add the breadcrumbs and cinnamon and brown until golden. Set aside.
Pre-heat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/gas 4 and line a large baking tray with baking parchment. To assemble the strudel, melt the remaining butter in a small saucepan. Place a sheet of filo pastry onto the damp tea towel and brush it with butter. Lay another sheet of pastry on top and paint again with butter. Repeat this process until you have used all the sheets of filo, saving a little butter to brush over the top of the strudel later.
Stir the breadcrumbs into the fruit filling and mix well. Heap the filling along one of the long sides of the pastry, about 2cm in from the edge, then tuck the ends of the pastry in and roll up to enclose the filling as carefully and tightly as you can manage. Transfer the strudel seam-side down onto the baking tray.
Brush the strudel with the remaining butter and sprinkle the almonds over the top. Place in the oven and bake for 40 minutes, then turn up the temperature to 200°C/180°C fan/gas 6 for 10 more minutes or so, until fully golden all over. Leave to cool on the baking tray.
Once the strudel is cool, dust with icing sugar. Cut into slices and serve with cream or vanilla ice cream, both good accompaniments, but it is equally delicious by itself.
🧡🥰🧡
Very interesting. I love learning more about Ukraine through your writing. I love Scotland and the imagery through this story brought me back there in some way..