Recipes of Ukrainian cuisine are among the richest and most delicious in the world. The centuries-old formation of this cuisine helped modern recipes to become so tasty that many writers and poets were in a hurry to glorify the dishes of Ukrainian national cuisine in their own works. Today, there are restaurants of Ukrainian cuisine almost all over the world and their chefs constantly delight their visitors with unsurpassed masterpieces.
Development of Ukrainian cuisine
Regarding the history of Ukrainian national cuisine, there are many omissions, since today many data from the time of the Tatar-Mongol invasions have simply been lost. However, the origins of Ukrainian cuisine begin in the days of Kievan Rus. According to historical findings, already in the 9th-11th centuries, Ukrainian women were able to cook a lot of tasty and healthy dishes that have survived to this day. Dumplings, pies, borscht, pancakes, Greeks, roasts and smazhenina – this is not a complete list of what people have been eating for 10 centuries in a row.
Already in the days of Kievan Rus, lard, millet, buckwheat, pork, onion and garlic, and beets were a distinctive feature of Ukrainian cuisine. Around the 14th century, Ukrainians began to eat rice, and in the 18th century – sweet peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, corn and sunflower oil.
At the princely courts, in the monasteries of the 11th century, the first professional cooks began to appear. The chefs of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, for example, were the first to introduce curd dishes based on eggs (Easter), as well as many modern flour and fruit dishes, to the menu of compatriots.
At various stages of the formation of Ukrainian statehood, the cuisine of Ukraine was influenced by the culinary traditions of Tatars, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and Germans. All this has made its own adjustments to the modern Ukrainian culinary tradition, but has not eradicated the national features of Ukrainian cuisine from its modern dishes.
Since ancient times, Ukrainian cuisine has honored meat products, primarily pork. Thanks to pork, dishes such as roast, sausage, dushin, gurka appeared in Ukrainian cuisine. Such a love for pork is historically conditioned. The fact is that when making their raids, the Tatar-Mongols necessarily exterminated and took with them all the animals that were bred in a particular area, with the exception of unclean, in their opinion, pigs. Thus, often only these animals and their meat became a salvation for the inhabitants of those lands where Ukrainians lived in ancient times. In the city of Lutsk today there is even a monument to this animal, as a symbol of survival and salvation.
The second product, which is also given to the inhabitants of Ukraine by a pig, is lard. Ukrainians respected this product for a long period of time. Since ancient times, lard has been boiled and salted, marinated, fried, smoked, used to make homemade sausages, and even used to decorate verguns – a sweet dish. Salo entered Ukrainian culture at the level of folklore. It was with the use of fat that the Ukrainian people used to have many sayings that could characterize the material wealth of the family.
In general, Ukrainian cuisine has always been famous for its unusual meat dishes. On festive tables at all times one could see jelly, shpundra, duck with apples, piglet with horseradish. Meat dishes were supplemented with vegetables, the most common of which has always been beets.
In the daily menu of Ukrainians there were many dishes borrowed from other nationalities. For example, German sicheniki, which are fried flatbreads made from fish, meat and vegetables, were eaten by Ukrainians as an everyday dish. Other recipes were also popular – meat rolls stuffed with vegetables or cheese – krucheniki, pancakes with meat sauce – tovcheniki, French medallions in Ukrainian – meatballs. But obligatory everyday dishes from ancient times were borscht with garlic donuts and black homemade sausage.
Since ancient times, Ukrainian culinary specialists have been preparing all kinds of porridges and skits. Grilled meats, dumplings, bean dishes, mushrooms, potatoes or home-style noodles were always served with porridges. The hostesses prepared millet kuleshi with fried lard and small onions. Today these recipes are known as field porridges.
People in Ukraine have always liked to cook and eat fish dishes. For many generations in a row, chefs of Ukrainian restaurants cook stuffed pike, crucian carp in honey or sour cream sauce, bream with horseradish or apples, fish soup. But Ukrainian culinary specialists have always made desserts from milk – babka, syrniki, feta cheese, as well as pumpkin porridge from milk, pumpkin and wheat.
Ever since the time of Kievan Rus, Ukrainian cuisine has been famous for its floury dishes – dumplings with various fillings, succulents, honey cakes, plaits, makorzheniki and are still the favorite treats of both children and adults in this country. Since that time, Ukrainian cuisine has also been famous for the preparation of special drinks – beer, kvass, uzvar, liqueurs, varenukha, tertukha and many others. In the 14th century, horilka (vodka) appeared in Ukrainian cuisine, and a little later home-made alcoholic drinks began to be made here by distilling berries and fruits with the addition of sugar – moonshine. Winemaking has always developed well in the south of the country.
With the advent of sunflower on the territory of Ukraine, they began to produce and use sunflower oil for food, this happened already in the 18th century. Until that moment, imported olive oil or lard, which Ukrainians prepared themselves, was used in cooking. But beets, traditional for Ukrainian cuisine, were brought here only in the 19th century. After that, they learned to extract sugar from it. Eggplants began to be used in Ukrainian cuisine along with beets – also in the 19th century.
Features of cooking
The climatic and geographical position of Ukraine at all times contributed to the well-developed livestock and crop production in this territory. The inhabitants of this territory well inherited the traditions of raising livestock and plants from their ancestors and actively used it in everyday life. Ever since Tripoli, that is, about 5000 years ago, wheat, millet and barley have been grown here. Even the fact that the Ukrainian lands experienced a lot of wars of conquest had a positive effect on Ukrainian cuisine. This enriched the recipes of many dishes and introduced Ukrainian cooks to new types of food. Today, modern Ukrainian cuisine considers many dishes brought to its territory to be national food.
The main feature of Ukrainian cuisine is the regionality of many dishes. In different historical periods, many parts of modern Ukraine were under the rule of other states, which invariably enriched the Ukrainian national cuisine. In the west and east of Ukraine, food is prepared that the inhabitants of these two parts of one state often do not even know about. But this fact also gives a special flavor to the real classic Ukrainian cuisine.
A real phenomenon of Ukrainian cuisine is the hearth or the national oven, in which food has always been cooked. The design of the oven was such that the food cooked in it always retained not only the taste, but also all the benefits of the ingredients that were part of a particular dish.
Among the main methods of cooking in Ukrainian cuisine, cooking, stewing, baking, frying and grilling prevail. Fried and grilled dishes were borrowed by Ukrainians from German and Turkic national cuisines. Despite the large selection of different foods, Ukrainian cuisine has those dishes that have always been associated with its authenticity and national tradition.
Ukrainian borscht is a dish that has been associated with this particular national cuisine for all ages. This is a kind of filling soup, the first dish, revered in many cultures of the world. During the time of Kievan Rus, borsch was made from edible hogweed, thanks to which the dish got its name. Much later, beets and potatoes were added to borsch, as in modern recipes.
So, to prepare a classic borscht, you will need the following ingredients:
- 2 liters of water;
- 400 grams of pork or beef on the bone;
- 2 beets;
- 1 carrots;
- 3 onions;
- 2 tablespoons of tomato paste;
- 5 tablespoons of vegetable (sunflower) oil;
- a pinch of citric acid;
- 300 grams of fresh white cabbage;
- 4 potatoes;
- salt, pepper, bay leaf, herbs – to the taste of the cook.
To cook Ukrainian borscht at home, you need to go through the following steps:
- Boil the broth. To do this, in a three-liter saucepan over medium heat, meat is cooked in 2 liters of water. Before boiling the broth, it is necessary to remove the resulting foam from it. The broth itself turns out to be more tasty if it is meat on the bone that is used. When the broth begins to boil, cover the pan with a lid and simmer the contents over low heat for an hour and a half.
- Prepare roast. During the preparation of the broth, you need to fry the vegetables. The beets are washed and peeled, the same happens with onions and carrots. Beets are rubbed on a coarse grater, carrots – on a medium or small grater, onions must be cut into cubes. Sunflower oil is poured into the frying pan, heated up and first onions and carrots are laid out on it, and after 5 minutes of frying, beets. Beets in a pan are sprinkled with citric acid or poured with the juice of one lemon to make the borscht very red. The vegetables are fried all together for another 5 minutes and then tomato paste is added to them. The mixture is stirred and continues to cook for about 7 minutes.
- Collect borscht. After the broth is cooked, it is necessary to remove the meat from it. The meat must be cold. At this time, finely chopped cabbage is poured into the broth, and after 5 minutes – potatoes, cut into strips. The cooled meat is separated from the bone and cut into cubes, then added to the broth. In this form, the broth must be salted. After that, vegetable frying is added to the borscht, mixed, spices and bay leaves, herbs are added, the pan is covered with a lid and all the ingredients are cooked together for another 7 minutes.
Borscht is eaten immediately after it is cooked. However, after a day, borsch, if left, becomes even tastier and richer. The dish is poured into deep plates, in each serving you need to add sour cream, finely chopped greens, ground pepper and fresh lemon – all this is added to taste. In Ukrainian cuisine, it is customary to eat borscht with black garlic bread or donuts.
Salo in Ukrainian cuisine has always symbolized prosperity and prosperity. Today, lard is both an individual delicacy and part of many classic dishes of Ukrainian cuisine. In modern restaurants of Ukrainian cuisine, there is an exotic dessert – lard in chocolate, called the national “snickers” or “bounty”.
Krovyanka is a national Ukrainian dish, which is a sausage made from purified pig or calf blood. This dish is very authentic and will appeal to true gourmets who are ready for experiments and new sensations from food. But dumplings are a more classic dish of Ukrainian cuisine; they are cooked at home with all kinds of fillings – mushrooms, potatoes, liver, cheese, cherries, strawberries, meat and even nettles. Vareniki are made from unleavened dough. They are very tasty and are famous for their characteristics and taste far beyond the borders of modern Ukraine.
The first courses in the traditional menu of Ukrainian cuisine are very often supplemented with dumplings – pieces of dough that are pre-boiled in boiling water. Dumplings were clearly a borrowed dish in Ukraine, since this tradition is followed not only here, but also in other cuisines of the world – in Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Chechen. By the way, zrazy, popular in Ukrainian cuisine, is also a borrowed dish. In addition to Ukraine, minced meat rolls with vegetable filling are prepared in Poland and Belarus.
Kulesh is often offered as a first and second course in restaurants of Ukrainian cuisine. This is such a thick kind of first course, a kind of millet soup seasoned with cracklings and lard, sometimes with vegetables. Also famous are verguns, which are pieces of dough fried in butter and sprinkled with powdered sugar, pancakes, which since ancient times have been honored as a symbol of Shrovetide and are prepared with both salty and sweet fillings, potato pancakes (pancakes), which are grated potato pancakes.
One of the most famous Ukrainian dishes is considered to be Kiev cutlet. This is a cutlet of minced chicken meat, in the middle of which there is a piece of butter. Many scientists argue about the origin of this culinary masterpiece. Some believe that France is the birthplace of the modern Kiev cutlet. Allegedly, the Frenchman Charles Montier brought this recipe to Russia during the time of Elizabeth II. Cutlets were cooked in Russia for a long time, and then they were forgotten about. The Ukrainian chef remembered the recipe only in 1947, having prepared it in one of the Kyiv restaurants and calling it Kiev cutlet. There is also a version that for the first time this recipe came to Ukraine during the 1917 revolution. And some believe that they invented it in America, however, emigrants from Ukraine. Nevertheless, no matter which version turns out to be true in the end, all over the world this dish is associated exclusively with Ukraine and its national cuisine.
So, for cooking cutlets in Kiev, you will need the following ingredients:
- 2 chicken breasts;
- 140 grams of butter;
- 60 grams of flour;
- 140 grams of bread crumbs;
- 2 eggs;
- 100 grams of milk;
- half a teaspoon of salt;
- half a teaspoon of pepper;
- parsley greens;
- 300 milliliters of vegetable oil.
To cook meatballs in Kiev, you must follow the following steps:
- Carefully remove the skin from the chicken breast, turn each half over with the inside up and cut lengthwise. Then wrap with a film and beat off the resulting pieces so that you can easily wrap the filling in them. The tendons on the meat must be carefully trimmed so that the cutlets do not shrink during heat treatment.
- Finely chop the parsley, put it in a container, add room temperature butter there, salt everything and mix thoroughly until a homogeneous mass appears.
- Form the future filling of cutlets with two tablespoons and put it in the freezer for 5 minutes so that it grabs. Then put the frozen butter with parsley in the middle of the fillet and wrap the cutlet so that the edges cover each other. Place the finished semi-finished cutlets in the freezer for 5 minutes. At this time, it is necessary to beat the eggs and milk with a whisk, obtaining a mixture similar to that used when baking an omelet.
- Remove the semi-finished product from the freezer, pepper and roll in flour, then place in the milk-egg mixture and roll in breadcrumbs, doing this twice in succession.
- In an oven preheated to 200 degrees, it is necessary to place a frying pan with cutlets pre-fried until golden in sunflower oil. Cook chicken Kiev in the oven for 10 minutes.
The benefits of Ukrainian cuisine
All over the world, Ukrainian cuisine dishes are considered very tasty and extremely healthy. Experts believe that this status is given to Ukrainian cuisine by the fact that it is customary to eat as many as 3 dishes during lunch, each of which fulfills its mission for the body. Soups and borscht prepare the stomach to receive heavy and nutritious food, contributing to the timely production of enzymes necessary for digestion. Hot food saturates the body and brings in vitamins and minerals that are lacking for energy production. Well, desserts based on a large number of fruits complete the process of saturation with a vitamin and mineral complex.
Ukrainians, being Orthodox Christians, observe fasting. During these periods, they deliberately refuse heavy food, the body has the opportunity to recover and cleanse itself, thus health is only strengthened.
A large number of liquid dishes in the menu of Ukrainian cuisine – soups and borscht – have a beneficial effect on the gastrointestinal tract and digestive processes. Therefore, in this country, people are less likely than others to experience digestive problems. The average life expectancy here ranges from 67 years for the male population to 73 years for the female population.