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Olia Hercules wasn't in Ukraine when Russia invaded that country and war broke out. She was living in relative safety far from the conflict center. But that doesn't protect your core when your family and home are at risk. Instead, she was catapulted into a cascade of emotions. Each of us responds differently to the panic and terror of these situations. For Olia, who has spent her adult life as a food writer and recipe developer in the UK, her response was to sit down and write her family story. The result is Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family and Ukraine . As she says in her prologue, you can call it "a complicated grief response, if you like."
Olia Hercules: My hometown is called Kakhovka , and it's in the south of Ukraine. If you look on the map, you will see Crimea quite prominently. So Kakhovka was only 70 kilometers away from the border with Crimea. It's flat but beautiful. I'd never seen a sky as big as back home. You can be just driving for hours with golden wheat fields and sunflower fields. And in the past, there used to be these wild covered grass swaying like a huge golden sea. And the sun, as bright as those golden fields, is just all bright and open and hot. The soil is black and very fertile, very fecund. So, you know, we always joke, you drop a little seed and something will just spring up, a massive tomato plant, or something like that.
Members of Olia Hercules' Ukrainian family, from generations past. Photo courtesy of Olia Hercules.
Evan Kleiman: It is such a powerful story, the way you have embroidered your family's story with the larger story of the history of Ukraine over a century. When was the last time you were with your family in Ukraine?
The last time all of our family got together was in August 2021. My parents' house was right by the reservoir. We call it Dnipro but it was created by the Soviets in the '50s when they built a massive dam, so we were right by the water. And it was an enormous body of water. It was a river but it looked almost like the sea. There was an orchard with about 20 trees — plums, cherries, walnuts, quinces, a real kind of cornucopia of beautiful fruits and berry bushes, lavender bushes.
My mom had this incredible little vegetable patch where she grew 10 types of basil — cinnamon basil, vanilla basil, you name it, dill, coriander. And they had a little kind of outhouse, which we call a summer kitchen, with a beautiful wild grape pergola outside to protect us from that intense summer heat. My mom, being one of six in her family, she's the youngest of six children, it means that we have this really massive extended family. We made a promise to each other 10 years ago, on my 30th birthday, that we'll get together every year, all of us, as much as possible. And that's what we did in August in 2021 under this pergola and under the hot sun, all together.
Where were you when the war broke out in 2022? You come from this large, loving family, but were you on your own?
I've lived in the UK for the past 22 years. I'm 41 now, so just over half of my life I've lived in the UK. I came here to university, and I stayed when the full-scale invasion started. I was in my bed at home here in London, I believe, with, you know, with my toddler son.
A collage of photos from Olia Hercules' life. Photo courtesy of Olia Hercules.
I imagine, like many cooks, you usually were able to seek comfort in the kitchen. What happened initially to your relationship with the act of cooking and eating?
The invasion was such a shock, watching it from afar, missiles falling. My brother was in Kyiv . He took up arms. He'd never held a gun in his entire life. He was, in fact, setting up an eco bike delivery business a start-up that year. So that's what he was busy with and then this invasion happened, so he joined the Territorial Army. My mom and dad were in Kakhovka, in my hometown, as the Russian tanks rolled in. The trauma and the worry is, I cannot describe it to you until you live through something like that, you cannot comprehend it.
Not only cooking became impossible, I couldn't eat. My husband had to kind of force me to have sips of broth, because I just couldn't put anything inside my body, no food. And, of course, I couldn't cook either. And cooking normally, in my normal life, even if I have bouts of depression or there is anxiety. Cooking has always been a healing process, a meditative process, a superpower in a way, chopping through vegetables or making bread, especially. Making Ukrainian food has always helped and suddenly, I lost my ability to cook.
You convinced your parents, other family members and friends, to leave, and your parents drove out. How many checkpoints did your parents go through to get out?
Kahovka is a small town, my hometown, where my parents were, 50,000 people. There is a bigger city called Kherson. This is the center of the Kherson region. Normally, it takes about an hour to get there from Kakhovka. It took my parents, as they were getting out, 19 hours to get to Kherson , because there were 19 checkpoints. So at each checkpoint, I have this knot in my stomach just remembering all of this. But at each checkpoint, the Russians stopped the cars and they searched them. Younger men were stripped naked because the Russians allegedly were looking for Nazi tattoos. Just complete... you know, it's ridiculous to think about that. And they interrogated my mom and dad as well. So it took them 19 hours what should have taken them an hour.
A family meal back in Ukraine. Photo courtesy of Olia Hercules.
And where did you meet them when your parents finally finished their journey?
My mom's cousin, Ihor, has been living in Germany for the past 15, almost 20 years, actually. He's a trauma surgeon and incidentally, he bought a holiday home in Northern Italy just a year before the full-scale invasion began. And that house, a doer upper, was waiting. It was empty and cold but it was empty, so it was a place where my parents thought they'd go to just kind of recuperate and catch their breath and decide what would happen next. As soon as I found out when they were arriving in Italy, I immediately bought a flight, and wanted to arrive there before they did.
Tell me how you prepared the house and what you cooked for them?
One of the reasons, I mean, obviously, I really wanted to see them, but the urgency of it for me was that I dreaded the idea of them coming into this cold house. It was a cold April in Northern Italy, especially. It's kind of drizzly and cold to the bones, so I didn't want them to go into this empty house with its plastic plants and no smells and this lonely feel to it.
So, yeah, I arrived six hours before they did, and I went to an Italian supermarket down the road in trepidation because I really wanted to cook borscht for my parents. Italians are not known for loving beetroot or dill very much. I was so nervous. I did find a vacuum packed packet of beetroot, and I couldn't find any dill, but I did find some parsley and a really good wiry old chicken. So I gathered my supplies and went back to the kitchen and started cooking. That was the first time that I cooked since the war started in February.
Author Olia Hercules was born and grew up in Ukraine but has spent most of her adult life living in the UK. Photo by Joe Woodhouse.
I love how you describe Vera in the book, your paternal grandmother and her incessant cooking. You talk about it as rather than working herself to death, she was cooking herself to life. Can you speak a bit about that and what the table at family gatherings looked like?
Yeah, just to explain to our listeners, my grandmother, Vera, my dad's mom, she lived in the south of Ukraine and in a town where my mom and dad were from. They were born in Mykolaiv region, just above my native region. She had a little allotment, a vegetable patch, like everyone did. You didn't have to live in the countryside to grow things. And everybody cooks, especially the older generations that have gone through war or famine. It's a thing. You just cook a lot of food all the time.
Every time we would pass by her house, always on the way to Kyiv to the airport, so I would fly back to the UK after visiting everyone, she would organize this enormous spread. Dumplings, roasted chicken, fermented vegetables, salads, you name it. It was just the table would be groaning with food. My dad used to tell her off. He used to tell her, just cook one dish, you know, one main dish and one salad. Don't do this thing. This is so old fashioned. You're going to cook yourself to death. To me, it seemed like perhaps he wasn't fair. To me, it seemed like if she stopped, she wouldn't be the same. She wouldn't be her own energetic self. So that's why I said that she was cooking herself and growing her garden to life.
The same would go for my maternal grandma. When we did this when I was growing up, multiple tables put together into one long table, and we just feast family-style, I think you call it in America. Family-style eating and there'd be drinking and there'd be talking and singing. A lot of the time the talking would be really quite intense, actually. All of these old stories would come out from the more difficult times, from the times of the Soviet Union and before that. It always shocked me almost that they could go in a split second from laughing about something to literally crying. Everybody would tear up — men, women, everyone in my family — they were just not scared of expressing their emotions. It almost felt like some kind of a family therapy. We didn't have a tradition of typical therapy with a therapist, so that's what it felt like when our big family got together, this processing of the past.
The cover of "Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family and Ukraine." Photo courtesy of Knopf.
You started with a couple of collaborators of a movement to support humanitarian aid in Ukraine under the hashtag, #cookforukraine. Can you tell us a bit about this movement and how much you've been able to raise and who you're supporting?
Yeah, thank you so much for asking. On the second day of the invasion, my friend Elissa sent me a message and said, we exchanged our utter shock. And we both were a little bit involved in the cook for Syria movement. And she said, "Do you think it would be a good idea to set up Cook for Ukraine ?" And immediately, I said, "Yes, of course." I feel like we knew all about war fatigue. After a while, we knew that supporters in the West would just become really tired, fed up with all the negative news, and we thought, there's no better way to keep people connected by doing this kind of softer cultural diplomacy.
So we phoned a man called Clerkenwell Boy on Instagram (he goes by his pseudonym), who did set up Cook for Syria . We asked him and his team... There was Layla, also, she's Iranian American. We asked them if they would help us to organize this movement, essentially. And they said, yes. They set up a donor box collecting for Ukraine UNICEF but afterwards also the Legacy of War and Choose Love joined as well. And to date, the initiative has collected just over 2 million pounds.
It wasn't just us doing all of the fundraising. The most incredible, incredible thing was that it was a movement. It was an international movement. We gave it a push, and then it just developed. School children in Wales doing bake sales, and then donating the money to cook for Ukraine to over 200 restaurants in London. They would collect 50,000 pounds and send ambulances to Ukraine, or on a smaller scale, put a dish on at the restaurant, and all of the money that comes through that dish would be sent to the donor box. So it's been incredible, and I'm just so thankful to people all over the world for joining in. |
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