Home Food: 100 Recipes to Comfort and Connect: Ukraine • Cyprus • Italy • England • and Beyond
“Hercules’ beautiful, affirming tales celebrate our humanity, while her mostly easy recipes open the door to a new palette of cooking flavors and techniques.”
Ukranian-born cookbook author Olia Hercules has taken the world by storm. Her three previous books, Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Summer Kitchens: Recipes and Reminiscences from Every Corner of Ukraine, and Kaukasis: A Culinary Journey through Georgia, Azerbaijan & Beyond have all received critical kudos and been top sellers. Now she gives us Home Food: 100 Recipes to Comfort and Connect: Ukraine, Cyprus, Italy, England, and Beyond.
Written during the on-again, off-again two-year COVID lockdown, Hercules hits the perfect note. She shares her personal memories along with the recipes that evoke comfort and that trigger happy memories without once being mawkish.
As is evident by her previous cookbooks, Hercules has a fervor for introducing her readers to the cuisine of Ukraine and other nearby Eastern European countries. In this book she also shares Eastern European dishes as well as her favorite comfort food recipes and memories from her years living in Cyprus where her family moved when she was 12 years old, her time at the University of Warwick in England, a year in Italy, and back to England, where she now lives with her husband and two young sons in London. Her vivid descriptions in the introduction to each dish makes her readers excited to embrace these various cuisines.
While this book is a celebration of our humanity and how food comforts and connects us to others, it features a modern technology. A QR code accompanies recipes that require particularly skilled or complex preparation techniques, linking the reader to a short demonstration video. These videos are captivating on their own. The clip to support the recipe for Punched Potatoes and a Roast Chicken (Hercules describes the potatoes as “buttery, chicken potatoes of dreams”), features the author demonstrating how to squish boiled potatoes with her hands to flatten them into patties (or as she calls them, “cow pats.”). Watching the short video certainly inspires and whets the appetite to try that recipe.
In the Walnut Esterhazy Torte video, it’s transfixing to watch Hercules pipe the sponge cake batter into rounds for baking. She accomplishes the task with great skill, but also with just enough minor irregularities to make the viewer think, “I can do that, too.” Indeed, Hercules is not afraid to admit her weaknesses. In the text, she confesses that putting the finishing touches on this cake raises her stress levels. “The original [cake] has a very specific feathered pattern on top . . . But personally, I have tip anxiety. ‘Where is the pastry bag? Where is the right tip? I found them! Bah, the attachment just popped through the bag hole with all the chocolate.’ . . . So I made a conscious decision a while ago never to use a pastry bag and tip again. Therefore, mine is a marbled effect Esterhazy . . .”
Hercules’ very honest, very human confessions and personal stories are endearing, and they engender trust in her recipes and with her as a person. Even if you don’t cook any of the 100 dishes offered in Home Food: 100 Recipes to Comfort and Connect, the book is worth owning for its profound insights into small things that have great meaning in life. Hercules’ beautiful, affirming tales celebrate our humanity, while her mostly easy recipes open the door to a new palette of cooking flavors and techniques.
In an interview Hercules explained that to be included in the book the recipes had to pass “the test of universal deliciousness” and “the cooking enjoyment factor.” Olia Hercules has succeeded on both counts.
Enhancing the book are photographs by Hercules’ husband and professional photographer Joe Woodhouse. In addition to portraits of each dish featured in the book, he captures intimate moments of Hercules and their children in the kitchen or eating together, emphasizing the love and vulnerability that we all feel.