The Sound of Spirit

“One of my earliest food memories is mum making this salad,” says Ukraine-born chef Olia Hercules of the bowlful in front of her, “I’m just mad about it at the moment.” We're in the kitchen she shares with her two sons and food photographer husband, Joe Woodhouse, in London's Forest Gate, and in the bowl is an orchestra of summer garden vegetables, soft herbs and sour cream. Despite great regional variation in Ukrainian food, everyone across the country makes a version of this salad, Olia explains. She is adamant that the ingredients cannot be cut on a chopping board but rather by using a small serrated knife to chop directly over the enamel bowl for the full sensory impact, “the sound of the radishes and cucumbers hitting the sides, the smell of dill and the first tomatoes of the season, and the feeling of the juices falling from them.”

As a cook and food writer, Olia has long been alive to the sensory delights of cooking and has championed her country’s culinary traditions in four books and countless magazine columns for over ten years. When Russia launched its military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, displacing millions of Ukrainians – including her own parents, who fled their home in Kakhovka two months into the conflict – Olia broadcast her response to the unravelling news agenda in real time on social media, laying bare the trauma of one whose family, roots and very identity were under threat. In the years since, she has written a memoir, Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope, a process which was by turns helpful and “re-traumatising”. The book is at once an “emotional history” of Ukraine and an explanation of the Russo-Ukrainian war for a world that is largely ignorant of its context, which Olia sought to do “not through a history book or the headlines, but through the sensory world.”

And sensory it is. My own copy of Strong Roots is littered with pencil marks underlining her visceral, voluptuous yet, somehow, spare language. Describing a walk through her parents’ garden in Kakhovka with their baby son, Wilfred, the summer before the Russian invasion, she details “a gang” of brightly-coloured roses: “butter-yellow and magenta, velvet-black and Dutch orange and, my favourite, puppy-belly pink and smelling like almond cake.” Meanwhile, of cooking, she credits Luisia with teaching her to listen while she cooked, waiting for the sound of “spirit” – or a hard, rolling boil – before adding dumplings to pork stew for a dish called nudli. “To be a good cook, you need to see, smell, taste and hear,” she writes “And there is no better way to feel alive.”

Today, as well as the salad, Olia has made sourdough, a dish of roasted red peppers dressed with rose vinegar (an ode to her maternal grandmother Luisia’s love of roses) and asparagus and mushrooms that she has cooked on a plancha grill before tossing them in shio koji, a dressing of homemade fermented rice culture, salt and water. Olia, you quickly realise, creates relentlessly, with urgency, and cooking is her first outlet. Her kitchen bursts with brilliant industry, from a wooden dough bowl loaded with seasonal vegetables and a miniature basket of herbs picked from the garden (“feverfew, spearmint, chocolate mint, bergamot herb, yarrow, pineapple mint, lemon verbena and lemon balm,” Olia rattles off) to giant jars of preserves: fermented tomatoes, mangoes infused with vodka, and her new creation, bitters made with “ten types of citrus herbs” she has grown herself.

In the last three years, Olia has come to realise how much cooking, for her, is both an act of resistance and an expression of her life force. How disorienting, then, not to want to cook during those traumatic early months of 2022. Cooking, Olia writes, felt like “frivolity”, the pleasure she took in it “a betrayal”: “How can I cook while my brother is running with a gun in a forest, defending Kyiv, and my mum and dad are living under occupation?”. But in the first chapter of Strong Roots, right after her parents, Olga and Petro, have fled Ukraine for Italy in April 2022, she describes going to meet them at a cousin’s holiday home in Lago Maggiore. Olia arrives early, scribbles “I want to cook!” into her diary, and sets to work making borsch for them – the vivid, sour beetroot soup which her mother once described as “an element of our DNA” – with what ingredients she could find at the local Italian minimarket. She is disappointed by the result – vacuum-packed beetroot, no dill – but her parents step into a house of familiar smells, and “the soothing murmurs from the bubbling and gentle susurration at the stove”. Meanwhile, the effort breathes energy into Olia; there is a sense of her cooking herself back to life.

After doing a politics degree at Warwick University, Olia was briefly a film journalist before following her heart into food. She did a course at Leith’s Cookery School and worked for a period at Ottolenghi before getting pregnant with her first son, Sasha, now a teenager. He was a toddler when we first met; I was editing a newspaper food section and Olia, by then a single mum, had recently left professional kitchens to pursue writing about the food of Ukraine. Doing so, I imagine, kept her family feeling close at a vulnerable time in the life of any new parent, not to mention a strong sense of connection to Ukraine. Russia has always "Russified," she tells me, “an uprooting, a complete de-indigenisation” of the countries it occupies, and that naturally extended to food. Under Soviet rule, it was customary for a token recipe to be lifted from each of the conquered lands and standardised – like borsch from Ukraine, plov a rice dish from Central Asia, and kharcho, a soup from Georgia – “and they would like make [a bad version of the] recipe, put it into all of the canteens, and people were discouraged from cooking.” And then there’s the question of land, from which Ukrainians have been systematically removed for centuries.

She tells me that the thing her mother most misses about her home in Kakhovka is the garden – an oasis around which readers of Strong Roots are taken by Olia on what was unknowingly her last visit to Ukraine. This garden, where walnuts and cherries grow, was the scene of her family's annual “summits” each August. They cooked, they ate, they told stories. It was “almost cinematic”, Olia says, watching her mother and aunts and uncles under a pergola heavy with wild grapes, recounting their family history, shaped as it was by Soviet rule, “so eloquently, and with so much detail, enthusiasm or sadness – they would cry, they would laugh.” She goes on, “I realise now that it was like a therapy session for them.”

Olia is reigniting the family summit this summer in France. It’ll be different from before, with fewer family members present and, of course, with a new location: the house that Olia and Joe bought in the Auvergne so that, if her parents need somewhere, they’ll have a home with a garden. Another big change: the family has unanimously decided to abandon the Russian that was forced upon them in favour of speaking in Ukrainian. “With language, I’ve been living in a kind of purgatory,” she tells me, “I grew up speaking Russian, and have been thinking in English since I was 19. It’s time I spoke Ukrainian properly. Even if I make mistakes, it’s a powerful form of resistance.”

So too are the traditions she is bringing back in her own home, the artisanal vyshyvanka, a Ukrainian embroidered shirt which, she says, is “her uniform” when worn with a TOAST linen dress; also kvitchaty, which literally means “to cover something with flowers”, the practice of white-washing walls before festivals, then painting them with botanical designs. It is regenerative, says Olia – she has repainted hers five times since 2022 – and “a talisman to protect you”. On her kitchen door in east London, she has painted a sunflower with a strong root, from which bulbous purple grapes grow – both symbolic of Ukraine, the land of sunflowers for as far as the eye can see, and home-grown grapes for homemade wine. Feeding on the grapes are two little nightingales – “Ukrainian is said to be the language of the nightingales,” Olia tells me, “because it is so melodious”.

In the epilogue of Strong Roots, Olia writes, “Most of us live in a state of war, whether actual or personal.” In the same year that actual war broke out in Ukraine, a different, even more personal one began for Olia. Wilfred, her son with Joe, now five, was diagnosed with Fragile X syndrome – a genetic condition that causes intellectual disability and neurodiversity – and, subsequently, Olia found out that she has a pre-mutation of the same condition, putting into context symptoms that had confounded her for a while. It felt like a kind of drowning, “intense, deeply upsetting,” but her thinking has shifted in the intervening years.

“There’s beautiful stuff, too,” she says, that lives in parallel with the layers of grief that she and many Ukrainians have to live with. “This,” she writes, “is the Ukrainian-ness that is in my blood… this thirst for creativity, the capacity to allow your brain to find a space to exist in two unavoidable worlds.” And with that, she suggests we sit down for lunch: bread, griddled vegetables and the salad that sings of Ukraine.

Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story of War, Exile and Hope is available now.

Olia wears our Lightweight Linen Gathered Waist Dress. The Splatter Enamel Salad Bowl. Washed Linen Napkins, Acacia Wood Salad Rectangle Board, Salad Servers, Wonki Ware Plates and Stonwashed Cutlery also feature.

Words by Mina Holland.

Photography by Ellie Smith.