Vegetarian recipes from Ukraine

The Ukrainian table stands on three pillars: beetroot and root vegetables, wheat and buckwheat, and fermented foods with soured cabbage at the front. The traditional fat is pork lard, but unrefined sunflower oil replaces it easily and gives salads their toasted seed flavour. The aromatics are few and constant: onion, garlic, dill, bay, black pepper. From that base comes vegan borscht, whose sourness comes not from vinegar but from the beet itself and from fermented cabbage, served with a spoon of cream or its plant equivalent.

A meal is built around a thick soup followed by something made of flour or grain, which makes meatless cooking feel native here: the Orthodox fasting days cover a large part of the year and fixed an entire repertoire. Kapusniak with soured cabbage holds the same place as borscht, varenyky are filled with potato, cabbage or cherries, nalysnyky are rolled around fresh curd, and Carpathian banosh cooks cornmeal in cream with mushrooms.