Meet the recipe writer de-colonising Russian food – and hopelessly obsessed with tzimmes

Things have changed for Alissa Timoshkina’s since her first cookbook Salt and Time was published in 2019. Her debut book was a love letter to the food of her native Russia, celebrating the food of the former Soviet Union, especially Siberia where the mother-of-two spent her first 15 years.

That book did not differentiate the foods from across the vast Soviet Union but her second book, Kapusta which hit book stores this week takes a different slant. For her this change reflects events of the last few years.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Omsk-born food writer, whose mother’s family were originally from Ukraine, has been vocal with her support for her family’s original homeland. Soon after war broke out, she and fellow food writer Olia Hercules set up #CookforUkraine which raised £2.5 million for Ukrainians.

“The war has been an absolute earthquake in terms of everything really - my whole life but particularly in terms of looking back at where I came from really, as it was just really painful to carry the label of Russian. And it was something that I physically could hardly tolerate.

“And that prompted me to go back and look deeper into my family history. I kind of realised that by default when I’m asked where I’m from I say Russia, but most of my family ethnically are not Russian at all. Most of them are from Ukraine and Belarus and half of them are Ashkenazi Jews.”

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So in Kapusta, which translates from several Eastern European languages into the less poetic-sounding cabbage, she drills down deeper into the provenance of her veg-centric recipes.

Simliar to the rebranding by large supermarket chains, post-invasion, of chicken Kiev to its Ukrainian name chicken Kyiv, Timoshkina felt it important to “de-colonise” the language and culture that had for so many years, blanketed everything as Russian when foods in question may come from Ukraine or other Slavic countries.

“I simply cannot bring myself to celebrate the culinary culture of the country (despite having been born there) that has launched an atrocious war in the heart of Eastern Europe, in Ukraine.”

Having done her research, the provenance of her recipes are carefully clarified to credit the countries and ethnic groups from which they originate. These include not only the Ashkenazi Jews of her heritage but also indigenous populations including the Volga Tartars and the Udmurts.

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And the north London resident has also found the food of her forefathers to be the ideal vehicle with which to pass her Jewish lineage to her children. This was especially important to her post October 7 which she says was “traumatic and painful”.

Her great grandmother, Rosalia survived World War Two in Siberia having escaped from Nazi-occupied Ukraine on false papers. She left her young son (Timoshkina’s grandfather) in what she hoped was the safe care with a non-Jewish family. “It was a miracle that they all survived the war.”

“Food is such an amazing way to do it Jewish holidays are very much linked to food and it was such a natural way for me to introduce Jewish context my family, specifically with food.”

Her research also opened her eyes to the influence Ashkenazi Jews had on European cuisine. “I was doing a recipe for Eastern European fritters — cottage cheese fritters which are a real staple and a real iconic way of cooking cottage cheese. When I’m in the UK the traditional European twarog cheese to make them is not readily available so I often use ricotta cheese instead. I've learned in my research that this tradition goes back to the Italian Jews who cooked with ricotta and that theirs was actually the original recipe.

“When they gradually moved into Germany and from Germany further into Poland and Ukraine, they brought this tradition with them, and they had to use local cheese like twarog. So for me the story came full circle — it was had initially been made with ricotta and then became the twarog that I’d grown up with.”

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Also in the (non kosher) cookbook are recipes for latkes — that she knew only as oladki or draniki growing up in Siberia — borscht and kreplach as well as variations of tzimmes with which she says she has become.

“I’m a hopeless tzimmes obsessive” she confesses in the recipe for New York-style knishes. In an Ashkenazi mash up, the knishes (soft bready buns better known to a US audience than on our shores) are stuffed with caramelised carrots and chicken as well as sticky sweet prunes.

The carrot and prune pairing has several other incarnations including as a filling for knishes; in a pearl barley tabbouleh salad, in its purest form as the original beef-based stew and even as an inspired riff on carrot cake.

That’s in a chapter of carrot recipes. There are also chapters on potatoes, mushrooms, beetroots and the book’s main character, cabbage.

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Timoshkina felt the boring brassica badly in need of a PR reboot. In the book’s introduction she cites George Orwell’s 1984 which describes protagonist Winston Smith’s miserable apartment block as smelling of boiled cabbage. From Orwell’s English perspective, this may have perfectly illustrated the protagonist’s dismal life but to her, kapusta represents simple and nourishing home food — an emotion not reflected by those she met when she moved to England from Russia.

“I would sometimes be faced with a well-meaning but slightly condescending remark ‘Oh, all you eat over there is cabbage!’ So, she felt the need to share the flavour-filled recipes she’d enjoyed as a child in her homeland.

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So she shares a range of recipes including soups, crunchy slaw; holishkes; Chanukah-worthy cabbage pea and dill fritters and even a crunchy strudel which she says is popular for Purim.

Whether or not it reframes the boring brassica, Kapusta, provides a lovely journey around the culinary traditions of Eastern Europe with plenty of familiar foods for Askhenazi readers.

Kapusta (Quadrille) is out now