Kapusta - Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe, by Alissa Timoshkina

March's cookbook club pick

“Kapusta. This beautiful-sounding word means ‘cabbage’ in many Eastern European Slavic languages including Belarussian, Polish, Russian, Slovak and Ukrainian. To me, the vegetable represents simple and nourishing home food. Its scents and flavours weave through the fabric of my childhood memories. Kapusta also symbolises my personal creative journey as a cook, both at home and professionally. When I used to spend my summers in various language schools in England during the early 1990s, I woudl sometimes be faced with a well-meaning but slightly condescending remark: “Oh, all you eat over there is cabbage!” With there denoting any Eastern European country from behind the notorious Iron Curtain….

While I was initially haunted by this stereotype, when I came to cook and write about food professionally in London in the mid-2010s, I was determined to turn this cliche onto its head, and empower myself with the ancestral knowledge of how to cook well with cabbage. I reached into the treasure chest of childhood fond memories and saw plump savoury buns stuffed with cabbage and mushrooms, zingy, fresh cabbage salads dressed in unrefined sunflower seed oil, comforting soups and stews of sour cabbage and grains and, of course, the most important, formative food-memory of all - the sauerkraut; its tang, its crunch and the ritual of preparing it!”

Alissa Timoshkina - Kapusta

These are the words with which Alissa Timoshkina begins her new book, Kapusta - Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe. And I can think of no better way to begin this peek into Kapusta and give a sense of the culinary world Alissa is creating with this her second book. She is a gorgeously evocative writer and one who is keen to share the stories of the breadth of a culinary heritage she is immersed in. I am delighted to be choosing it as our March cookbook club pick.

When I asked here the other week what for each of you the point of cookbooks is, so many of you said that you are drawn to cookbooks that give you insight into people, places and time. If that is you, then Kapusta will very probably be for you too.

Read on for more background to this book, three cracking sample recipes - and head here for details on how to join in with our virtual meet-up to share thoughts and food from March’s cookbook club pick: Kapusta by Alissa Timoshkina