Central Ukrainian

Central Ukrainian — the cooking of Kyiv, Cherkasy, Poltava, and the chernozem belt — is what most of the world means when it says 'Ukrainian food.' The pillars are well-known: borshch in its hundred regional faces (with beef, without; with beans, without; with smoked pear), varenyky stuffed with potato-and-cheese or sour cherry depending on the season, holubtsi (cabbage rolls) baked in tomato-and-sour-cream, salo (cured pork fat) eaten raw on rye with garlic. The Kyiv kitchen also gave the world Kotleta po-Kyivsky — the butter-and-herb-filled chicken cutlet that conquered Soviet restaurants and crossed into Western menus.

Beneath the canon sits the everyday plate: deruny (potato pancakes) with sour cream, kasha hrechana (buckwheat porridge) with mushroom or onion, pyrizhky (small filled buns), syrnyky (tvorog pancakes) for breakfast, mlyntsi (thin crepes) folded around anything. The sweet ending is medivnyk (honey cake) or the legendary Kyivskyi Tort, the meringue-and-cashew torte invented in 1956 at the Karl Marx confectionery. Drinks run uzvar (dried-fruit compote) and kvas (fermented bread drink). This is the food of black-soil abundance — generous, sour-leaning, fermented at every layer.