Join us on Tuesday, December 8, 2026, 7 PM via Zoom

“Carol Singers” by Mykola Pymonenko

Presented by Roman Hani

On Christmas Eve, Ukrainian families sit down to the most elaborate meal of the year, and every dish on the table is meatless. How did a fasting supper become the great feast? In 1860 the ethnographer Mykola Markevych wrote down how ordinary Ukrainian households cooked through the year, and his record shows a cuisine shaped by the church calendar: for roughly half the year there was no meat, milk or eggs, and the cooking that grew around that rule is anything but plain. Translator Roman Hani walks through the Holy Supper as it was recorded: kutia and uzvar, Lenten borshch, varenyky with dried pears, and the customs around them, from the didukh in the corner to the spoons left for the dead.

Roman Hani is a Ukrainian writer and translator. In Kyiv he worked as a journalist, a translator and a press secretary for an automotive company; in 2017 he moved abroad, where he taught English at university. His series The Old Ukrainian Cookbook brings Mykola Markevych’s 1860 record of Ukrainian home cooking into English for the first time, in three volumes: Pot & Porridge, Garden & Hearth and Feast & Cup. Home testers around the world cooked every recipe.

The Old Ukrainian Cookbook: Pot & Porridge — Historical Recipes from 1860

The Old Ukrainian Cookbook: Garden & Hearth — Historical Recipes from 1860

The Old Ukrainian Cookbook: Feast & Cup — Historical Recipes from 1860

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Tuesday, December 8, 2026
7 PM Central Time via Zoom
If you wish for a link or have any questions,

please e-mail: Culinary.Historians@gmail.com