Sour cherries and sunflowers: a taste of home. recipes from eastern europe and beyond

In Sour Cherries & Sunflowers, Anastasia Zolotarev undertakes an experiment more delicate than it seems: the reconstruction of memory through food. Not the objective kind (there is no such thing) but the soft, persistent type that clings to kitchens, tablecloths, and the exact fold of a dumpling.

Drawing on her Ukrainian and Belarusian heritage, she documents recipes not as fixed formulas, but as cultural coordinates — where borsch is not merely soup but a dialect, and cakes speak in the grammar of celebration and loss. The dishes, pancakes for unhurried mornings, dumplings for crowded tables, pickles for winter silence, form a kind of edible archive.

Nevermind the name, Sour Cherries and Sunflowers: A Taste of Home. Recipes from Eastern Europe and Beyond does not romanticise. The book understands that tradition mutates, that no grandmother’s hand is reproducible, and that preservation is always approximate. But still, Anastasia Zolotarev tries. Because somewhere between plum cookies and buckwheat, the taste of belonging flickers briefly, and perhaps that is enough.

• Author(s): Anastasia Zolotarev
• Size: 18 x 2,4 x 25,5 cm and 208 pages
• Language: English