Ukrainian Food: meat, grease, and sour cream

One major way in which the United States differs from the rest of the world is in its lack of a national cuisine. There are a few patently American dishes, like hotdogs, boiled peanuts and corn bread, but nearly every other dish is a hybridized form of some other nation’s culinary fare. French fries are Belgian, pizza is Italian, fried chicken is West African, and hamburgers are [allegedly] German- from Hamburg. Not to mention Mexican, Chinese, Indian, and Thai, which have also found their way into our national culinary culture. Of course, we are a nation of immigrants, so it’s perfectly sensible to be this way
In Eastern Europe, however, national cuisine is still a defining characteristic, as defining even as language. Ukrainians eat Ukrainian food every day, for every meal, and have little desire to broaden their tastes. Ethnic food has hardly taken off. You can find an odd assortment of Italian and Japanese restaurants in the cities, but there is little beyond that. In Moscow, a city of over 10 million people (larger than New York), there were only 2 or 3 Indian restaurants. I have only seen one in Kiev (a city of around 6 million).
I have been living here for nearly a month and have eaten nothing but Ukrainian food. Every day I wake up to a Ukrainian breakfast, go to a Ukrainian cafeteria for lunch, and come home to a Ukrainian dinner. If I go out to dinner, it is to a Ukrainian restaurant.
There is no real breakfast food here, so the morning meals vary from day to day. Some days breakfast is fatty sliced sausage or cheese laid over thickly buttered bread. Fried eggs are popular, though they never fully cook the egg white so it is a bit like eating cold snot. Some days it will be thick sausages that taste like bologna, other days it will be hot-dogs and pickles. One morning I was given salmon patties and gretchka, or buckwheat. The safest dish is kasha, which is basically just slightly sweetened oatmeal.
If breakfast did not pack on enough calories from fat, then lunch certainly does the trick. The first course is usually a salad, but do not let that confuse you. Salad here means a few vegetables to go with the mayonnaise. Borsch, a bright pink soup made from beets and cabbage, is a staple and is delicious with a dollop of sour cream. Then come potatoes and stroganoff or maybe fried cutlet. Finally, a serving of vereneki, or dumplings, with more sour cream on top. I usually wash it all down with a glass of chilled berry tea, or compote.
Dinners are a somewhat lighter affair, consisting of soup and some kind of meat entrée. Potato patties stuffed with ground beef, ground pork cutlets with onion, ground fish patties, or dumplings are typical. If eating at a restaurant, I wash all of this down with a liter of beer.
The other day I walked into the kitchen to find my host mother preparing food. She had a big bowl of slimy dark meat that she was about to fry with onions. Fearing for the worse, I asked her what kind of meat it was. She smiled and said “pechonka,” or liver! I flatly refused to eat it in spite of her protests and insistence that it was “vkusno,” or tasty.
Even though it is usually over-salted, bland, greasy, fattening, starchy, and reheated in the microwave, I have been enjoying the food. The extra calories are absolutely necessary in the extreme cold, even if you can feel your blood running thicker.