Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine

by Olia Hercules

Overview

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, award-winning Ukrainian chef and food writer Olia Hercules decided it was finally time to tell her story.


Strong Roots is the story of a century in Ukraine told through four generations of one extraordinary family. It takes us from years of Russification, to Olia’s grandmother’s deportation to snowy wastelands under Stalin, to her aunt Zhenia’s school protest, to her own parents’ flight from Ukraine when their village was occupied in 2022.

This is an ode to the land, to ideas of home and belonging, and to family stories and recipes passed down the generations—the tang of sour cherries, the best way to make borsch. It is an account of resilience in the hardest of circumstances.

Strong Roots brims with hope and fear. It lays bare the compromises and betrayals of generations struggling and surviving through war, peace, invasion and exile. It is an uplifting reminder of how much the human spirit can endure when born from a land rich with strong roots.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593537480
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/12/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.54(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

OLIA HERCULES was born in Kakhovka, in the South of Ukraine. She trained at the renowned Leiths School of Food and Wine, then worked as chef de partie in restaurants, including Ottolenghi, and as a recipe developer. Her first book, Mamushka, went on to win the Fortnum and Mason Award for best debut cookbook and was followed by Kaukasis, Summer Kitchens and Home Food. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Olia co-founded a global initiative to raise money for Ukraine through cooking, #CookForUkraine, with her friend Alissa Timoshkina which has raised over £2 million pounds to date. She lives with her husband, food writer and photographer, Joe Woodhouse, and two sons in London.

Editorial Reviews

2025-06-10
A Ukrainian long-term resident in Britain reflects on her embattled homeland.

“Call this book a complicated grief response, if you like.” So writes Hercules, whose parents lived in the besieged Kherson region of Ukraine, less than 45 miles away from Russian-controlled Crimea and the center of savage fighting over the past three years. One way of reaching back to her birthplace was to speak to the spirits of her deceased grandmothers, for, as she writes, “to me, a non-religious person, my family—including, maybe especially including, my deceased ancestors—has always been the most important, most sacred thing in the world.” Another means of connection over the miles was to cook traditional dishes, not always successfully; when she reunites with her refugee parents in Italy, offering them a meal of borsch, her father, disappointed with precooked beetroot and the lack of dill, grimly says, “Mum should give you some tips.” A forgiving Hercules goes on to explain key points of Ukrainian history and culture, knowledge of which, in her parents’ childhood, had been suppressed by the Soviet state in a process locally called movchanka, “the great hush,” in which there was, she writes, not just “The Unsayable” but also “The Unthinkable.” Fortunately, if daringly, her father rebelled against a system in which, Hercules’s mother explains, the state seemed impossibly huge, and the people—“a blurry, intangible concept”—seemed tiny. That process of subjugation, Hercules notes, did not begin with Lenin or Stalin but with Catherine the Great, whose army seized Crimea, deported native Tatars, and began the process of Russifying a region whose language is different enough from Russian, she adds meaningfully, that “the thing is, we Ukrainians understand Russians, but they don’t understand us.”

A thoughtful, valuable testimonial to what it means to be Ukrainian in a time of torment.

Kirkus Reviews