Deep-fried doughnuts

The recipe seems to be from my great-grandmother. But I’m not entirely sure!

In my childhood, these doughnuts were always there. My mom would bake them for Hanukkah and occasionally just because.

Now, I bake these doughnuts every year and invite friends over to enjoy them during Hanukkah.

Kartoshka (“Potato” chocolate sponge cake)

I can't call myself a fan of Soviet cuisine, nor do I feel any nostalgia for it—there's no Olivier salad, meat jello (kholodets), or herring "shuba" in our home. But some Soviet pastries?

View the recipe

pastry

Moldovan pies vărzăre (from Sonya Kopylova)

My grandparents lived in Tbilisi (my grandfather was a Tbilisi Armenian, and my grandmother, a Jew on her mother’s side, evacuated to Georgia from Kharkiv as a teenager and stayed there). When I was little, in the 1980s, every winter, they would send us a package from sunny Georgia to our home in the Moscow suburbs.

View the recipe

sauces

Experimental mango salsa (a la chutney)

This is a story about Sonya’s close friend, a director of photography. One evening, long before all the wars and disasters, they were sitting in the kitchen, arguing the way only a director and a cinematographer can. The fridge had a strange assortment of ingredients, including an overripe mango, so Sonya improvised and made a mango sauce out of it.