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

Chef and cookbook author Hercules (Home Food) blends personal history with political urgency in this poignant account of her family’s roots in Ukraine. What begins as a visceral tale of survival and cultural preservation—Hercules recounts the emotional turmoil of persuading her parents, uncle, and aunt to flee Kakhovka in southeastern Ukraine and reunite in northern Italy after Russia invaded in 2022—soon becomes a meditation on the century that Hercules’s ancestors have spent in the region. Along the way, she uses food as a through line, recalling her anxious search for beetroot to prepare borsch while she awaited her family’s arrival in Italy, and taking note of how she sublimated her grief about the invasion by imagining the former lushness of her parents’ garden, now no doubt ravaged by Russian forces. Throughout, Hercules’s prose is sensual and evocative, highlighting the herbal-scented ceremonial scarves called khatas and hand-embroidered linens that decorate Ukrainian life. Her reflections on grief and resilience, meanwhile, are wonderfully complex: “Any hint of pleasure felt like a betrayal,” she writes, admitting that she took great pleasure in the control that cooking for her family brought her. At once elegant, affecting, and mouthwatering, this is not to be missed. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Calligraph. (Aug.)