The Perils of Holiday Feasting

By Volodymyr Kish

Every January at about this time, I am immensely gratefully that the double Christmas and New Year’s season for Ukrainians is mercifully winding down.  I say mercifully, since my body is making it perfectly clear to me that it can no longer withstand the continuous four week onslaught of Ukrainian food and drink that accompanies the festivities.  My digestive system is in desperate need of a holiday, while my kidneys and liver are threatening to go on strike.  Each night in my dreams I am revisited by the ghosts of varenyky and cabbage rolls of the recent past, reminding me of my gustatory over indulgences.

Ukrainian foods are indeed both a blessing and a curse.  They are ultimate comfort foods, honed and perfected over the ages to fill and satisfy the working peasant’s appetite.  The operative word of course is “working”, as our ancestors toiled hard, ensuring that those calories had little chance to establish themselves in the arteries and mid-sections of their bodies.  Sad to say, in our modern age of more sedentary occupations, those calories become quick and direct contributions to our body’s lipid assets.

And yet, who can resist the temptation of a mound of steaming varenyky smothered with sour cream, or a generous serving of fried onions and bacon bits known as shkwarky, or even a generous covering of mushroom gravy?  And then, of course, there are the patychky, lovingly marinated chunks of pork tenderloin, redolent with garlic, skewered on wooden sticks, then breaded and baked to perfection!  And what would a Ukrainian meal be without cabbage in its many forms, either stuffed with rice and ground meat into cabbage rolls, or in the form of sauerkraut, fried with kovbassa, creating an aroma that instantly gets the digestive juices flowing.

But we are but starting to scratch the surface here!  When I tell my non-Ukrainian friends that on Christmas Eve it is customary to have a twelve-course meal, they are amazed by that number.  Yet, in reality, the number of different items that grace our festive tables frequently greatly exceeds that apostolic number. 

There are some specialty foods that one typically sees only at Christmas. For the meatless Holy Christmas Eve Dinner (Sviata Vecheria), kutia is served as the traditional first course made of wheat, honey and poppy seeds, followed by vushka or kraplyky, tiny dumplings filled with mushrooms or herring that are added to the borscht, the royalty of Ukrainian soups.  Then there are various fish dishes, ranging from pickled herring to Ukrainian variations of various Yiddish favourites such as stuffed gefilte fish or shmyr, a pat made of ground sardines and cream cheese. There are pickled vegetables of all kinds – pickled cucumbers, pickled beets, pickled peppers, pickled tomatoes, pickled onions and more.  For Christmas, there is always kolach, the rich egg bread sculpted into many decorative forms, and studynets, that grand Slavic concoction of shredded pork or chicken in aspic, accompanied by grated beets and horseradish. 

And then, when one is as stuffed  as can be after a meal, out come the desserts. This year, as has become tradition, I made one of my mother’s signature holiday favourites – khrustyky, deep fried, light crisps of egg-rich dough dusted with icing sugar that are dangerously addictive.

Every Christmas, my mother would also make her famous fruit cake, a dark, incredibly rich slab of nuts and fruit that was enhanced with the addition of the better part of a bottle of brandy.  Also typically served over the holidays are poppy seed rolls, rugalky (crescent rolls stuffed with ground walnuts and poppy seeds), and medivnyk, a rich honey cake.

For Ukrainians in Canada, the Christmas season according to the Julian calendar starts on December 19 with the Feast of St. Nicholas and ends on January 19 with Yordan, or the Blessing of the Waters.  It is a time of family reunions, religious celebrations, partying, and of course, eating and drinking.  It is for the latter that I will be doing penance in the months to come.  Fortunately, Lent starts in February and that will be the signal for some serious fasting and dieting.  After all, Easter is just around the corner, and the start of some more serious feasting!