One of the most respected holidays of the Orthodox calendar in Ukraine is Christmas, which is traditionally celebrated in the family circle on January 7, as the birthday of Jesus Christ.
The gastronomic culture of the Ukrainian Christmas table impresses with its culinary diversity, harmonious combination of flavours and colourful presentation of dishes, despite its peasant nature. It has been honed for centuries, perfecting the generally accepted recipe, generously seasoned with local features and preferences.
Contrary to the “Soviet” efforts to impose analogues on the national cuisine, traditional dishes of the Christmas table still hold their positions in the gastronomic memory of Ukrainians today. They have become a recognizable business card of the material culture of our people in the world.
Culinary tradition
The culinary tradition of the Christmas table begins on January 6, on Christmas Eve, when the hostess puts 12 dishes on the table following the number of disciples-apostles of Christ. However, the pre-Christian tradition makes an analogy with the 12 months of the year.
The main thing is that all the dishes on Christmas Eve before Christmas should be completed, and the queen of the table should be the ritual dish – kutya. In general, Ukrainians prepare three dishes during the Christmas cycle: rich – on Christmas Eve; generous – on the Generous evening; hungry – on Holodna kutya (on the second Christmas Eve, January 18). An obligatory attribute of the table is also a traditional drink – a concoction, as a symbol of fertility, which the skilful hostess brewed in advance, letting it infuse and fully reveal the fragrant flavours of dried pears, apples, prunes, etc.
The table on Christmas Eve hostess decorated with specially baked bread or dough products.
Given the multiculturalism of the Ukrainian people, the tradition of baking bread on Christmas Eve has several regional variants of names: krachun, kraichun, kerechun, knysh, kalach and simple bread forms, depending on the area where it was baked. Accordingly – from different flours. It could be fresh or meagre. Meagre bread was not consumed during dinner, it was simply put on the table.
Christmas bread was a symbol of the newborn Christ, and therefore, when mixing the dough, holy water was necessarily added to it. Often, another ceremonial bread was placed in the middle of the table – a strutslya (kukelia) – a braid generously sprinkled with poppies, a symbol of the intertwining of fates, births, and the continuation of life. It had to lie on the festive table for three days. According to belief, such bread symbolized the newborn Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes.
Stolen
With a touch of authenticity, the gastronomic tradition of the Christmas menu of Ukrainians has undergone transformations and borrowings from the cultures of other European nations over time, in particular concerning the spread in Ukraine of the world-famous German Christmas cake – stollen. The first known mention of it dates back to 1329: when it was written about the cake as one of the offerings as a gift to the bishop of Naumburg.
However, 14th-century stollen had little resemblance to their modern versions, because they were baked exclusively from vegetable products. In 1430, Prince Ernst of Saxony even appealed to Pope Nicholas V to allow butter to be added to the vault but was refused. In 1491, Pope Innocent VIII issued the “butter decree”, according to which it was possible to drink milk and use butter during fasting but to make donations to the church. Saxony, where the local chef Heinrich Draz added candied fruit, nuts and raisins to the cake, can rightfully be considered the true homeland of stollen.
Some historians even believe that the oblong cake sprinkled with powdered sugar was meant to resemble the baby Jesus. In the capital of Saxony, Dresden, the cake was called “strzel”, and the traditional Christmas market, which is also the oldest in the country, is called the Strizelmarkt. There is also a version that the miners liked to take this aromatic delicacy with them into the tunnel, hence the name.
In the second half of the 19th century in the Galicia territory of Ukraine, the stollen was known in the noble families. Thus, the mention of one of the guests of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi’s house in Lviv, the famous historian Oleksandr Barvinskyi, has been preserved, when he wrote in his diary: “Maria Sylvestrivna’s marzipan stollen smoothed over our sharp disputes.” Today, stollen is a well-known edible souvenir in Ukraine and a gastronomic bridge between traditional Ukrainian cuisine and European culinary classics.
On the morning of January 7, Ukrainians went to church to pay their respects to the newborn Christ. After the end of the church service, the family gathered again for a festive dinner, which was no longer fasting, and the Christmas feast began. Lard, liver, sausage, various fried and smoked foods, everything the soul longed for during fasting, should be on the table. In the afternoon comes the time for a well-deserved rest. You have to go to visit already after lunch. Married children, as a rule, go to their parents. It is an old Ukrainian tradition to reconcile on this day, to forgive each other’s offences, free and involuntary to experience the joy of a life fully.
