Feastern Europe is a recipe blog dedicated to the cuisines of Central and Eastern Europe.
Chicago, IL
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I created this blog in April 2019 as a way to document for myself some of my favorite dishes I encountered in my travels and in my studies of the cultures and languages of Eastern Europe. I was inspired to do it many years ago, in fact, while I was attending the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. I sat at a luncheon next to an incredibly earnest young blogger who was writing about Georgian cuisine (Georgia the country in the Caucuses, not the American state). That afternoon I remember thinking, if she can write a blog about the cuisine of Georgia, a tiny country with a population under 4 million, I could write one about Bulgarian cuisine (a country about twice the population of Georgia). They have in common their relative obscurity for most Americans.
Well, it took me about ten years to get up the nerve to start working on it. And once I dove in, I decided it would be better to expand the content to the whole of Eastern Europe. That would have the effect of greatly increasing the material I could cover and broadening the appeal to a wider audience. Furthermore I thought it would be interesting to explore how some of the same dishes are reflected in each of the different cuisines.
One of the toughest challenges in writing a blog of this sort is determining what is “authentic.” On the one hand, the make up and origin of many of the dishes are often disputed within a given country. Add in regional variants and the disagreements can get downright ugly. On top of that there are many immigrant versions of various “old world” dishes. I’m writing in the United States of America after all. People have ideas about what some of the more well-known dishes should be because it’s the way their grandmothers always made them or the way they were handed down--or thought to have been handed down--from their immigrant forebears. And of course there’s often the problem with finding “authentic” ingredients. Sometimes we will just have to make do with something approximate that’s easy to find in a U.S. supermarket.
I hope you’ll take the journey with me and even try out some of the recipes. I strive to make the prose understandable yet detailed enough so you won’t have too many questions. And I welcome your comments (and your disagreements). I don’t consider myself an expert by any means--and sometimes I’m trying a recipe on the blog for the first time as I write it. Usually I consult as many original recipes as I can find, search for the commonalities, try to deduce what is most authentic and then adapt it for my purposes. I’m always striving to have the recipes be accurate and, as I said, “authentic.” Enjoy!
