It’s hard to imagine the Mariupol, Ukraine, of Olga Koutseridi’s childhood, where a carefree child would walk with her grandmother amongst the open-air markets, snacking on a bublik while they shopped for that night’s dinner. The Mariupol of today exists in a state of devastation that is far removed from idyllic memories. Besieged by the Russian army and ravaged by bombs at press time for this article, the city and its people became one of the first grand casualties of the Russia-Ukraine war. Olga had to watch from Austin, Texas, as her grandmother and aunt’s home city was reduced to rubble, and they became refugees in their own country. But there was something else Olga began to fear: cultural erasure. When the dust settled, would the Ukrainian culture be as broken as the infrastructure? “Bombs were dropping. Things were being erased. I wanted to save what I could,” Olga says.
What she could save was a humble yet essential cornerstone of her culture: the recipes that defined her time in Mariupol. She began working on a database of family recipes, complete with cultural context and stories. “To me, recipes are a cultural artifact. As
