Be pre­pared to fall in love with dill and sour cream. This is the advice I shared with my fiancée when I start­ed to cook my way through Alis­sa Timoshkina’s Kapus­ta: Veg­etable-For­ward Recipes from East­ern Europe. She was skep­ti­cal at first, but soon began to look for­ward to dill’s herba­ceous slap and the vel­vety tang of sour cream — ubiq­ui­tous ele­ments of East­ern Euro­pean cui­sine — in their native dish­es. In the end, we were both deeply grate­ful to Tim­o­shk­i­na for illu­mi­nat­ing an old world of foods and food­ways for a glob­al audience.

This book is orga­nized into sev­en sec­tions: cab­bage, beet, pota­to, car­rot, mush­room, dumplings, and pick­les & fer­ments. By using this for­mat, Tim­o­shk­i­na escapes con­ven­tion­al recipe cat­e­go­riza­tions (i.e., entrée, side dish, appe­tiz­er, etc.) while also giv­ing read­ers-qua-cooks a thor­ough cul­tur­al his­to­ry of these ingre­di­ents and gen­res. Through­out the book, Tim­o­shk­i­na ori­ents the read­er by includ­ing numer­ous intro­duc­tions — defin­ing East­ern Europe at the out­set, show­cas­ing the prin­ci­pal ingre­di­ent or genre at the begin­ning of each sec­tion, and vivid­ly describ­ing the tex­tures and fla­vors before every recipe. Hun­gar­i­an, Pol­ish, Tatar, Ukrain­ian, etc. vari­a­tions; brief ety­molo­gies; and expla­na­tions as to why par­tic­u­lar dish­es ought to be con­sid­ered part of the region­al gas­tro­nom­ic oeu­vre are espe­cial­ly helpful.

The recipes and cor­re­spond­ing pho­tos in this book are heimish—cozy, casu­al, and ooz­ing with old-world shtetl charm. One stand­out dish is the beet and rye choco­late cake. This earthy, moist, and sub­tly spiced cake was a clear win­ner at my Shab­bat table, with guests ask­ing for mul­ti­ple slices all week­end. The rye gives this a mild chai-like spice that pairs excep­tion­al­ly well with the choco­late ganache, tak­ing this from a love­ly snack­ing cake to a fes­tive, bet­ter-than-birth­day choco­late cake. (I rec­om­mend adding a table­spoon of cocoa to the dry ingre­di­ents and sep­a­rate­ly using coconut cream to make a parve ganache.)

One of the most heart­warm­ing (and mod­ern) dish­es includ­ed in the book is ​“Rosie’s Buck­wheat Stir-Fry,” a mush­room kasha kim­chi dish devel­oped by Timoshkina’s four-year old daugh­ter. It’s a dish with deep Slav­ic roots that pairs excep­tion­al­ly well with ​“Cab­bage and Fen­nel Braised in a Creamy Sauce.” Like so many dish­es in this book, this can be adapt­ed to your pantry: use gribenes or shmaltz for a kasha var­nishkes vibe; serve it with a fried/​poached egg for brunch; light­en it up with some hearty greens in the win­ter, aspara­gus in the spring, or zuc­chi­ni in the sum­mer; or sea­son it with papri­ka, cumin, and white pepper.

I am excit­ed to con­tin­ue cook­ing from this book and wel­com­ing the fla­vors of East­ern Europe into my home. The recipes are sim­ple, and the fla­vors pro­found. Make sure you have some qual­i­ty rye bread on hand (I’m talk­ing the dense, dark loaves that Sholem Ale­ichem described; not the ​“pumper­nick­el” rye made with only a whis­per of this grain), as many of the sal­ads, soups, and shmears call for a cou­ple of slices.