You know how attentive and dedicated a good teacher can be, especially when there's a chance to celebrate their students’ heritage. So when our daughter brought home a request from her teacher to bring in a dish for a multicultural feast, we thought it was a great idea. It's much easier to chew on cultural differences over a good lunch. But before I could fire up the stove, I ran into one small problem: what exactly counts as the quintessential Slavic dish for a fourth-grader?
A friend of mine set out to right a culinary wrong. He wanted to replicate one of the great marketing miracles of the 2000s: how PepsiCo and its subsidiary company Sabra turned hummus into an American staple—much like salsa had done before, and Greek yogurt, sriracha, tzatziki, and kimchi would do after. Notice a pattern? The runaway hits are almost always spreads, sauces, or, once in a while, a fermented “wellness” drink like kombucha. My friend’s candidate was our childhood jewel: kabachkovaya ikra—zucchini caviar, a silky zucchini and tomato spread every kid from our part of the world grew up on. As children, we’d smear it on boiled eggs, hot dogs, plain toast—anything. It shows up in jokes, movies, even a few oil paintings. If hummus could conquer America, why not zucchini caviar?
Spoiler: our culinary cultural ambassador was headed for a spectacular failure. The first problem was color. After you sauté, purée, and simmer zucchini, it turns a brownish tan. Next to hummus’s clean beige, it looked highly unconvincing. Shoppers took one glance and walked away; without a killer backstory, the jars never made it to the shelf. Next problem, or should I say problems, was the name: “Caviar" is too confusing and heavily ethnic. Try telling someone you had “zucchini caviar on rye bread” for breakfast—you’d need serious confidence or zero shame.
I’m no authority on Slavic cuisine. If it comes up on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, don’t waste your phone-a-friend on me. Growing up in the 90s, “traditional” dishes lived mostly on the pages of books, not in our fridge or on the table. The pages of those books overflowed with food: shchi with nyanya—a sheep's stomach stuffed with buckwheat, brains, and trotters; elaborate fish-filled kulebyaka pies; homemade noodles with goose giblets; pot roast with pickles and brined apples; rum-flavored kalachi; potato patties stuffed with prunes; cranberry kissel scented with vanilla; black caviar; herring forshmak; and countless other dishes. Writers like Gogol, Tolstoy, Shmelev, and Ilf & Petrov treated those dishes like characters in their novels, stories, and plays. Thanks to summer mandatory reading in school, the dishes came to feel almost like part of our national identity.
Culinary tourism has turned travel into one big snack run, replacing the quest for new experiences with the hunt for something tasty. Think of all the modern possibilities: Netflix food shows, neighborhood potlucks, and multicultural food festivals. You can take a foodie pilgrimage without leaving your zip code. And with Uber Eats, you don’t even have to get off the couch. Any cuisine you want is just a tap away. But what if you’re not a foodie? What if “ethnic food” is simply the food you eat every day?
In a small European grocery store in Beaverton, I looked for inspiration for an elementary-school multicultural feast. Stores like this are scattered across Oregon and southwest Washington. They’re go-to spots for immigrants, like me, who have been walloped by America’s all-you-can-eat abundance and now crave flavors that feel like home. Let me play culinary Virgil for just a couple of paragraphs while we explore Slavic and Eastern European cooking.
The store is snug, only a few feet shy of tiny. Picture a candy shop where every dessert leaves a bittersweet aftertaste of nostalgia—even if it's a murky jar of pickles. Shelves groan under sacks of kasha and boxes of cookies. Front and center stand the bread rack and the cooler of smoked meats—anything sturdy enough to survive a trans-Atlantic haul and still carry the taste of home. Most of these products are shipped in from the Baltics, Israel, or Germany; sanctions and an endless war have closed off the old supply routes.
The staff can spot “their people” instantly. If a clerk barks in Russian, “Let’s go, pick something already,” take it as a warm welcome or even a hug. You’ve been claimed as an insider. That brusque kindness alone is worth the visit.
You know the staples you’ll find: perfectly roasted buckwheat, garlicky pickles (yes, pickles again), Snickers bars with richer chocolate. Every so often, you stumble on a delicacy that slingshots you so far down memory lane you spend days finding your way back. Perched on a shelf thousands of miles from your birthplace, it promises a round-trip ticket to carefree evenings, the gentle sway of a train compartment, sun-blasted beaches, pine-scented hikes, or the rustle of gift wrap on New Year’s Eve.
Some people crave watermelon, others would kill for a bite of pork cartilage, as my grandma used to say.
One of Oregon’s oldest food wholesalers stocks local stores with more than two thousand “ethnic” items. Sounds like enough to cure homesickness, right? Hardly. Only the stuff that turns a profit makes the cut. Judging by the shelves, the fastest-moving nostalgia triggers are sweets and anything that comes in a salty brine.
I’m as basic as the next immigrant: give me dill pickles and good old Atlantic herring. Sure, WinCo and other stores sell herring, but it’s Pacific, and that fish handles salt as if it’s read a different guidebook. Or maybe the ocean-salinity story is just another thread I cling to while the idea of “home” frays at the edges.
Every immigrant has mental scars like that, flavors that now exist only in memory. Chasing them only feeds the beast of nostalgia—which has a bottomless appetite—and nudges you into increasingly wild kitchen experiments. Anything to quiet the craving.
Eventually, though, you stop shopping for nostalgia. You swing wide of the Euro deli, because the price of those memories is feeling out of place.
Every summer the Slavic corners of the internet erupt into the same debate: What’s the right way to make okroshka? This cold soup of chopped vegetables, herbs, and eggs is one of the few dishes that sounds appealing when the thermometer melts. Old-school Soviets swear by a kefir base; traditionalists insist on fizzy, malty kvass. Then comes the protein question: keep it vegetarian or slip in boiled beef or bologna? Over the years, okroshka has changed almost beyond recognition, yet somehow it has remained okroshka. Until now. Try making it in Oregon and you’ll feel like a fish floundering on the sidewalk—an Atlantic herring flung into the Pacific.
Portland doesn’t have a single Ukrainian, Belarusian, or Russian restaurant. One Russian place popped up in the 2000s, but rumor says it folded after a few too many fistfights or maybe just unpaid bills. You can grab solid “Soviet-style” plates at Kachka or hit food trucks in Oregon City and Beaverton for loaded blini and pirozhki, but you won’t see many immigrants hanging around. That menu is for Portlanders.
The real stuff happens off the grid. In apartments and rental houses, people fill small-batch orders for the comfort foods they grew up on. Maybe not borscht—but pelmeni and shashlik? Absolutely. Honey cake or layered Napoleon cake? No shortage. Those dishes come out whenever tradition gets an official invite: weddings, baptisms, funerals, even business lunches. Moments when dinner stops being just food on the plate and becomes an excuse for near-strangers to discover they share the same memories.
You are what you eat, right? When almost nothing around you feels familiar, you cling to the things that make you feel like yourself. You cook at home more, bring leftovers to the office—anything to keep a grip on your identity. But lunch ends and you’re still hungry. Worse, the hunger turns into a quiet longing. It’s as if you ate only the name of a dish: a vague “fish casserole” idea—some theoretical mayonnaise, poorly-written tomatoes—nothing like the flavor you remember. The real taste keeps slipping away. Must be the ingredients.
Here, even the milk plays by different rules. American cows produce a different version of beta-casein that your Slavic stomach barely recognizes, so milk, ice cream, and everything made from dairy just hits differently. The wheat is beefier too, packed with extra protein that weighs down dough and keeps yeast from lifting it. Bakers trade tips in group chats, swearing by flour from the UAE or Canada. But these are still compromises. No one has managed to bake that bread again.
And here’s the thing: eating “ethnic food” isn’t just about nostalgia or dulling phantom pain for a lost homeland. It’s self-awareness. Over a lifetime, you build a diet that matches your rhythm, your status, your role in the family. Leave home and the whole ecosystem flips: schedule, salary, kitchen, groceries. Change enough of those pieces, and the next piece that begins to change is you.
Cooking is an everyday battle for survival. Every grilled cheese is a tiny middle finger to starvation, a small victory over our own mortality. Win that skirmish and a new front opens up: identity. If it matters that much, why not defend it?
So you improvise. You can hide the shortcomings of substitute ingredients behind spices and fermentation. You can make your own farmer’s cheese, maintain your own sourdough starter, bake bread on Sundays. Before long, your body is a walking diaspora of microbes, your lunches are rituals, your recipes are laws. That’s how the self-deception starts—a DIY “national cuisine,” a Polaroid of the perfect world you left miles behind.
Trouble is, you can’t stay in culinary quarantine forever. Growing or importing everything yourself takes more horsepower than most immigrants have.
Starving is not your Uncle Marvin, as my grandma might say. Hunger doesn't care which lullabies rocked you to sleep as a toddler. For me, every meal is a choice between memory and amnesia. Familiar food keeps me tethered; without it, panic seeps in. I watch local ingredients shine through my old recipes. No braise or slow rise will change their DNA. They’re already squatting in my pantry, my freezer, my bloodstream, reshaping the world from the inside out.
What life waits for me after this dinner? Who will I be when I wake up tomorrow—Colonel Sanders? The green M&M? I want to hang on to myself as long as I can. Forgetting feels too much like dying. Sometimes hunger isn’t just an empty stomach; it’s a warning that your memory is slipping. So I’ll feed that memory. Not today, Colonel, not today.
But I’ve been in Oregon for four years now—maybe it’s time to loosen up and let more of this cheerful local food onto my plate. “It’ll help me adjust faster,” I tell myself. I scoop half-portions, dodge the bags that scream PARTY SIZE or FAMILY VALUE.
Food used to keep my day marching to the rhythm I knew. But everything else has flipped—job, friends, language—so why not the menu, too? Except something still feels wrong.
The frustration builds. The disappointment piles up. My body starts storing all that unused energy in places I never asked it to.
I squint at ingredient lists in six-point type and kick myself for sleeping through high-school chemistry. A quick grocery run now eats an entire evening. Then I look at the people I've recently met and see myself.
Once a surgeon. Once a vegetarian. Now an eligibility specialist who demolishes a double cheeseburger instead of his falafel. He arches over the keyboard, devouring that burger without losing a single drop of sauce. He knows he’s changing. Does it bug him? Absolutely. But he either embraces it or refuses to dwell on it. Neither approach will stop the shift.
My story is one of many. My breakfast is one of many. There is nothing particularly unique about either. Food has only one purpose, I tell myself: to keep you going through the day. That's it.
Try picturing calories as building materials. You’re putting up the house that is your body—maybe a temple, maybe a public library. You’ve got the blueprint: height, window count, even the HVAC specs. What you can’t control is the quality or origin of the lumber, cement, and bricks that show up on the construction site.
What kind of structure will it be? It will probably survive the new climate, and it will definitely be one-of-a-kind—maybe even a little lopsided. But how long can any house last when it’s thrown together with random stuff that just happened to be on hand?
Back home, every ingredient carries a specific memory: the warm sting of garlic, the sun-bright acidity of a tomato, the snap of coriander, the green burst of fresh dill, the blanket-soft hug of sour cream. I don’t taste them anymore. What I get instead is a well-rehearsed choir singing one of three hooks—savory, sweet-and-sour, or tangy. It’s tasty, sure, but it’s also engineered never to confuse the customer. Individual flavors get drowned out by a brass section of seasoning blends, a cymbal crash of “zesty sauce,” or a crescendo of ketchup. Around here, “ethnic food” makes it onto the shelf only if it's a remix of flavors people already know.
Can you remember every dish served at a birthday party two years ago? Or even last month? I can’t. What sticks is who I sat with and what we talked about. That’s how food memories work. We don’t fixate on exact recipes; we remember the occasion, the people, the version of ourselves at the table. That feeling is what we’re really chasing when we crave a taste of home.
Studies say price and packaging shape how we taste food and drink. I’d add one more factor: where it comes from. Maybe that’s why anything shipped in from back home carries a bittersweet punch of nostalgia. Same brand, same recipe, but it’s still out of place. Something’s always missing—something so slippery you can’t catch it even if you fly back to the place you flew away from.
Time to ditch that aftertaste. I’ve stopped searching town for perfect, “authentic” ingredients. These days I stop by the Euro delis for a chat, not groceries. The folks behind the counter are fresh off the plane, their stories still unpolished by memory. Now I look for people to break bread with and start new traditions. A little community that nourishes us with what food can’t: a sense of belonging.
The school’s multicultural feast was a success. Our daughter stole the spotlight with her cheese-filled vareniki. My wife made the cheese from goat’s milk and spent hours working the dough to get the texture just right. But when our daughter set the tray on her classroom table, she introduced them as pelmeni. Later, at home, she shrugged: “Pelmeni just sounds more Russian than vareniki.”
She rides the multicultural currents better than we do. After three years of Taco Tuesdays, I trust her judgment. Food itself isn’t what she misses. She’s homesick for her school friends, her neighbors, and Grandma’s dogs and cats. Nostalgia hasn’t yet attached itself to herring or the vinaigrette beet-and-pickle salad she ate with those faraway people over long winter holidays and lazy breakfasts. But the day will come when those memories fade, and the quickest way to revive them will be with a forkful of that bright-red vinaigrette with crunchy pickles. Or, heaven help us, a big, steaming bowl of borscht.
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