The apple is one of those ingredients so omnipresent it becomes invisible — you stop tasting it and start assuming it. Alissa Timoshkina's project in this excerpt from Lozhka is to make you see it again, and she largely succeeds. Five recipes, five registers: breakfast, salad, braise, ferment, pudding. That range is the argument. The oladky (Ukrainian yeasted-adjacent pancakes) are the strongest opener. The technique of embedding grated apple in the batter while pressing sliced apple directly onto the cooking surface — caramelised with a knob of butter mid-flip — is both clever and practically useful. The double apple application amplifies without doubling the labor. This is what good recipe writing does: it teaches a transferable move, not just a result. The roast chicken salad with tahini 'mayo' is the most complex dish structurally, with three sub-components (pickle, mayo, salad) that share a brine — the pickle liquid seeds the tahini sauce, pulling the whole plate into coherence. The ice-cube trick for rescuing split tahini is a genuine piece of practical knowledge, not a flourish. The fennel and granny smith combination is not new, but the acid layering (cider vinegar, lemon twice, the pickle brine) is more deliberately constructed than the genre usually attempts. The duck leg braise is the most straightforward entry. Sauerkraut, red cabbage, apple, cranberry, caraway, bay — this is Central European larder cooking executed cleanly. It asks little of the reader and delivers a reliable cold-weather supper. Timoshkina adds orange zest and juice, which lifts what could otherwise read as merely heavy. The 90-minute covered oven braise at 200C is a reliable method for duck legs and the recipe doesn't overcomplicate what already works. The fermented apple salsa is the most interesting recipe in the collection for what it implies about the book's ambition. Granny smith, white grapes, jalapeño, dill, fennel seeds, three-to-six days lacto-fermentation: this is not weekend-cooking territory, it's pantry-building. The instruction to use it in egg mayo instead of capers is the kind of lateral suggestion that distinguishes recipe writers who actually cook from those who transcribe. Three months' fridge life gives the recipe real utility. The baked rice pudding closes the set with a Ukrainian rizhnyk-adjacent technique — par-cooking rice in milk, combining with a beaten egg-sugar mixture, folding in sautéed apple and raisin, then baking to a golden set top. The method produces a texture that is neither porridge nor cake but something in between, and the orange zest against cinnamon and raisin is a combination that earns its place rather than arriving by default. This is comfort food with internal logic. Timoshkina's voice across all five recipes is quiet and precise. She tells you when to stop mixing, what the batter should look like before you proceed, what 'silky' means in the context of tahini, and when to trust the process ('it will work'). That's the posture of a teacher, not a stylist. Lozhka, published by Quadrille at £28, appears to be making a case for Eastern European cooking as a coherent, seasonal, technically interesting tradition — and on the evidence here, it has the recipes to back that case.
