"Strawberry dumplings feel like a warm hug in a bowl": Evie Harbury on the magic of Czech cuisine
Chef, food writer and cookbook author Evie Harbury is the author of My Bohemian Kitchen, which introduces international readers to Czech food through recipes and personal stories. Inspired by her childhood between England and the Czech Republic, the book also draws on family memories and traditions. I caught up with Harbury during a recent visit to Prague to talk about her grandmother's influence on her cooking, the inspiration behind the book, and why she thinks Czech cuisine remains one of Europe's most overlooked culinary traditions.
You have just come over from England. What was the first Czech meal you had when you got here?
"Oh, that's a good question. I think it was řízek. It was a fried chicken schnitzel with potato salad, which is one of my favourites and one of the classics."
For listeners who may not know your story, could you tell us a little bit about your connection to both England and the Czech Republic?
"Yes, absolutely. My granny was born in Prague in 1924 and then moved down to South Bohemia. I kind of grew up between England and the Czech Republic because my mother's side of the family is English.
"I spent my childhood living between the two. I went to school in England and most of my life was there, and then we spent the summers and winters here. Basically, any school holidays we had, we were in the Czech Republic."
Your book is called My Bohemian Kitchen rather than My Czech Kitchen. Why did you choose the word Bohemian? Does it refer primarily to the region or also to a particular outlook on life?
"It was a bit of both. I feel that I know Bohemia more than I know Moravia, and so it came quite naturally as the first idea that it's my Bohemian kitchen. My granny's kitchen was in South Bohemia, and so is mine.
"So it was almost a play on the word in the dual sense of the word. The idea was that maybe people who don't know what Czech food is might know what a bohemian is. Even if they don't know the geographical region, they can start to come up with their own idea of what might be in the cookbook from reading the title My Bohemian Kitchen.
"So yeah, it was really about drawing people in and bringing a wider audience to a Czech cookbook."
You have already mentioned your grandmother, and she really is a very important presence in the book. What are some of your strongest memories of cooking and eating with her?
"I always say my granny taught me how to eat. She basically gave me the enjoyment of food and an understanding of what food means to people, and what it meant to her. She taught me the idea that if someone's cooked for you, they're showing you love and warmth.
"My granny wasn't a brilliant cook herself. She loved to eat, but her dishes were fairly limited: maybe potato pancakes and potato salad. It was a very small repertoire.
"But she would take me to the neighbouring house and we'd eat palačinky until we couldn't eat any more. She would also take me to the pub in Červený Újezd in South Bohemia. She'd sit there drinking beer after beer while I, as a ten-year-old kid, ate huge amounts of food.
"I'd be eating loads of soup and she kind of used it as a distraction tactic. She could sit there chatting with her friends and drinking for hours, and if she kept feeding me soup and dumplings, I was perfectly happy.
"That pub, which I still go to now even though my granny's no longer around, is kind of the home and heart of my Czech food experiences with her."
You have described Bohemian cuisine as something of an underdog among Europe's great food traditions. What do you mean by that?
"I mean that it's underrated and not really that well known. I wanted to show that there's room for the underdog, and room for people to hear about more cuisines from around the world.
"Certainly in English-speaking countries there's a real interest in learning more about cuisines people might not know about. I think there are many things in Czech cuisine that are underrated, like strawberry dumplings, for example, which are unlike anything else in any other cuisine.
"It's such a simple dish, but it's incredibly interesting to people who haven't heard of it before and maybe haven't been to the Czech Republic.
"So I think it's about making room for the simple, ingredient-led dishes of Czech cuisine and showing how interesting they can be. Nothing fancy, nothing expensive, just making way for them."
You have already partly answered my question, but still: what made you decide to write a cookbook about Czech food for an international audience? Was there a particular moment when you decided that's what you wanted to do?
"I kind of joke that my whole life was leading up to it, but I think it was a long time coming.
"I trained as a chef. Before that, my first ever restaurant job was in a restaurant in the Czech Republic, in my family's hotel in South Bohemia. So my culinary journey started in the Czech Republic, cooking Czech food, and that was what turned me towards wanting to be a chef.
"That was the initial concept. I know Czech food from learning it in the restaurant, but I've also absorbed it my entire life. I've absorbed the stories that my granny and her friends used to tell me.
"It feels like a warm hug in a bowl. The warmth of cooking strawberry dumplings for someone, whether it's for your children or your friends, is kind of a way of showing love."
"I'd worked on other people's cookbooks for about ten years when I woke up in the middle of the night with jet lag while on holiday and wrote a list of 80 recipes. At the end of the list I wrote: 'This is going to be a cookbook.'
"It kind of evolved from there. I spent a little bit of time working with a literary agent who helped develop the book from that initial idea of 80 recipes into what it could become as a cookbook.
"So it was really about bringing together my life experience and my work experience and putting it all into one 90-recipe cookbook."
When you were researching the book, was there anything about the history of Czech cuisine that genuinely surprised you?
"I was actually surprised by how much of it was historical and how much it has been shaped over the last hundred years.
"I knew what the dishes were, but I hadn't really thought about the reasons behind them. The seasonality of it really surprised me.
"Historically, if you can eat what you grow and you're guided by the seasons, that's such an intrinsic part of Czech cuisine. It's something I really fell in love with the more I researched it."
In one part of the book you introduce readers to what you call 'my Bohemian larder'. If you had to choose a few quintessential ingredients that every Czech kitchen should have, what would they be?
"Oh, that's a hard one to narrow down.
"I would say marjoram would be my number one dried herb if I'm choosing a stocked larder. I think it's such an amazing ingredient. It's not used much in England and you can't get it that easily, so I think it's very underrated, but a brilliant herb.
"I think dried yeast is another one. Although you have to keep replacing it if you don't use it often enough and it goes out of date, it's such a useful staple to have.
"Apart from that, I'd say my favourite fresh ingredient would be chanterelle mushrooms. I just think you can put them into almost any savoury dish and they're always enjoyable."
Is there one dish that you feel best captures the essence of Czech cuisine?
"I think for me it might be strawberry dumplings. I keep going on about them.
"It feels like a warm hug in a bowl. The warmth of cooking strawberry dumplings for someone, whether it's for your children or your friends, is kind of a way of showing love.
"It also reflects the seasonality of Czech cuisine. Depending on the time of year, you're filling them with blueberries or plums, and depending on what you're serving them with, whether you're making them from tvaroh dough or a yeasted dough.
"It kind of epitomises Czech cuisine, and I really love it.
"I also love that it's something so unknown to many people eating Czech cuisine outside the Czech Republic. It often surprises them. The first time I fed it to my cousin, he said: 'I'm not sure I've ever eaten a warm strawberry before.'
"It's those small things that make me realise how magical Czech cuisine is and why I want to share it."
So if you are cooking for someone who has never had Czech food, is this what you would put on the table?
"I always say my granny taught me how to eat. She basically gave me the enjoyment of food and an understanding of what food means to people, and what it meant to her."
"I think so, yeah. When I've done supper clubs in England, strawberry dumplings have always been part of them.
"I guess the other thing is that I like introducing people through dishes they may have had before, like goulash or řízek, which might feel more familiar and less intimidating.
"But strawberry dumplings always feature, and chlebíčky always feature as well."
One thing that comes across in the book is how difficult some Czech recipes can be to translate. Were there any ingredients or techniques that you simply couldn't find an exact English equivalent for?
"There were plenty.
"I think tvaroh was actually the first one I came across, and one of the reasons I started writing the book in the first place. I was trying to cook Czech recipes in England using an English translation of a Czech recipe.
"It translated tvaroh as cottage cheese, but then the quantities didn't quite work because tvaroh is slightly different in texture and moisture.
"So it made me think: okay, I need to make this with cottage cheese, but make it taste like traditional Czech tvaroh. It became a balancing act between flavours and ingredients.
"Also, all of the flours: hladká mouka and hrubá mouka. I simply couldn't find them in England, or if I did, they were expensive. To me, that defeated the point of making a quick, cheap dumpling dish with very expensive flour.
"So I ended up using semolina and working with the textures, trying to make it match. The whole idea was to get more people cooking the recipes rather than scaring them off with ingredients they couldn't get."
You have since published another cookbook called Shrooms, focused on mushrooms, a subject that also has a special place in Czech culture. What attracted you to that project?
"I think it was, as you say, a very natural path from the Czech love of mushrooms and mushrooming.
"When I was approached by a publisher to write Shrooms, it felt like a no-brainer, really.
"It was basically because I'd done so much research into mushrooms for My Bohemian Kitchen, and I'd spent my whole life with my granny looking through her mushroom books.
"Before I even spoke Czech, I would read through this book she had and I'd learned the words jedovatý and jedlý. That was part of my very early Czech vocabulary, before I even knew how to say hello, I think.
"So I felt it was very much part of me. Although it's not a Czech-based cookbook, there is a kulajda recipe in there. I had to make sure I put something Czech in it.
"And even My Bohemian Kitchen has mushrooms on the cover. It kind of felt like the two go hand in hand."
Finally, after My Bohemian Kitchen and Shrooms, do you feel there are still more Czech food stories waiting to be discovered?
"Definitely.
"I would love to keep diving into the world of Czech cuisine.
"I think one thing I wasn't able to cover enough in My Bohemian Kitchen was the baking side of things, the wonderful world of Czech baking, because I was so limited in the amount of baking I could fit in.
"Czech baking is never-ending. I think I limited myself to maybe five or six Christmas biscuits, when there must be thousands.
"So something I'd love to develop further is baking recipes. Baking from the Czech Republic is known across Europe, and I kind of want to take that into America, New Zealand, Australia and England and introduce it there."
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