“I always thought I was Russian,” explains food stylist and cookbook author Susan Spungen. Her grandmother Pearl was a petite and kind woman of the old world who didn’t like to discuss her journey to America and how her family fled pogroms around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. “I knew they had a harrowing journey, so I had this image of them running across a countryside — I thought it was Russia,” Susan adds. 

That image came into sharper focus when the latest chapter of the Russia-Ukraine war broke out early in 2022. Through an older cousin who worked with their grandparents at their jewelry store, Susan learned that when Pearl was 17, her sisters, and mother fled their hometown of Zhmerynka in Ukraine, southwest of Kyiv. “They had to escape on foot and get rides in horse carriages to avoid being caught,” Susan shares. At one point, they hid in haystacks. They traveled without any credentials or the family patriarch, Joe, who had left a year earlier — likely to set things up for the family in Philadelphia. 

When they managed to reach the Ukrainian port city Odessa, they took a boat on the Black Sea to Romania where they stayed for a year. Pearl worked on a farm in Bucharest while she was there and received a Romanian passport that the family still has. Finally, she traveled with her sisters and mother through Italy on to France where they took a boat from Le Havre to the U.S. It was in Philadelphia at a sweater factory that she met Susan’s grandfather Meyer, a fellow Ukrainian Jew.

“I was a little shocked to realize that I myself am half Ukrainian, and that I never knew this. Ukraine was part of Russia then, but the distinction didn’t matter to me until now,” Susan wrote in her newsletter Susanality. The war and her newfound knowledge of her family’s past nudged her to recreate some of Pearl’s recipes like kreplach and snappy poppyseed cookies — a sort of back pocket recipe that she would whip up when her grandchildren were around. 

Like Susan, her grandmother was always in the kitchen. “That's where I remember seeing her and hanging out with her,” Susan says. But, she’s quick to clarify that she didn’t learn to cook at her grandmother’s knee, instead, she watched and chatted with her.

Susan remembers Pearl’s culinary repertoire was strictly Ashkenazi, made up of dishes like chicken soup with kreplach or matzah balls, herring, and stuffed cabbage the family calls prakes. With the exception of an American convenience or two, like the Heinz 57 sauce she used to make the prakes, Pearl’s cooking was rooted in Eastern Europe and looking back, Susan says: “I'm glad that I had firsthand knowledge of those tastes of the old country — food that she brought with her from her homeland.”

When Susan was a teenager and her grandmother suffered a stroke, she sat beside her hospital bed. Unsure of what to say, Susan told Pearl that she missed her chicken soup. Pearl’s eyes welled up with tears. “That's my last real memory of an interaction with her and it was over food because that's how she gave,” Susan says. “She couldn't speak or really communicate, but that communicated a lot to me.”

In addition to a recipe for Pearl’s poppyseed cookies, Susan also shared recipes with us for toasted barley pilaf with mushrooms and dill from her grandmother Essie and skillet roasted beets with buttered kasha and walnuts that’s inspired by her family’s Eastern European heritage.