Archive of Handwritten Culinary Notebooks 1920-1940 — New Acquisition
The museum has received a unique archive — 23 handwritten culinary notebooks of Poltava housewives 1920-1940, preserved in the family archive of the Shevchenko family from Lubny.
In November 2025 a unique archive arrived at the Poltava Folk Gastronomy Museum — twenty-three handwritten culinary notebooks of Poltava housewives, written during 1920-1940. The archive was kept in the family archive of the Shevchenko family from Lubny and passed from generation to generation. The notebooks cover the period of the Holodomor of 1932-1933, when preserving recipes became a form of cultural resistance — in some notebooks recipes are written especially densely, as if the authors tried to fix the maximum culinary memory for future generations.
Among the recorded dishes: full cycles of paskas (soft, hard, cheese), varieties of halushky (Poltava, Hadyach, Myrhorod), varenyky (with cherries, cheese, poppy seeds, potatoes), kulish on beet kvass, uzvar of dried fruits, Cossack borsch with sauerkraut. A separate value is recipes for dishes from 'hunger' ingredients (goosefoot, nettle, wild berries), which appear in notebooks of the 1932-1933 period. Museum restorers conducted a primary examination — paper, ink, binding are preserved satisfactorily. The archive will become the basis of the 'Poltava Recipe Canon' publication series.
