The Mission of Larysa Onyshchuk — A Decade of Poltava Gastronomic Research
The founder of the Poltava Folk Gastronomy Museum — Larysa Onyshchuk — sums up a decade of field expeditions through Poltava villages: 2000+ recorded recipes, 50+ old culinary notebooks.
In September 2025 the Poltava Folk Gastronomy Museum marked a decade of field work by its founder — Larysa Onyshchuk, a Ukrainian researcher of the culinary heritage of Poltava region. Over ten years of work Larysa together with a team of ethnographers visited over two hundred villages of the region — from Sorochyntsi to Hadyach, from Kremenchuk to Lubny, recorded about two thousand authentic recipes and collected a collection of fifty old culinary notebooks of the late 19th — first half of the 20th century.
The museum's mission: to return Poltava region to the gastronomic map of Ukraine not as 'one of the regions', but as a centre of a distinctive kitchen tradition formed at the crossroads of steppe, forest-steppe and Dnipro cultures. By the way, Poltava region gave Ukrainian culture two literary masters of gastronomic prose — Ivan Kotliarevskyi (1769-1838) with his register of dishes in 'Eneida' and Mykola Hohol (1809-1852) with detailed culinary descriptions in 'Sorochyntsi Fair' and 'Evenings on a Farm Near Dykanka'. The museum continues this literary tradition through modern ethnographic documentation.
