Thoughts in a time of war

I just don't know what to say right now. 

Scratch that. 

I just don't what that is swear-free and publishable to say right now.

I have been doing a lot of stress baking.

The Guardian food section has a #CookForUkraine piece by Olia Hercules this weekend. I'll admit I was hoping for stodge: interesting ways with potatoes, or cabbage, or dumplings. Comfort food, yanno. But the recipes are recipes for spring (for hope?): cauliflower fritters (sound v good, suspect would benefit from a deep fat fryer) and a soup of nettle, sorrel and wild garlic.

A forager's soup. A green borsch made of whatever you can cobble together.

When my babcia, my grandmother, was in her early twenties, she and her family were deported from what was then eastern Poland (so far east it's now well inside Belarus and practically all the way to Minsk) by Soviet forces. They were held -- until the onset of Operation Barbarossa and the entry of the USSR into full participation in the war -- in work camps on the edge of Siberia.

Forty-five odd years later she recorded an account of that time, from her pre-war life to the family's piecemeal arrival in the UK in the late 1940s. Twenty-five years after that my mum steeled herself to transcribe and translate that account for me.

I rarely reread it, but the family tale has been frequently on my mind throughout the last two years. Every time I fretted about shopping deliveries, I remembered the goat, named Rymi, that the family managed to acquire in their first winter in the camp. By all accounts the goat's milk helped to keep the children alive. 

Babcia wrote of their first summer, a time when small vegetable plots exploded into life and brought a measure of hope and relief:

Everyone started making small gardens in the woods, and planting whatever they could: onions, potatoes, cabbage. Oh the wonder, that in such a short summer everything grew so quickly, so in the summer things were already better. I was working in the bakery so we weren’t short of bread at home. We grew potatoes. We had a goat, so we could add flavour and nutrition to the barszcz [borsch]. This was made from sorrel, which [my sister] and I would walk far to find, and rain soaked us to the bone in the process. 

None of this has a point. It's not a particularly unusual story in a world that teems with refugees. Then is not now. Now is not then. But these things linger, somehow. I think I shall pass on the sorrel soup.