His gift to my mother on Saturdays was sleeping in. Saturdays were for rest that children didn’t need. His gift to my future husband was to train me into proper wife material, as in, woman who cooks. Each week my father threw open my bedroom curtains, splashing weak tea of morning light onto walls as he shouted, <<Up, up, up!>> I opened one, then second weary eye with quiet groans, peeled myself slowly out of bed, <<Ready.>>

In morning’s empty oven we made omelets, soup, bread, honey cakes, thin blini with red caviar, salaty without lettuce— empty filler, if you asked him— karp, that lowly fish. While beneath American palates it was most delectable in tomato sauce, considered delicacy by many, especially if you caught it yourself. Kuritsa, roasted smothered in mayo, secret ingredient to crispy skin. Kartoshka boiled, grated, fried into pancakes. Lots of chesnok in everything, antiseptic & tongue-sharp, held over from days of inadequate refrigeration & long, cold winters.

We’d stop to sprinkle sol at every step, on every wound, every knife-cut intentional— cuts numbering thousands, each suitable for different cuts of meat, different trails of tears. Luk was to be grated with spunk, vigor, anger— you did it fast enough if you clipped your thumb’s knuckle— it infuses food with meaning, with feeling, makes it pan-tender, makes it <<nice.>> Sprinkling more sol, until it hurt, until you tasted it. At times we cooked with too much spice; my novice hands with too much heat, his experienced ones with too much force. <<Sahar is spice, sol is mineral>> he’d say every Saturday— our weekly sermon, wisdom applicable to every cooking lesson— as pickles fermented in our bathtub, as if we dragged it all that way in our trans-Atlantic migration. Vodka sitting on our table already by 7am. His guitara— every Slavic home’s guest of honor— resting on our sixth chair, where my great- grandma used to sit.

Two wedges of omelet basted with slices of pomedory & bologna— known as Doktor sausage, once so rare to find on market shelves during Perestroika, but so common in American grocery store aisles. I carefully plated slices for each member of our family, half speaking no English, youngest already forgetting Ukrainian. On those Saturdays, he taught me dozens of ways to cook dozens of eggs— two always remaining raw for my father, eggshells discarded in kitchen sink for my mother to find every night but Saturday— that secret ingredient in his special recipe for hangovers, covering up all those bitter flavors, covering up all those things that shouldn’t have been family secrets but we felt forced to swallow anyway. Four generations in one apartment, just like in our homeland, as if revolution never changed anything.