Our cookbook of the week is Chesnok: Cooking from My Corner of the Diaspora: Recipes from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia by Polina Chesnakova.

Polina Chesnakova ‘s third cookbook, Chesnok (Hardie Grant North America, 2025), was a decade in the making. An ode to her roots in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, the author and culinary instructor had been building toward it since launching her food blog of the same name in 2015.

It took maturity and experience to get to the heart of the Soviet diaspora’s food culture. Her previous cookbooks, Hot Cheese (2020) and Everyday Cake (2022), helped Chesnakova figure out the framework.

“I don’t think I would have been able to tap into those stories when it was 2015, and I was 23 years old,” she says. “Having some wisdom under my

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