KIEV (dpa) – Ukrainian pop star Iryna Bilyk had trouble getting through customs when she visited New York last month, but it wasn’t because of the international war on terrorism.
“It was my drummer Feodr. He had listed a kilogram of salo (pork fat) in his customs declaration,” Bilyk told a visibly shocked reporter for Cegodnya newspaper.“The Americans actually had trouble believing people ate the stuff, never mind that salo is our national Ukrainian food.”Where Germans tuck into their wurst (sausage), and the French fancy their fromages, Ukrainians cherish white pork lard – they call it “salo” – in all its delectable forms: fresh cut from the hog, slightly salted, cured with apple wood smoke, rendered into a spread and mixed with green onions, smeared on a slab of dark bread, and of course as the preferred chaser to vodka.Carpathian farmhands eat salo with rye bread and tomatoes for breakfast.Odessa sailors prefer it with coffee and crackers on the night watch. At gatherings of Kiev intelligentsia, it is considered politically correct and patriotic to offer a plate of salo appetizers, even if no one is likely to eat them.Salo aficionados have their preferences. Some choose pure fat raw with the skin on, others go for a product similar to smoked bacon. Chefs at Kiev’s high-end Svitlitsia restaurant offer salo sliced paper-thin, sprinkled with fresh-ground garlic and black pepper.At the greasy Harchovania cafe in Kharkiv’s outskirts, the dish of the house is steamed dumplings and sour cream, with blubbery cubes of salo on top.But no matter how you cut it, Ukrainians are proud of their salo.At a recent reception for executives from Shanghai, Kiev Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko confronted his guests – like he does with most foreign delegations – with a table fully eight metres long, loaded end to end with salo-based delicacies.“It is our national narcotic,” Omelchenko told the Chinese, urging them, “Have some!”Even the spectre of the 1986 nuclear power disaster in Chernobyl that is still one of the few things that most of the world has heard about Ukraine, pales locally in the face of the purported healthful benefits of salo.“We have tested the animals in the region for the presence of radioactivity,” said Hryhory Danilo, Chernobyl engineer.“Pigs raised in farms (near Chernobyl) are not only perfectly safe, we believe that because of the lack of fossil fuel pollution in the area, their salo is particularly healthful.”True, news of the dangers of high-fat diets has penetrated to better-educated Ukraine, and certainly some younger Ukrainians can’t bear salo.Oksana Kurbak, 20, a student at Kiev’s Taras Schevchenko university and part-time model, reacted much like many – if not all – her counterparts in Paris or Mardid would if offered a free sample of salo-on-a-stick.“Eeeeew!”, Kurbak responded during an open-air promotion, making a face.But even Ukrainian physicians concede talking most Ukrainians out of salo would be like, well, putting the Russians off their vodka, or divorcing the Dutch from their herring.“Salo is a key component of the Ukrainian cuisine and it has been so for centuries,” said Lilia Babiy, cardiology specialist.“We will have little chance of convincing our patients stop their use of this product; in practice it is better to to convince them to drink less and eat more vegetables.”Ukrainians have joked about their passion for pork fat for almost as long. One of the best-known salo jokes goes like this:A hut in a Ukrainian village catches fire, so the husband runs in and starts throwing out slabs of salo into the street.Wife: You fool, save the children!Husband: If we have salo for the winter, we can always have more children!Municipal leaders in the Carpathian city Romny led by Mayor Viktor Strelchenko have gone so far as to organize an annual “Love of Salo” festival, its central events last year being Ukrainian folk dances, arts and crafts displays, and (naturally) a wide selection of salo booths and tastings.Canny businessmen in the trading city Odessa updated the humour- in-salo theme last holiday season by manufacturing candies with Ukrainian cossack pictures printed on the foil wrappers and the chocolates filled with – you guessed it – salo.And at least for some Ukrainians, some of the time, it seems eating salo has clear practical benefits.“Our secret weapon is salo,” Vitaly Klitchko, the two-metre Ukrainian heavyweight fighter was quoted in Fakty newspaper as saying. “We eat salo with bread, salo with vegetables, and salo with pickles. And of course we eat salo with salo.“That’s why we are so strong.”
