I was enchanted by the premise of “Grandmas Project” as soon as I read about it in the New York Times. It is a web series in which film directors document their grandmothers as they cook. The women also share their stories, dreams, aspirations and give advice, and these short 8-minute films are so tender and heartwarming that watching them makes me feel as if I’m cooking with my grandmother Valentina. Although my cooking lessons come from diverse sources, learning from Valentina gave me a deeper understanding of food as a way of connecting with others, and that’s exactly what makes “Grandmas Project” so compelling.

Valentina learned cooking a young woman married to an army officer and stationed in a military town in eastern Ukraine. Living in the shared housing, she met other “army wives,” who hailed from different parts of the Soviet Unions and whose lessons gave her cooking a multicultural flair. Some of Valentina’s signature dishes were Georgian spicy soups, Armenian stewed vegetables and Tatar meat pies. She also had a big collection of pickled vegetables, which in her recipe books were marked as “from Zulia, Dagestan” or “Natalya, Saratov.” When we prepared these pickles together, Valentina told me about her friends, and even though she had no news from these women for many years, it felt as if they were present.

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I was saddened to learn that perfumer Olivier Pescheux passed away on July 10 in Paris after battling a long illness. He was only 57 years old, too young to leave us. Olivier was one of the first perfumers I met when I first became interested in fragrance, and he was supportive of my interest. I found him down-to-earth and charismatic.

Born in Paris in 1966, Olivier started his perfumery career in Bangkok after graduating from ISIPCA. He also worked at Annick Goutal and Kao Corporation, but most of his work was done at Givaudan. Olivier was well known for his expressive, distinctive style and his successful masculine fragrances. It was he who designed the best-selling Paco Rabanne One Million scent.

Some of Olivier’s most interesting work can be found at Diptyque where he created Orphéon, Fleur de Peau, and Eau Mohéli. I also suggest trying Parfums de Marly Herod, Montblanc Explorer, and Roberto Cavalli Precious Leather. Olivier’s style lent itself to fragrances of different genres and types. “I want my fragrance to tell a story, but above all, I want to make the wearer feel good,” he told during one of our last meetings in Paris. Olivier, you will be missed.

My condolences to Olivier’s family and his colleagues.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

On Thursday, Russia launched a missile attack on Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, about 60 km from the Polish border. A jewel of Renaissance art, Lviv has a long history. Today it stands in mourning, grieving over the lives lost in the bombardment. Some of its beautiful buildings are in ruin. A few years ago, I spent a memorable time in Lviv with my mother and fell in love with the city. Below is my tribute to its fin-de-siècle allure–and the nostalgic beauty that unities Lviv with another gorgeous city on the other side of the border, Kraków.

In 1808 Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, the youngest son of the famous composer, traveled to Lemberg. Today it’s Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, but when the eighteen year old pianist was packing his sheet music and books and setting off on his journey, it was located in Galicia, an entity created by Joseph II after the partition of Poland in 1772. (It was the same Joseph that commented about the Marriage of Figaro, “too many notes, Mozart.”) While young Mozart was aware that he was trading Vienna for the provinces, he was in dire straits. Lemberg seemed like a promising place for a pianist to build his career and return to the capital. Mozart ended up staying for more than two decades.

Young Mozart’s early letters to his family were filled with mentions of his “loneliness [Einsamkeit].” He acutely felt the Galician isolation and complained that his inspiration was deserting him. He envisioned all of the brilliant conversations he could have experienced in Vienna society, the music, the books, the arts, and despaired of finding anything similar in Lemberg. Franz Mozart’s output over his lifetime was indeed small, yet, what becomes obvious is how much he drew on the local surroundings and how creatively he interpreted them.

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I spent much of last year traveling and researching the way spices and other aromatics are grown. My pursuit took me to the clove gardens in Indonesia, cumin fields in India, and the cassia cinnamon groves in Vietnam. The word ‘spice’ contains the same root as the word ’special,’ and I wanted to discover how these unique fragrant plants are transformed into essences and used in perfumery.

The journey was full of revelations. I learned, for instance, that processing clove essence involves not the buds of the tree, the familiar cloves of mulled wine and gingerbread, but rather the stems and leaves. All parts of the clove tree contain essential oil with varying scent profiles. The leaves release sweet-smelling essence, but the one derived from the stems has a smoky, woody accent.

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I’m delighted to share that my book The Rooster House is now available in the USA and Canada. It has been released by Abrams Press on June 27th and it’s now on the bookshelves around the country. The New York Times ran a review of my book earlier this week.

“When something of ours, something we took for granted as being ours, is destroyed before our eyes,” writes the Ukrainian-born journalist Victoria Belim, early in her absorbing memoir, “we are destroyed along with it.” “When Going Home Becomes a Fact-Finding Mission,” The New York Times, June 27, 2023

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