Krabovyi Salat (крабовий салат, crab-stick salad)

The most honest thing about this salad is that nobody boasts about it, then the bowl comes back scraped clean. Pink crab sticks, yellow corn, white egg, rice holding everything together, mayonnaise glossing the whole business until it looks like a New Year table under electric light. It is not old village food. It is newer, cheekier, and very much alive.

Krabovi palychky, crab sticks, arrived in our kitchens as a small luxury that ordinary people could actually buy. No one in Sokolivka thought it was crab from the sea. We weren't fools. But diced into a big bowl with sweet corn and eggs, it tasted festive, generous, and modern in the way the 1990s wanted to feel, even when the cupboards knew better.

The one thing that decides the dish is the rice. Cook it until the grains are tender but still separate, then cool it completely, because warm rice drinks mayonnaise like a thirsty auntie and turns the salad heavy. Cold rice gives you little edges, little spaces, so the corn pops and the crab sticks keep their sweet saltiness. Aunt Nadia wrote once, for another mayonnaise salad, "don't dress it while it is thinking," and she was right. Let everything cool, then bring it together.

Serve it cold, in a deep bowl, enough for eight guests or one hungry Ukrainian. A bit of cucumber makes it fresher. Dill makes it ours. And if anyone makes a joke about fake crab, hand them a spoon and watch what happens.