About Petra and Cook Like Czechs

Every good Czech story begins at a table.

A table crowded with good things to eat: golden kolache still warm from the oven, fresh rye bread spread thick with lard and sprinkled with salt, or Sunday svíčková that has simmered slowly for half the day. Nobody leaves this table hungry. For us Czechs, this is one of the ways we say who we are.

My name is Petra Kupská, and I am the person behind Cook Like Czechs, a food blog written from the Czech Republic, a small country in the heart of Europe.

Here you will find everything from hearty everyday classics to festive Christmas baking, and the stories and traditions behind every dish.

My mission is simple: to help you bring real Czech recipes into your own kitchen, wherever in the world that kitchen may be. You do not need to have grown up with this food to cook it well. You only need someone beside you who is happy to guide you, and that is what I am here for.

Northern Bohemia - where I am from

I was born in Liberec, in the north of Bohemia, in the middle of the 1970s. It is a place framed by the Jizera Mountains, and I have always loved the shapes of the hills and the forests around me.

But my family has not always lived here. After the Second World War, my grandparents left their small villages in the Czech interior and moved north to resettle this borderland. My father's family had roots in Podkrkonoší, the foothills beneath the Giant Mountains. My mother's family was from the Vysočina Highlands, also called Horácko, a region stretching across the border between Bohemia and Moravia.

My two grandmothers

If this blog is about Czech food, then it is also about my grandmothers, who first taught me that home is not something we simply inherit. It is something we come to understand through the stories, places, and people who lived before us.

I was fortunate to have both of my grandmothers nearby. Grandma Milada lived with us down in the valley, so we called her dolení babička, the grandmother from down below. Grandma Blažena lived high up in the Jizera Mountains, half an hour away through the forest, so she was hoření babička, the grandmother from up above.

Both grandmas were wonderful storytellers, and I loved them dearly. It is Blažena's story, though, that I carry with me most.

She was born in 1922 in Dobrohostov, into a family of millers. Later, her father lost the family fortune on one unfortunate investment, shares in a company that traded coffee. Still, she managed to finish a business school in Prague. During the World War II, her year was threatened with forced labor in the German Reich. At the time, she worked for a Jewish family who were preparing to leave for Australia, and she was meant to go with them.

But local matchmakers introduced her to my grandfather Antonín. She married him, and as a married woman keeping a household, she was spared the transport. Her first son was born in Prague in 1942, and after the war, in 1945, the whole family moved north, to the borderland where I would one day be born.

Years later, in the 1990s, I traveled with her back to the Vysočina Highlands, the region she came from. In Úsobí, a village near her birthplace, she stopped in front of a house and told me this: in that house, a girl had once been born, and one day a young man from our family came to say goodbye because he was leaving for America. He promised that once he had earned enough money, he would return home and marry her.

And, my grandmother said, that is exactly what he did.

Yet for all those stories, what I treasure most are the ordinary summers at her farmstead. She and my grandfather kept a place full of animals, and we grandchildren spent whole summers there. We herded the geese, gathered eggs from under the hens, and on the one day each year of the zabíjačka, the pig butchering, we hovered nearby at a curious but careful distance.

Now, cooking for my own family, I find myself returning to those times again and again. I see how much of who I am in the kitchen was shaped there.

How my Czech foodblog began

I will be honest about how this blog began.

In the spring of 2020, as the world shut its doors during the pandemic, I started Cook Like Czechs as a kind of therapy, a thread connecting me to the world outside. To keep my son Honza's English sharp while schools were closed, we made a deal: I would cook and write the recipe in Czech, and he would translate it into English.

We published a few Czech recipes, and then the blog sat quietly for a few months, half forgotten.

Just before Christmas of 2020, people began to write to me. And as I read their messages, I understood that something much larger than a recipe blog was forming around these dishes.

Here are a few of the first voices I heard:

"My mother's family immigrated to the United States from what is now Czechoslovakia in the 1800s. We still have family in Bílov. When I was young, my grandmother made frgály, which she called kolache. Since she passed away in the nineties, I have continued to make these traditional desserts for my family on holidays. With help from you and others, I will eventually make this dessert as well as my grandma did." - Matt

"My boyfriend is Czech and I am Italian, and before meeting him I knew nothing about Czech cuisine. Your website has been a godsend. The recipes are clear and easy to follow, the tips and tidbits are useful, and the photography is lovely. These potato pancakes were excellent, and I am trying the fruit dumplings next." - a reader in Italy

"When I was a girl, I remember making what my grandma called 'fleetczkey' with her. I would google it and only find casserole recipes. Then I came across the Czech name flíčky and found your recipe. This is what I remember." - another reader

Do you see what I saw?

So many people were not only asking how to cook. Behind almost every message there was something more: a grandmother, a family table, a memory someone wanted to hold on to. For some, it was the food of a country their family had left long ago. For others, it was simply the comfort of a dish that tasted like home.

That is when Cook Like Czechs found its true purpose: to keep Czech culinary heritage alive, and within reach of everyone who feels drawn to it.

More regional and heritage recipes ahead

I will tell you a secret. The older I grow, the more I long to know where I come from.

So my brother and I began to search, following our family back through the old parish registers of Podkrkonoší, on my father's side. The records gave us many wonderful surprises. Among our ancestors, we found a midwife and a gravedigger whose names appear again and again across whole decades: the woman who welcomed the village's newborns into the world, and the man who laid its people gently to rest.

All of this has changed what I want for this blog, too.

Alongside the classic Czech recipes people know and love, I want to explore more regional Czech food: the dishes that belong to one particular corner of the country, one family kitchen, one village, one memory. In this way, I hope Cook Like Czechs can set a table for every part of these lands.

Before we sit down, a special thank you to my son Honza, who first helped me bring these recipes into English, and to my mother, named Blažena after the grandmother whose story I told you above, for their steady support and for believing in what I do.

So welcome. Pull up a chair. Let's cook, and remember, together.

As we say in Czech, Dobrou chuť!

- Petra

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