MLYN simply means “mill”. We didn’t invent the name. We took it from a village. Boremel sits on the high bank of the river Styr in Volhynia, and it is the village our family calls home. Every recipe on this menu is a family one.

The village explains its own name with a story. Beside it stood a dense pine wood (“bor”) and in the middle of it a water mill that roared, when it worked, like the forest itself. People said of it: “yak bor mele”, it grinds the way the wood roars. Hence Boremel. Linguists prefer a different origin, the old first name Boremyr (“a peace-loving warrior”), but in the village the mill won.

We kept the village’s version because it is exactly the job. A mill takes the simplest thing there is (grain) and turns it into flour, and the flour ends up as bread on somebody’s table. Ours is the same: flour, water, eggs, meat, cherries. Nothing clever, all of it by hand.

Alla has been cooking in Portugal for more than 25 years. The mill changed country; what comes out of it did not.