Evie Harbury: Everything you need to know about Czech food

Czech cuisine is “kind of a mystery” to most British people, says chef and cookery author Evie Harbury – “apart from the beer”.

Czechia, or the Czech Republic, is probably best known for its capital Prague, but its food has gone a little under the radar. “People sometimes can’t even place it on a map,” the 31-year-old notes.

England-born with Czech heritage on her dad’s side of the family, Harbury spent her childhood summers visiting her grandmother in South Bohemia, an hour from Prague, making hot chocolate on a wood-fired stove and cooking traditional špekáček sausages over an open fire. “She was in a retired flour mill in a little hamlet, very rural, really off grid.”

Unlike many cuisines around the world, Czech food “hasn’t had its moment”, says Harbury. “When people go to the Czech Republic, they quite often go to just Prague and Prague is amazing, it has an amazing food scene, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, it’s got great Czech food in Prague – but there’s better Czech food outside of Prague. By not exploring, people often don’t actually know what it’s like.”

So Harbury – who started cooking 10 years ago after moving to Czechia and working in a kitchen there, before formally training at Le Cordon Bleu – is on a mission to spread the word about this “small, unassuming” country and its food with her debut cookbook, My Bohemian Kitchen.

Here’s what you need to know…

Food (and drink) is at the heart of Czech culture

“If you are going round to someone’s house, they expect to feed you. You’re never going around just for a drink or just for a cup of tea – there’s always food on the table,” she says, “whether it’s something that they’ve handmade from scratch that morning, that they’ve picked from the garden, or it’s something that they’ve run out to the shop to get.

“It’s kind of a way of telling you that they love you – by feeding or sharing their Slivovice with you.”

Slivovice is a Czech plum brandy, which many people make at home, because there are plum trees everywhere. “When they share a bottle of their homemade Slivovice, that’s basically [saying] ‘I want you in my life forever’. And when you accept it, it’s like saying, ‘Yeah I’m going to carry on drinking with you and spending time with you’.

“Czechs – my family included – are not gushing people, saying ‘I love you so much, you’re the best’, but by giving you a box of Christmas biscuits, for example, you know that they love you, you know how welcome you are and you know that they don’t want you to leave by the extra dumpling on your plate.”

The basics

The first thing people think of is goulash, soups and dumplings, Harbury notes. And it’s true, it shares similarities with neighbouring Eastern European countries, particularly those once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

“Key ingredients are marjoram – either dried or fresh – it’s a herb that’s used in loads of the food, dill is in loads of soups, dill pickles are a big part of the cuisine,” she says. “There’s always something sour on the plate. Dumplings feature heavily – they can be stuffed with fruit or meat, quite often smoked ham.”

Smoking is a popular cooking technique, and important historically. “They have a lot of smokeries, they’re as common as butchers, where you go to buy smoked meat. It’s a lot of meat but it’s not meat exclusively.

Although, “There’s a joke that the only thing that you can get in a Czech restaurant for vegetarians is fried cheese, and that is the one that’s on every menu” (try the marinated wheel of camembert or hermelín, one of Bohemia’s most iconic beer snacks, in the book).

Czechoslovakia (which existed from 1918 to 1992) was quite a ‘food poor country’, she writes, for political and conflict-based reasons. So traditionally the focus on food was to fill people up. ‘So the idea of a purposely light meal or one that excludes nutritional value is not at all in the nature of a traditional Czech kitchen.’

But, “They’re also quite heavy on the bakes and sweet treats too – Czechs are known for sweet treats which are heavily nut-based, with fruit, rather than chocolate.”

It’s seasonal by nature

Typically, people grow a lot of their own veg, says Harbury. “If you can grow it in your garden, you’re eating it. It’s a seasonal [cuisine] and has been for hundreds of years.

“You can’t get red currants outside of June and July, you can’t find them in the shops and if you try and ask someone, they’ll laugh at you.”

So what’s typically grown?

“Cucumbers are grown by pretty much everyone, and then they’re either made into a cucumber salad, or they’re pickled quite often when there’s an abundance of cucumbers. Radishes would be quite often grown and herbs like dill. There’s a lot of forests and people forage wild mushrooms.”

Harbury remembers her grandmother’s potato salad (which there’s a recipe for in the book). “Basically, when you turned up at Granny’s mill for lunch, you knew that potato salad was going to be on the table. It has celeriac in, which gives it a nice crunch, loads of dill and nutty potatoes and mayonnaise. The taste is just so nostalgic to me.”

Although, “She wasn’t such a great cook, hers has always had eggshell in it!”

It’s a cost effective way to cook

Soups – particularly vegetable ones – are a huge feature in the cuisine. “Soups feature in pretty much every meal. A meal isn’t complete unless it starts with a soup.” Think chanterelle and dill soup, asparagus soup or South Bohemian cabbage soup.

Czech broth-based soups are economical as well as being low-waste, says Harbury, because the whole carcass and even the peelings of veg are used. “A Czech might plan a meal which would start with a chicken broth soup and then maybe have chicken schnizel as the main – so you’ve used the bones to start with and the chicken breast for the main, and maybe you’d use yesterdays bread rolls for the bread crumbs on the outside of the schnitzel.”

But anything leftover – like smoked sausage or ham – can also be added to soups.

Dumplings are easier to make than you might think

There are many varieties of dumplings in Czech cuisine but the three main ones are potato-based dumplings, bread-based dumplings (both common in pubs and homes), and yeast-based dumplings. “The bread one is the simplest to make,” says Harbury, “it’s basically just cubes of old bread, herbs and some flour and eggs, squished together. The potato ones have a few more steps but are still simple to make. The yeast dumplings are the trickier ones because you’ve got to wait for it to rise, it’s more like making bread.”

The dough is typically stuffed with fillings like smoked ham, but a real speciality of Czech cuisine is the strawberry dumpling, she notes. “They’re quite often eaten as a main course because they don’t really differentiate between sweet and savoury – it doesn’t matter if it’s a plate-filling food!

“It’s made out of tvaroh which is a cottage cheese that’s made in the Czech Republic and for ease of accessibility I just use cottage cheese. It’s just dumpling dough wrapped around strawberry and then cooked – and then you serve it with icing sugar and strawberry compote.

“There’s nothing else like it in any other cuisine.”

My Bohemian Kitchen by Evie Harbury is published by Murdoch Books, priced £20. Photography Ola O. Smit 2025. Available now