Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (2 page)

That past is now gone. Vanished after the Soviet Union’s collapse. In place of our “Socialist Homeland” there are cultural ruins, a vast archaeological site of a Soviet Atlantis. But we’re not ready to let go of this rubble. Toppled headless statues of leaders, songbooks and candy wrappers, once-scarlet Young Pioneer scarves, triangular Soviet milk cartons blackened with grime—we cling to these fragments. Unlike the melancholy ruins that fueled the Romantics’ nostalgia for an idealized past, ours are pieces of our physical homes, of the lives we once lived. For us they’re still freighted with meaning: historical, political, personal. And almost always ambiguous.

I started my own collection of socialist fragments in 1974, weeks into our Philadelphia life. Mom instantly fell for
Amerika
. Me? Huddled on our bony refugee sofa I read Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
and whimpered along with the characters: “To Moscow … to Moscow.” My childhood fantasies of capitalist delicacies crashed against our first meal at the Robin Hood Diner. I choked on the cloying fluff of American coleslaw, stared in shock at the Day-Glo that is Velveeta. At home, while
my mother gleefully slapped Oscar Mayer bologna onto alien Wonder Bread, I pined for the fragrant bricks of Moscow sourdough rye and the stale reek of cheapo Krakovskaya kolbasa. I’m pretty sure I’d lost my sense of taste those first Philadelphia months. Because depleted of political pathos, hospitality, that heroic aura of scarcity, food didn’t seem much of anything anymore.

Like a raggedy orphan, I paced our apartment, repeating to myself our sardonic Soviet
defitsit
(shortage) jokes. “Would you slice one hundred grams of kolbasa?” asks a man in a store. “Bring the kolbasa and we’ll slice,” answers the salesgirl. Or “Why are you emigrating?” “Coz I’m sick of celebrations,” says the Jew. “Bought toilet paper—celebration; bought kolbasa—more celebrating.”

In Philadelphia, no one celebrated Oscar Mayer bologna.

To revive my taste buds I began playing a game in my head. Picturing myself at a dacha (country cottage) surrounded by prickly gooseberry shrubs, I’d mentally preserve and pickle the tastes and smells of my Soviet socialist past in an imaginary three-liter jar of memory. In went the Order of Lenin Red October chocolate bars with a mirthful kid on the wrapper. In went the scarlet-wrapped Bolshevik Factory Jubilee Biscuits, the ones that dissolved so poignantly when dipped in tea from a yellow packet adorned with an elephant. In my mind’s eye I unwrapped the foil from the squishy rectangles of Friendship Cheese. Paused to dig an imaginary aluminum fork into the industrial breading of the six-kopek meat patties named after Stalin’s food supply commissar.

There was, however, an ideological cloud darkening my nostalgia exercise. The Friendship Cheese, the kolbasa, the chocolates—all were produced by the reviled Party-state we’d fled. Recalling Mom’s Proust recitations, I’ve come up with a phrase to describe them.
Poisoned madeleines
.

This is my “poisoned madeleine” memoir. It was my mother, my frequent co-conspirator in the kitchen and my conduit to our past, who suggested the means to convey this epic disjunction, this unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths. We would
reconstruct every decade of Soviet history—from the prequel 1910s to the postscript present day—through the prism of food. Together, we’d embark on a yearlong journey unlike any other: eating and cooking our way through decade after decade of Soviet life, using her kitchen and dining room as a time machine and an incubator of memories. Memories of wartime rationing cards and grotesque shared kitchens in communal apartments. Of Lenin’s bloody grain requisitioning and Stalin’s table manners. Of Khrushchev’s kitchen debates and Gorbachev’s disastrous antialcohol policies. Of food as the focal point of our everyday lives, and—despite all the deprivations and shortages—of compulsive hospitality and poignant, improbable feasts.

CHAPTER ONE

M
y mother is expecting guests.

In just a few hours in this sweltering July heat wave, eight people will show up for an extravagant czarist-era dinner at her small Queens apartment. But her kitchen resembles a building site. Pots tower and teeter in the sink; the food processor and blender drone on in unison. In a shiny bowl on Mom’s green faux-granite counter, a porous blob of yeast dough seems weirdly alive. I’m pretty sure it’s breathing. Unfazed, Mother simultaneously blends, sautés, keeps an eye on Chris Matthews on MSNBC, and chatters away on her cordless phone. At this moment she suggests a plump modern-day elf, multitasking away in her orange Indian housedress.

Ever since I can remember, my mother has cooked like this, phone tucked under her chin. Of course, back in Brezhnev’s Moscow in the seventies when I was a kid, the idea of an “extravagant czarist dinner” would have provoked sardonic laughter. And the cord of our antediluvian black Soviet
telefon
was so traitorously twisted, I once tripped on it while carrying a platter of Mom’s lamb pilaf to the low three-legged table in the cluttered space where my parents did their living, sleeping, and entertaining.

Right now, as one of Mom’s ancient émigré friends fills her ear with cultural gossip, that pilaf episode returns to me in cinematic slow motion. Masses of yellow rice cascade onto our Armenian carpet. Biddy,
my two-month-old puppy, greedily laps up every grain, her eyes and tongue swelling shockingly in an instant allergic reaction to lamb fat. I howl, fearing for Biddy’s life. My father berates Mom for her phone habits.

Mom managed to rescue the disaster with her usual flair, dotty and determined. By the time guests arrived—with an extra four non-sober comrades—she’d conjured up a tasty fantasia from two pounds of the proletarian wurst called
sosiski
. These she’d cut into petal-like shapes, splayed in a skillet, and fried up with eggs. Her creation landed at table under provocative blood-red squiggles of ketchup, that decadent capitalist condiment. For dessert: Mom’s equally spontaneous apple cake. “Guest-at-the-doorstep apple charlotte,” she dubbed it.

Guests! They never stopped crowding Mom’s doorstep, whether at our apartment in the center of Moscow or at the boxy immigrant dwelling in Philadelphia where she and I landed in 1974. Guests overrun her current home in New York, squatting for weeks, eating her out of the house, borrowing money and books. Every so often I Google “compulsive hospitality syndrome.” But there’s no cure. Not for Mom the old Russian adage “An uninvited guest is worse than an invading Tatar.”
Her
parents’ house was just like this, her sister’s even more so.

Tonight’s dinner, however, is different. It will mark our archival adieu to classic Russian cuisine. For such an important occasion Mom has agreed to keep the invitees to just eight after I slyly quoted a line from a Roman scholar and satirist: “The number of dinner guests should be more than the Graces and less than the Muses.” Mom’s quasi-religious respect for culture trumps even her passion for guests. Who is she to disagree with the ancients?

And so, on this diabolically torrid late afternoon in Queens, the two of us are sweating over a decadent feast set in the imagined 1910s—Russia’s Silver Age, artistically speaking. The evening will mark our hail and farewell to a grandiose decade of Moscow gastronomy. To a food culture that flourished at the start of the twentieth century and disappeared abruptly when the 1917 revolution transformed Russian cuisine and culture into
Soviet
cuisine and culture—the only version we knew.

Mom and I have not taken the occasion lightly.

The horseradish and lemon vodkas that I’ve been steeping for days are chilling in their cut-crystal carafes. The caviar glistens. We’ve even gone to the absurd trouble of brewing our own kvass, a folkloric beverage from fermented black bread that’s these days mostly just mass-produced fizz. Who knows? Besides communing with our ancestral stomachs, this might be our last chance on this culinary journey to eat
really well
.

“The burbot liver—
what
to do about the burbot liver?” Mom laments, finally off the phone.

Noticing how poignantly scratched her knuckles are from assorted gratings, I reply, for the umpteenth time, that burbot, noble member of the freshwater cod family so fetishized by pre-revolutionary Russian gourmands, is nowhere to be had in Jackson Heights, Queens. Frustrated sighing. As always, my pragmatism interferes with Mom’s dreaming and scheming. And let’s not even mention
viziga
, the desiccated dorsal cord of a sturgeon. Burbot liver was the czarist foie gras,
viziga
its shark’s fin. Chances of finding either in any zip code hereabouts? Not slim—none.

But still, we’ve made progress.

Several test runs for crispy brains in brown butter have yielded smashing results. And despite the state of Mom’s kitchen, and the homey, crepuscular clutter of her book-laden apartment, her dining table is a thing of great beauty. Crystal goblets preen on the floral, antique-looking tablecloth. Pale blue hydrangeas in an art nouveau pitcher I found at a flea market in Buenos Aires bestow a subtle fin-de-siècle opulence.

I unpack the cargo of plastic containers and bottles I’ve lugged over from my house two blocks away. Since Mom’s galley kitchen is far too small for two cooks, much smaller than an aristocrat’s broom closet, I’ve already brewed the kvass and prepared the trimmings for an anachronistic chilled fish and greens soup called
botvinya
. I was also designated steeper of vodkas and executer of Guriev kasha, a dessert loaded with deep historical meaning and a whole pound of home-candied nuts. Mom has taken charge of the main course and the array of
zakuski
, or appetizers.

A look at the clock and she gasps. “The
kulebiaka
dough! Check it!”

I check it. Still rising, still bubbling. I give it a bang to deflate—and the tang of fermenting yeast tickles my nostrils, evoking a fleeting collective memory. Or a memory of a received memory. I pinch off a piece of dough and hand it to Mom to assess. She gives me a shrug as if to say, “
You’re
the cookbook writer.”

But I’m glad I let her take charge of the kulebiaka. This extravagant Russian fish pie, this history lesson in a pastry case, will be the pièce de résistance of our banquet tonight.

“The kulebiaka must make your mouth water, it must lie before you, naked, shameless, a temptation. You wink at it, you cut off a sizeable slice, and you let your fingers just play over it.… You eat it, the butter drips from it like tears, and the filling is fat, juicy, rich with eggs, giblets, onions …”

So waxed Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in his little fiction “The Siren,” which Mom and I have been salivating over during our preparations, just as we first did back in our unglorious socialist pasts. It wasn’t only us Soviet-born who fixated on food. Chekhov’s satiric encomium to outsize Slavic appetite is a lover’s rapturous fantasy. Sometimes it seems that for nineteenth-century Russian writers, food was what landscape (or maybe class?) was for the English. Or war for the Germans, love for the French—a subject encompassing the great themes of comedy, tragedy, ecstasy, and doom. Or perhaps, as the contemporary author Tatyana Tolstaya suggests, the “orgiastic gorging” of Russian authors was a compensation for literary taboos on eroticism. One must note, too, alas, Russian writers’ peculiarly
Russian
propensity for moralizing. Rosy hams, amber fish broths, blini as plump as “the shoulder of a merchant’s daughter” (Chekhov again), such literary deliciousness often serves an ulterior agenda of exposing gluttons as spiritually bankrupt philistines—or lethargic losers such as the alpha glutton Oblomov. Is this a moral trap? I keep asking myself. Are we enticed to salivate at these lines so we’ll end up feeling guilty?