Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (21 page)

You could also neatly follow post-war policy shifts by comparing the 1939 and 1952 editions of
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
.

In the late thirties, a Bolshevik internationalist rhetoric still held sway. This was the internationalism celebrated, for example, by the hit 1936 musical comedy film
Circus
of “O Vast Is My Country” song fame.
Circus
trumpets the tale of Marion, a white American trapeze artist chased out of Kansas with her illegitimate mulatto baby. Marion winds up in Moscow. In the Land of the Soviets, she’s not in Kansas anymore! Here she finds an entire nation eager to cuddle her kid, plus a hunky acrobat boyfriend. In a famous scene of the internationalist idyll, the renowned Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels sings a lullaby to the African-American child.

That scene was later deleted. So was Mikhoels—assassinated in 1948 on Stalin’s orders amid general anti-Semitic hysteria. America? Our former semifriendly (albeit racist) competitor was now fully demonized as an imperialist cold war foe. Consequently, xenophobia reigns in the 1952
Kniga
. Gone is the 1939’s Jewish
teiglach
recipe; vanished Kalmyk tea (Kalmyks being a Mongolic minority deported en masse for supposed Nazi collaboration). Canapés, croutons, consommés—the 1952 volume is purged of such “rootless cosmopolitan”
froufrou
. Ditto
sendvichi, kornfleks
, and ketchup, those American delicacies snatched up by Mikoyan during his thirties trip to America.

In the next reprint, released in August 1953 … surprise! All quotations from Stalin have disappeared. In 1954, no Lavrenty Beria (he was executed in December 1953)—and so no more my favorite 1952 photo, of a pork factory in Azerbaijan named after him.
A pork factory in a Muslim republic, named after “Stalin’s butcher.”

Kremlin winds shifted, commissars vanished, but the official Soviet myth of plenty persisted, and people clung to the magic tablecloth fairy tale. Who could resist the utopia of the socialist good life promoted
so graphically in
Kniga
? Just look at the opening photo spread! Here are craggy oysters—oysters!—piled on a silver platter between bottles of Crimean and Georgian wines. Long-stemmed cut-crystal goblets tower over a glistening platter of fish in aspic. Sovetskoye brand bubbly chills in a bucket, its neck angling toward a majestic suckling pig. Meanwhile, the intro informs us, “Capitalist states condemn working citizens to constant under-eating … and often to hungry death.”

The wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and its absence in shops made
Kniga
’s myth of plenty especially poignant. Long-suffering
Homo sovieticus
gobbled down the deception; long-suffering
H. sovieticus
had after all been weaned on socialist realism, an artistic doctrine that insisted on depicting reality “in its revolutionary development”—past and present swallowed up by a triumphant projection of a Radiant Future. In socialist realist visions, kolkhoz maidens danced around cornucopic sheaves of wheat, mindless of famines; laboring weavers morphed into Party princesses through happy Stakhanovite toil. Socialist realism encircled like an enchanted mirror: the exhausted and hunger-gnawed in real life peered in and saw only their rosy future-transformed reflections.

Recently, I shared these musings with Mom. “Huh?” she replied. Then she proceeded to tell me her own
Kniga
story.

December 1953, she said, was as frigid as any in Russia. The political climate, however, was warming. Gulag prisoners had already begun their return; Beria had just been executed. And Moscow’s culturati were in an uproar over a piece in the literary magazine
Novy mir
. “On Sincerity in Literature” the essay was called, by one Vladimir Pomerantsev, a legal investigator. It dared to bash socialist realism.

Larisa recalls that she was cooking her way through
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
when Yulia handed her the
Novy mir
conspiratorially wrapped in an issue of
Pravda
. In those days Mom cooked like a maniac. Her childhood suspicions of life not being “entirely good” and the future not radiant had strengthened by now into a dull, aching conviction. Cooking relieved the ache somewhat. Into the meals she whipped up from scant edibles, she channeled all her disappointed theatrical
yearnings. Her parent’s multicornered, balconied kitchen offered a stage for a consoling illusion, that somehow she might cook her way out of the bleak Soviet grind.

The
Novy mir
sat on the white kitchen table as Mom assembled her favorite dish. It was a defrosted cod with potatoes in a fried mushroom sauce, all baked with a cap of mayo and cheapo processed cheese. The cod was Mom’s
realist-realist
riff on a
Kniga
recipe. The scents of cheese, fish, and mushrooms had just started mingling when Mom, scanning the “sincerity” article, came to the part about food. Overall, Pomerantsev was condemning socialist realist literature for its hypocritical “varnishing of reality”—a phrase that would be much deployed in liberal attacks on cultural Stalinism. Pomerantsev singled out among the clichés the (fake) smell of delicious
pelmeni
(meat dumplings). He complained that even those writers who didn’t set the table with phony roast goose and suckling pigs still removed “the black bread” from the scene, airbrushing out foul factory canteens and dorms.

Mom leafed through her
Kniga
and suddenly laughed. Oysters? Champagne buckets? Fruit cornucopias spilling out of cut-crystal bowls? They positively glared with their hypocrisy now. “Lies, lies, lies,” Mom said, stabbing her finger into the photo of the suckling pig. She slammed shut
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
and pulled her cod out of the oven. It was
her
dish,
her
creation stripped of the communal abundance myth—liberated from the Stalinist happiness project.

She never opened the
Kniga
again until I pushed it on her in New York.

Prepping for our Stalin’s Deathday dinner, Mom phoned constantly for my menu approval.

Her overarching concept, as usual, was maddeningly archival: to nail the cultural pastiche of late Stalinism. One dish
had
to capture the era’s officious festive pomposity. We settled finally on a crab salad
with its Stalinist-baroque decoration of chimerical anchovy strips (
never
seen in Moscow), coral crab legs, and parsley bouquets. Pompous and pastiche-y both.

As a nod to the pauperist intelligentsia youth of the emerging Thaw generation, Mom also planned on ultra-frugal pirozhki. The eggless pastry of flour, water, and one stick of
margarin
enjoyed a kind of viral popularity at the time.

This left us needing only an “ethnic” dish.

Stalin’s imperialist post-war policies treated Soviet minorities as inferior brothers of the great ethnic Russians (or downright enemies of the people, at times). So while the 1952
Kniga
deigns to include a handful of token dishes from the republics, it folds them into an all-Soviet canon. Recipes for Ukrainian borscht, Georgian
kharcho
(a soup), and Armenian dolmas are offered with nary a mention of their national roots.

Mom rang a day later. “To represent the ethnic republics,” she announced, unnaturally formal, “I have selected … 
chanakhi!
”

“No!” I protested. “You can’t—
it was Stalin’s favorite dish!
”

“Oy,” Mom said, and hung up.

She called back. “But I already bought lamb chops,” she bleated. She had also bought baby eggplants, ripe tomatoes and peppers, and lots of cilantro—in short, all the ingredients for the deliciously soupy clay-baked Georgian stew called chanakhi.

“But, Ma,” I reasoned, “wouldn’t it be weird to celebrate liberation from Stalin with his
personal favorite
dish?”

“Are you totally
sure
,” she wheedled, “that it
was
his favorite dish?”

With a sigh I agreed to double check. I hung up and poured myself a stiff Spanish brandy. Grudgingly, I reexamined my researches.

“Stalin,” wrote the Yugoslav communist literatteur Milovan Djilas on encountering the Vozhd in the thirties, “ate food in quantities that would have been enormous even for a much larger man. He usually chose meat … a sign of his mountain origins.” Describing meeting him
again in 1945, Djilas gasped, “Now he was positively gluttonous, as if afraid someone might snatch the food from under his nose.”

Stalin did most of his gluttonizing at his Kuntsevo dacha, not far from where I grew up, accompanied by his usual gang of invitees: Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov, and Mikoyan. The (non-refusable) invitations to dacha meals were spontaneous, the hours late.

“They were called
obedi
(lunches),” grumbled Molotov, “but what kind of lunch is it at ten or eleven p.m.?”

There was a hominess to these nocturnal meals that suggested Stalin himself didn’t much enjoy officious Stalinist pomp. A long table with massive carved legs was set in the dacha’s wood-paneled dining room, which was unadorned save for a fireplace and a huge Persian carpet. Waiters presided over by round-faced Valechka—Stalin’s loyal housekeeper and possible mistress—left food at one end of the table on heavy silver platters with lids, then vanished from sight. Soups sat on the side table. The murderous crew got up and helped themselves. Stalin’s favorite Danube herring, always unsalted, and
stroganina
(shaved frozen raw fish) could be among the zakuski. Soups were traditional and Russian, such as
ukha
(fish broth) and meaty cabbage
shchi
cooked over several days. Grilled lamb riblets, poached quail, and, invariably, plenty of fish for the main courses. It was Soviet-Eurasian fusion, the dacha cuisine: Slavic and Georgian.

I took a swallow of my Carlos I brandy.

At the dacha Stalin drank light Georgian wine—and, always, water from his favorite frosty, elongated carafe—and watched others get blotto on vodka. “How many degrees below zero is it outside?” he enjoyed quizzing guests. For every degree they were off by, they’d have to drink a shot. Such dinnertime pranks enjoyed a long regal tradition in Russia. Peter the Great jolted diners with dwarfs springing from giant pies. At his extravagant banquets, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s role model, sent chalices of poisoned booze to out-of-favor boyars and watched them keel over. Stalin liked to make Humpty Dumpty–like Khrushchev squat and kick his heels in a Ukrainian gopak dance, or he’d roar as his henchmen pinned paper scribbled with the word
khui
(dick) to
Nikita’s rotund back. Mikoyan, ever practical, confessed to bringing extra pants to the dacha: tomatoes on chairs was a cherished dinner table hijink. (The tomatoes, incidentally, were grown on the dacha grounds.) Throughout this
Animal House
tomfoolery, Stalin sipped, “perhaps waiting for us to untie our tongues,” wrote Mikoyan. These were men who, in their bloody hands, held the summary fate of one sixth of the world.

Ever the meticulous foodie, Mikoyan left us the best recollections of the Vozhd’s dining mores. Apparently Stalin had a fondness for inventing new dishes for his chefs to perfect. One particular favorite was a certain “part soup, part entree …”

Aha
, I said to myself.

“In a big pot,” Mikoyan wrote, “they’d mix eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, black pepper, bay leaf, and pieces of unfatty lamb. It was served hot. They added cilantro … Stalin named it Aragvi.”

No, there could be no doubt: Mikoyan was describing a classic Georgian stew called
chankakhi
. Stalin must have dubbed it Aragvi after a Georgian river or a favored Moscow Georgian restaurant, or both.

I thought some more about Mikoyan. Seemingly bulletproof for most of his career, by 1953 Stalin’s old cohort, former food commissar, and now deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, had finally fallen into disfavor. The Vozhd trashed him and Molotov at Central Committee plenum; then the pair were left out of the Kuntsevo “lunches.” Mikoyan must have counted his days. His son recalled that he kept a gun in his desk, a quick bullet being preferable to arrest, which would drag his big Armenian family with him. Anastas Ivanovich was a brutally calculating careerist. Yet, sitting at my desk with my brandy, I felt a pang of compassion.

The phone interrupted my ruminations.

“I’ve resolved the chanakhi dilemma!” my mother proudly announced. “Before his death wasn’t Stalin plotting a genocidal purge against Georgia?”

“Well, yes. I believe so,” I conceded, bewildered. This intended purge was less famous than the one against Jews. But indeed, Stalin seemed to have had ethnic cleansing in mind for his own Caucasian
kin. More specifically, he was targeting Mingrelians, a subminority of which Beria was a proud son. This could well have been a convoluted move against Beria.

“Well then!” cried Mom. “We can serve chanakhi as a tribute to the oppressed Georgians!”