Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (29 page)

Our kindergarten sweets were off this scale altogether. Like most Moscow candies, they were manufactured by the Red October Chocolate Factory, Mikoyan’s pet confectionary. Only recently have I learned that Red October produced two versions of the sweets: one for the People, the other for the Party.
Nomenklatura
chocolates had the same names—Squirrel, Red Poppy, Hail to October—and wrappers that looked the same as those on their proletarian doubles. But they possessed a vastly superior flavor thanks to exalted ingredients. As a kindergartner I had no idea about any of this. I did know that our candies, hefty in weight and wrapped smartly in classy matte paper, exuded power and privilege. Unable to eat—or toss—something so status-laden, let alone imagine sharing it with my friends outside the fence, I stashed the sweets inside my underwear bag.

My food dumping went well until a smell began to rise from behind the radiator. First it was a disagreeable whiff, then a noxious stench that caused everyone to scream
foooo
and bolt away from the wall. It was Zoya Petrovna who discovered my decomposed pile. Mother was immediately summoned, with me, to the director’s office. A small, sniffling woman, the kindergarten director had mothy hair pulled into a tight bun and the colorless Slavic features of a career
apparatchik:
in Mother’s mind doubtless a high-ranking KGB informant. She was formidable despite
her size. Once she’d attacked a flasher who loitered by our fenced-off playground, pounding him with her sharp-edged handbag. The flasher fled with a genuinely terrified expression.

“Your child, Comrade
Frum-kina,”
commenced the director, enunciating mother’s Jewish surname with a meaningful curl of her lip, “your child doesn’t really belong to our
kollektiv …
” Was I being expelled from the Central Committee kindergarten? Was Mother going to lose her job—or worse? In a panic I rushed out to the dormitory and grabbed my precious underwear bag.

Mother brought me home on a sled, yanking it over the snow slopes with uncharacteristic aggression. I felt for her, a woman alone with no childcare. But then again, she had only herself to blame—raising me as a non-friendly kid, alienating me from the
kollektiv
—traumatizing my appetite with her dissident nonsense! Moodily, I pulled a candy out of my bag. It was called
ananas
. First I sucked on the crunchy chocolate shell, then slowly licked my way toward the center. The filling was so excruciatingly luscious with the synthetic-exotic flavor of pineapple, I shuddered. To mollify Mother, I decided to offer her the last remaining spectacular centimeter. I expected her to groan and topple into the snow, paralyzed with ecstasy and guilt by the taste. But she just absent-mindedly chewed and kept pulling the sled.

The following Monday I was back among the Georgian’s pines, gagging on caviar behind the tall wire kindergarten fence.

And Khrushchev? In his lonely, depressing retirement, he occupied himself with growing corn at his dacha.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“W
here does Homeland begin?”

So wondered a popular croonful tune of the seventies performed in that saccharine Mature Socialist tone that instantly infantilized the listener.

“With a picture in your alphabet book?… That birch tree out in the fields?”

Russians of my mother’s age, who spent most of their living hours standing in line, might insist that Rodina (Homeland) began with
avoska
. From the word
avos’
—“with any luck”—this expandable mesh bag lay in wait in the pocket of every Russian, a stubborn handful of hope that
defitsit
Moroccan oranges or Baltic sprats might suddenly appear at some drab corner store. Our luck sack was a triumph of Soviet optimism and industrial strength. Inside the
avoska
you could practically fit a small tractor, and the sturdy cotton thread resisted even the sharp corners of the triangular milk cartons—yes, the blue and white leaky ones that dripped their accompaniment as you walked.

My generation, children of the Stagnation Era who now tend to dote on their Mature Socialist childhoods, might joke that Rodina began with their first black market jeans, or bootlegged Beatles LP. Or perhaps it began with the Young Pioneer parades where we sang Rodina songs, adding a nearly silent
U
in front of the
R
, which transformed the word into
urodina:
ugly hag.

That subversive hiccup before the
R
—this was the seventies. You could be disrespectful to Rodina and still enjoy four fun-filled August weeks at a Young Pioneers’ camp—paid for by the State.

I, of course, experienced no such regime-sponsored enjoyment. My cruel mother wouldn’t send me to camp, and she kept me home sick on that festive spring day in 1973 when our entire class was inducted into Young Pioneers. Never did I stand on Red Square making a five-finger salute to the clattering of drumbeats and the squawks of bugles. Never felt the garlicky breath of Vassa, our school’s Pioneer leader, as she fumbled with the knot of the scarlet tie around my neck. Never solemnly swore to “love Rodina, to live, learn, and struggle, as Lenin bequeathed, and as Communist Party teaches us.” Luckily, School 110 considered me a de facto Pioneer anyway and let me wear the tie, that small, sacred scrap of our Rodina’s banner.

As for where Rodina
really
began … Well, maybe it began, for all of us, with
salat Olivier:
with the colorful dice of cooked potatoes, carrots, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, peas, and some protein to taste, the lot smothered in a sharp, creamy dressing.
Apparatchiks
, impoverished pensioners, dissidents, tractor drivers, nuclear physicists—everyone across our eleven time zones relished salat Olivier, especially in the kitschy, mayonnaise-happy seventies. Borscht was banal; Uzbek pilaf or Georgian walnut chicken a little exotic, perhaps. But Olivier was just right, unfailingly festive and special on account of such
defitsit
items as canned Hungarian Globus-brand peas and tangy Soviet mayo, which was always in stores but never without a long line. Birthdays, engagements, dissertation-completion bashes, farewell parties for Jews who were emigrating (these sometimes felt like funeral wakes)—there was no special “table” without salat Olivier.

And who doesn’t remember big cut-crystal bowls of salat Olivier at New Year’s celebrations where families gathered in front of their television sets waiting for the Kremlin clock to strike twelve, and for Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev to adjust his reading glasses, rattle his medals, thunderously clear his throat, and then shuffle his papers in a desperate scramble to locate the first line of his New Year’s address?

The first line was always the same: “Dear Compatriots!”

Nowadays Mom and I must have at least a thousand various salad recipes in our collective repertoire. I like Thai and Catalan. Mom has perfected the simple green salad, possibly the hardest one of all to master. Hers has toasted pine nuts and chewy dried cranberries to punctuate a shallot vinaigrette veiling impeccable lettuce leaves. It’s as non-Russian as food ever gets. And salat Olivier? We don’t make it often, and never idly, careful not to disturb its aura of festiveness. A precious heirloom of our non-idyllic socialist pasts, the Olivier recipe gets pulled out from the memory drawer to commemorate a particular moment in life.

One day Mom decides that it’s time once again. Her sister, Yulia, is coming to visit from Moscow. We will throw a party and Olivier will anchor the appetizer spread.

I arrive to help with the cooking. Mother’s apartment, overheated as always, is permeated by the sweet, earthy smell of boiled root vegetables. In the dining nook off the kitchen, the potatoes and carrots sit, cooked in their skins—awaiting their transformation into salad. We peel, chop, chatter. As often happens in Mom’s dining nook, time and space begin to blend and compress. A taste of a Lebanese pickle that uncannily resembles a Russian gherkin leads to a snippet from a Rodina song, which in turn rouses a political morality tale, or reawakens a recollection of a long-ago dream, of a fleeting pang of yearning.

Piling potato, carrot, and pickle fragments into a bowl, I think that Olivier could be a metaphor for a Soviet émigré’s memory: urban legends and totalitarian myths, collective narratives and biographical facts, journeys home both real and imaginary—all loosely cemented with mayo.

We keep chopping, both now lost in our own thoughts.

I am seven when the grandest Olivier feast I can remember occurs. Tables are pushed together in a cavernous kitchen unevenly lit by greasy dangling bulbs. Potbellied men haul in chairs; women in splotched aprons dice and mince. A banquet is being prepared in a shared kitchen
inside a long four-storied building on Kuybishev Lane, two minutes by foot from the Kremlin.

We’re in the
kommunalka
, the communal apartment into which I was born. Where I heard Misha the black marketeer puke out his delicacies; where Dad’s mother, Babushka Alla—Baballa, we call her—still lives; and where Mom spent three agonizing years after my birth until we moved out to Davydkovo.

We don’t live in Davydkovo anymore, by the way. Before my first school year, Dad decided that he
did
want a family full time—but only if we moved to the center of Moscow. In a bureaucracy-defying maneuver, Mom finagled a dwelling swap between herself and her parents. Naum and Liza moved to our apartment, where bracing walks awaited among Stalinist pines, and we took over their central two-room flat in the Arbat, only one metro stop away from Baballa’s
kommunalka
kitchen. Which is where we’re crowded this evening.

I visit Baballa here every weekend, often staying overnight in her dank, high-ceilinged room. On our sleepovers Grandma and I play cards and dine on no-fuss frozen dumplings followed by the “Snowhite” meringue torte she has toted home from the elite canteen at Gosstroy, the State Construction Committee where she earns a whopping 260 rubles a month. I’m in awe of Baballa: her swagger with vodka and billiards, her three-tiered slang, her still-sexy looks. She’s my playmate and role model, the one who pressured Mom to allow me to grow my hair long just like hers. Whenever construction workers whistle at her, I wink and whistle back proudly while she slanders the offenders in a voice roughened by a lifetime of Belomor cigarettes. Baballa is the world’s coolest granny. But her
kommunalka
simultaneously fascinates me and scares me so much, I get butterflies in my stomach each time I visit.