Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (30 page)

Bolshevism did away with private life, Walter Benjamin noted after his 1927 visit to Moscow. Describing a communal apartment, he wrote: “One steps through the hall door—and into a little town.” It’s
a poignant image, Magrittian almost. Except that the “town” in Baballa’s apartment forty years later wasn’t that little: more than fifty people jammed into eighteen rooms situated along a long narrow hallway. Unheated, with water-stained walls and no lights—the bulb was perpetually stolen and bartered by the
alkogolik
Tsaritsin—the hallway was a canyon of terror and peril for me. There you could catch pneumonia, fracture an ankle stumbling over the passed-out body of the self-same Tsaritsin—or worse. The
worst
? The ghoulish figure of demented old Mari Vanna, who meandered about in her torn once-white nightgown with a chamber pot in her hands. If she was feeling frisky she’d tilt it toward your feet.

I won’t share details about the communal bathroom other than the fact that its three toilet cabins were separated by plywood, through which the peeper Vitalik liked to drill holes. Next to this peeper’s gallery lay the shared kitchen.

Please note that there is no word for “privacy” in Russian.

Fittingly, the kitchen of Baballa’s apartment constituted a multifunctional public space, abustle with all manner of meaningful collective activities. Here were some of its functions:

AGORA: Glorious news of overfulfilled Five-Year Plans blasts from the transistor radio suspended above the stove. Neighbors discuss grave political issues. “Motherfucking Jew-traitor Maya Spiro from room number six conspiring against the Soviet Union again.” MARKETPLACE: “Nataaaasha … Saaasha … Trade me an onion for half a cup of buckwheat?” BATHHOUSE: Over a kitchen sink women furtively rub black bread into their hair. Furtively, because while bread is believed to promote hair growth, it is also a sacred socialist treasure. Its misuse could be interpreted by other neighbors as unpatriotic. LEGAL CHAMBER: Comrades’ Court tries neighbors for offenses, including but not limited to neglecting to turn off the kitchen lights. A more serious crime: stealing soup meat from the pots of your neighbors. In Baballa’s rambling flat, the thief is a tiny, aristocratic-looking old lady whose mournful expression sometimes resolves into a beatific smile that seems glued to her face. To combat her theft, some neighbors hang skull-and-bones signs over their pots; others put padlocks on lids. LAUNDRY ROOM: As you
enter the kitchen on a cold dark winter morning, half-frozen stockings swaying from clotheslines flagellate you in the face. Some neighbors get angry. The tall blond Vitalik grabs scissors and goes snip-snip-snip. If stockings were imported, a fistfight ensues. The communal apartment kitchen turns into an EXECUTION SQUARE.

People cooked, too, in communal kitchens; cooked greasy borscht,
shchi
, kotleti, and kasha. The petite fireball pensioner Valentina Petrovna, who babysat me sometimes, baked the world’s most amazing pirozhki, seemingly out of thin air. Misha’s mom, Baba Mila, fried succulent
defitsit
chicken tenders that Mother pilfered. Eating, however, was something neighbors did in the ideologically suspect privacy of their own rooms. In the entire memory of Baballa’s apartment, that salat Olivier feast was the only exception.

The occasion was joyous indeed, exceeding the apartment’s very bounds. A kitchen expansion on the floor above Baballa’s!

Inside that kitchen, a door led to a tiny, bare, four-square-meter space that had been for years occupied by an old lady we all called Auntie Niusha. Miniature and birdlike, with sunken eyes, a sweet disposition, and a pervasive odor of formaldehyde, Auntie Niusha loved her job as a morgue attendant, loved sharing inspirational stories about washing cadavers. One day Niusha herself left this world. Not because neighbors added ground glass to her food to acquire her room, as sometimes happened in other communal apartments. Oh no no no—truly and genuinely!—Auntie Niusha died of natural causes.

Her death, everyone hoped, would result in a much-needed kitchen expansion. The
upravdom
(the building’s manager) had other ideas. Although the apartment above Baballa’s was already dangerously overcrowded even by the nine-meters-per-person standard, the
upravdom
instantly registered a new tenant in Auntie Niusha’s room in exchange for a bribe. One evening people came home from work to find a notice from the Housing Committee. The next morning, it said, a new tenant would be claiming Auntie Niusha’s dwelling space.

“Fuck the
upravdom
’s mother!” screamed the Tatar janitor.

“Over my dead body,” howled the Jewish expert in Sino-Soviet relations.

And so, in a feat of passionate and—for once—genuine
communality
, the communal apartment above Baballa’s sprang into action. They performed their Stakhanovite labor in the night’s slumbering darkness, so as not to attract the attention of informers on other floors.

By morning the door and walls had been brought down and the rubble trucked off. The entire expanded kitchen floor had been repainted, the seams between the kitchen and Auntie Niusha’s former room sanded down and the space filled with kitchen furniture.

The kitchen was now four square meters larger. Not a trace of Niusha’s dwelling space remained.

The
upravdom
arrived bright and early with a new tenant. The tenant was dangling keys to Auntie Niusha’s room on a key ring shaped like Lenin’s profile.

“Bastards! Motherfucking traitors of Rodina!” roared the
upravdom
. “Where’s the room?!” He started kicking the wall in front of which Auntie Niusha’s room had stood.

Everyone went speechless with fear. It was after all illegal to alter a dwelling space. Only Octobrina stepped forward.

She was an exotic creature, this Octobrina. Of uncertain age, her fire-engine red hair always in rollers, her eyes wandering, her lips curled in a perpetual amorous smile. A not altogether unpleasant delusion possessed her. She was convinced both Stalin
and
Eisenhower were madly in love with her. “He sent me a cable to say ‘I miss you, my dove,’ ” she’d announce every morning in the line for a toilet. “Who—Stalin or Eisenhower?” the
alkogolik
Tsaritsin would mutter grumpily.

“Room? What room?” Octobrina said, staring innocently and lasciviously straight into the
upravdom
’s eyes. “Please leave, my dear, or I’ll telephone Comrade Stalin this minute.” It was a good thing she didn’t invoke Eisenhower. Or maybe she wasn’t so mad after all.

Stalin had been dead for almost two decades. Still, the
upravdom
stepped back and instinctively shuddered. Then he sucked in his cheeks with great force and let out a blistering spit. Against the
kollektiv
he was powerless. Anyway, bribes for rooms—that wasn’t exactly legal either.

That night the whole building threw a feast of celebration in the new kitchen. Herrings were whacked against the table to loosen their
skins, then arranged on pristine sheets of fresh
Pravda
. Vodka flowed like the Don. Moonshine, too. In an act as communal as Auntie Niusha’s room demolition, all four floors contributed to the construction of the salat Olivier. The Georgian family produced bunches of scallions—improbably in the middle of winter—to lend the salad a summery twang. Neighbors carted in boiled potatoes and carrots and pickles; and they dipped generously into their stashes of canned crabmeat and Doctor’s Kolbasa. Special thanks went to our Misha, the food store manager with a proprietary attitude toward socialist property, for the
defitsit
peas and a whole case of mayonnaise. I can still picture Octobrina in her grime-fringed, formerly frilly housedress, piping mayonnaise flowers onto the salad with such abandon, you’d think both Joe
and
Ike were arriving for dinner. After a few bites of the Olivier salad I fell into a mayonnaise-lipped stupor.

I don’t recall the exact taste, to be honest, but I assume it was pretty fab.

Now, in Mom’s tiny kitchen in Queens, she doesn’t share my nostalgic glow.
“Foo!
I’ve never had salat Olivier so laden and clunky as the one at Baballa’s party,” she exclaims, still dicing the veggies into precise half-inch pieces for her more ethereal version. “Who mixes chicken, kolbasa, and crab?” Well, I can’t blame her for having less than tantalizing memories of Baballa’s apartment, where neighbors, straight to her face, called her
yevreechka
(“little kikette”).

Like every Russian, Mom maintains her own firm ideas of a perfectly composed Olivier. And as with most Soviet dishes, the recipe’s nuances expressed social belonging beyond one’s personal flavor preferences. Soviets felt this acutely in the Stagnation years under Brezhnev. On the surface, the propaganda machine continued to spin out its creaking myths of bountiful harvest and collective identity; beneath, society was splintering into distinct, often opposing milieus, subcultures, and tightly knit networks of friends, each with its own coded vocabulary,
cultural references, and political mind-set—and, yes, recipes—that signaled how its members felt about the official discourse.

With salat Olivier, identity issues boiled down mainly to the choice of protein. Take for instance militant dissidents, the sort of folk who typed out samizdat and called Solzhenitsyn “Isayich” (note the extremely coded, Slavic vernacular use of the patronymic instead of first and last names). Such people often expressed their culinary nihilism and their disdain for Brezhnev-era corruption and consumer goods worship by eschewing meat, fish, or fowl altogether in their Olivier. At the other end of the spectrum, fancy boiled tongue signified access to Party shops; while Doctor’s Kolbasa, so idolized during the seventies, denoted a solidly blue-collar worldview. Mom’s version—I’d call it arty bohemian—featured delicate crabmeat, along with a nonconformist crunch of fresh cucumbers and apples to “freshen up” the Soviet taste of boiled vegetables.

But Mom’s suddenly not so sure about my homespun semiotics.

“Eh? Whatever,” she says with a shrug. “In the end didn’t all the versions just taste like mayo?”

So they did! They tasted of the tangy, loose-textured Soviet Provansal brand mayo, manufactured for the first time in 1936 and taste-tested and approved by Stalin himself. Initially scarce, Provansal began to lubricate Soviet consciousness in the late sixties and early seventies, which is when salat Olivier took center stage at the table.

Specifications of a totem: short, 250-gram, potbellied, and made of glass, with a tight-fitting lid. If, as Dostoyevsky supposedly said, all Russian literature comes out of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat,” then what Gogol’s garment was to nineteenth-century Russian culture, the Provansal mayonnaise jar was to the domestic practices of Mature Socialism.

Our Brezhnevian days, so “abundant,” “friendly,” and “happy,” were accompanied by a chronic and calamitous shortage of
tara
, the term for packaging and receptacles. Hence the deep bonds between
people and their
avoskas
, into which salesladies would dump fish or meat—unwrapped, unless you brought along your own sheets of
Pravda
. Of this time too was the fetishistic adulation that comrades lavished on foreign-issue plastic bags—washing them tenderly with a fancy East German bath foam called Badoozan, hanging them to dry on the slipshod balcony, parading them at haute soirées the way modern fashionistas show off their Kelly bags.

Still, nothing matched the use—the reuse—value of the mayonnaise jar. I toted mayo jars full of nails, needles and threads, and other paraphernalia of socialist junior toil to my school “Labor” classes. Both my babushkas sprouted scallions from onion bulbs in mayonnaise jars. My drunken Uncle Sashka used them as a) spittoons, b) ashtrays, and c) drinking vessels at certain unlovely canteens from which thoughtless comrades had pilfered the vodka glasses. When spring came and the first flowers perfumed Moscow air with romance, gangly students carried mayonnaise jars filled with lilies of the valley to their sweethearts. (Being short and delicate, lilies of the valley—and violets, too—were unjustly ignored by the Soviet flower vase industry, which favored tall, pompous blooms like gladioli.) And which
H. sovieticus
, strapped for cash three days before payday, hadn’t stood in line to redeem a sackful of mayo jars for a handful of kopeks? Elaborate rituals sprang up around the act of glass redemption.