Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (40 page)

A
bysta
, the bland Abkhazian cornmeal mush, comes alive with lashings of salty young local
suluguni
cheese. And so I tucked some
suluguni
into my Abkhaz gruel, then watched it melt.

It was Christmas Day, 1991—a bit before seven p.m.

In the kitchen of a prosperous house in the winemaking countryside, women with forceful noses and raven-black hair tended to huge, bubbling pots. My boyfriend, John, and I had arrived a few days before in Abkhazia—a breakaway autonomous republic of Georgia one thousand long miles south of Moscow. Primal, ominous darkness consumed Sukhumi, the capital of this palm-fringed subtropical Soviet Riviera. There was no electricity, no drinking water. On blackened streets teenage boys waved rifles and a smell of catastrophe mingled with the salty, moist Black Sea wind. We’d come during the opening act of Abkhazia’s bloody conflict with Georgia, unresolved to this day. But here, in the country house of a winemaker, there still lingered an illusion of peace and plentitude.

The women hauled platters of cheese bread into the room, where dozens of men crowded around a long table. Innumerable toasts in our honor had been fueled already by homemade Izabella wine. Not allowed by tradition to sit with the men, the women cooked and watched TV in the kitchen. I dropped in to pay my respects.

At exactly seven p.m. my spoon of corn mush froze midway to my mouth.

A familiar man occupied the screen. The man wore a natty dark pinstriped suit, but exhibited none of his usual autocratic vigor. He seemed tense, spent, his skin tone a loony pink against the gray backdrop with a scarlet Soviet flag on his left. The contours of the birthmark blotches on his forehead looked drawn with thick pencil.

“Dear fellow countrymen, compatriots!” said Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev. It was six years and nine months since he’d assumed leadership of
Sovetsky Soyuz
, the Soviet Union.

“Due to the situation which has evolved …”

The
situation
being as follows: that August, a coup against Gorbachev had been attempted by eight extremely dimwitted Party hard-liners (some obviously drunk at the time). The putsch collapsed almost straightaway, but the pillars of centralized Soviet power were cracked. Boris Yeltsin, fractious new president of the USSR’s Russian republic, went leaping in, emerging as resistance leader and popular hero. Gorbachev still hung on—barely: a wobbler atop a disintegrating empire.

“Due to the
situation
 …”

My mouth fell open all the way as Gorbachev continued speaking.

Much had changed in my own
situation
since my first time back in Moscow in December of 1987. Returning to Queens, I’d sobbed uncontrollably, facedown on Mother’s couch. “
There
everyone loves us!” I wailed.
“Here
we have nothing and nobody!”

I had other reasons to cry. No wonder
gadalka
Terri, the fortune-teller, was mute about my future as an international keyboard virtuoso. My wrist had become painfully disfigured by a lump the size of a mirabelle plum. I could barely stretch a keyboard octave or muster a chord louder than mezzo forte. The more I tortured the ivories, the more the plum on my wrist tortured me.

A stern-browed orthopedist prescribed instant surgery.

But a pianistic trauma guru had a different prescription. Because
my technique was ALL WRONG. Unless I relearned piano from scratch, she inveighed, my “ganglion” lump would just return. I postponed my Juilliard MA exam and signed up for her rehabilitation course. I’d been playing since I was six, starting on our Red October upright piano in Moscow. Into the sound I produced—
my
sound—I’d poured my entire identity. Now, at twenty-four, I was relearning scales with my plum-lumpy wrist. I still remember my face reflected in the guru’s shiny Steinway. I looked suicidal.

To come up with her weekly wad of crisp bills I took translating gigs, using Italian mustily recalled from our refugee layover in Rome. A cookbook as hefty as a slab of Etruscan marble landed one day on my desk. Instead of
andante spianato
and
allegro con brio
, my life was now to be occupied by
spaghetti al pesto
and
vitello tonnato
. Glumly I transcribed recipes onto index cards, while in the same room John, my boyfriend, was finishing his Ph.D. thesis—so rife with Derrida-speak that it was, to me, Swahili.

John and I had met in the mideighties when he arrived in New York on a Fulbright. Cambridge-haughty, he wrote for trendy
Artforum
and deconstructed obscure Brit punk bands. Me, I brooded over my Schumann and lived with my mom in an immigrant ghetto. But somehow we clicked, and soon he was colonizing my bedroom in Queens. The Derridarian, Mom christened him—a being from a mystifying other planet. “And what do
you
do?” condescended John’s post-structuralist pals. I stared at the floor. I labored at scales and translated recipes.

The idea came out of nowhere, a flicker that lit up my dismal brain.

What if
 … I myself
wrote a cookbook? Russian, of course. But embracing more so the cuisines of the whole USSR, in all its multiethnic diversity? My resident Derridarian magnanimously volunteered himself as coauthor, to help with my “wonky” immigrant English.

I remember our fever the day our proposal went out to publishers.

And their icy responses. “What, a book about breadlines?”

Then, stunningly, a yes—from the publisher of
the
cookbook of the burgeoning new foodie zeitgeist,
The Silver Palate
.

Contract signed, I was drifting down Broadway when a heckler piped up in my dizzied head.

“You
fraud
! What’re your credentials? Zero, a big fat Russian
nol’!
”

Sure, I’d learned some recipe-writing from my Italian job, cooked enthusiastically with my mom, occasionally even gawked at overpriced chevres at Dean & Deluca. But watching Julia or Jacques on TV or leafing through the glossy layouts in
Gourmet
, I felt the same émigré alienation that had gripped me during my first bleak Philadelphia winter. Some capitalists were boning duck for a gala to which I wasn’t invited. This eighties “foodie” world of pistachio pesto and mushroom duxelles—I was a rank outsider to it. A class enemy, even.

But in my floppy handbag rested our signed contract and the chicken I’d already bought for recipe testing.

By the time I finished the opening chapter, on zakuski, the lump on my wrist had disappeared. By chapter two—soups—my guru-directed fingers were effortlessly tossing off octaves. But somehow the desire was gone. The bombastic Rachmaninoff chords felt hollow under my hands. My sound wasn’t
mine
. For the first time in my adult life, plumbing the depths of late Beethoven no longer claimed my heart. Well into salads I played my Juilliard MA exam (adequately), shut the lid on my Steinway, and have hardly touched the ivories since.

The all-consuming passion that sustained me all these years had been supplanted. By a cookbook.

I realize, gazing back across my Brezhnevian childhood, that two particular Moscow memories propelled me on my food- and travel-writing career. Two visions from the socialist fairy tale of abundance and ethnic fraternity.

A fountain. A market.

The fountain was golden!
Druzhba Narodov
, or Friendship of Nations, it was called—and it glittered spectacularly inside VDNKh (Exhibition of National Economic Achievements), that sprawling totalitarian Disneyland where in 1939 my five-year-old mother saw Eden.

Grandma Alla and I liked to sit on the fountain’s red granite edge, cracking sunflower seeds as sparrows peeped and the water jetted
fantastically among sixteen larger-than-life golden statues. They were of kolkhoz girls in ethnic costumes, set in a circle around a baroque eruption of wheat. The fountain was completed right after Stalin’s death, and gilded (so people whispered) at Beria’s orders. “National in form, socialist in content”—a spectacle of the happy family of our Socialist Union republics. How could I
ever
confess to my anti-Soviet mom that I, a cynical kid exposed to samizdat, was utterly mesmerized by this Soviet imperialist fantasy? That in their wreaths, tiaras, hats, ribbons, and braids the golden maidens were my own ethnic princesses?

The friendship of nations …

The hackneyed phrase was one of the most powerful propaganda mantras of the Soviet regime.
Druzhba narodov:
it celebrated our empire’s diversity. Compensated us for our enforced isolation from the unattainable
zagranitsa
. What comrade, went the official line, needed crap capitalist Paris when more than 130 languages were spoken inside his own borders? When to the east he could behold the tiled splendors of Samarkand; enjoy white, healthy lard in Ukraine; frolic on pine-fringed Baltic sands? Your typical comrade didn’t make it past sweaty Crimean beaches. But oh, what a powerful spell the ethnographic myth cast over our Union’s psyche!

Some Union, ours. To telescope rapidly: Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the newly aggregated Transcaucasus formed the initial Soviet fraternity, bonded by the 1922 founding treaty. Soon after, Central Asia supplied five fresh socialist
–stans
: Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Come the midthirties, the Transcaucasus was split back into Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All the carving and adding wasn’t entirely neat, though. Samarkand, a predominately Tajik city, was given to Uzbekistan. The Christian Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh got trapped in Muslim Azerbaijan. The nasty seeds of future
un
-friendships were being sown across the map. By 1940 the Soviet family reached fifteen members when the three Baltic republics and Moldavia were dragged in, courtesy of the treacherous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. My gilded fountain’s enigmatic sixteenth maiden? She was the happy Karelo-Finnish Union Republic, later demoted to a subrepublic of Russia.

So there we were: the world’s largest country by far, one sixth of the planet’s land surface; a seeming infinity pitched within 37,000 miles of the border, reaching from the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific Oceans. Fifteen full Union republics—all founded, please note, on
ethno-national
principles, from behemoth Russia (population almost 150 million) to teensy Estonia. In addition: twenty autonomous subrepublics, dozens of administrative “national” units, 126 census-recognized “nationalities” (Sovietese for ethnicity)—more than fifty languages spoken
just in the Caucasus
.

Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Back in my childhood, though, the Party talk was all SOLIDARITY. Profound RESPECT for ALL republics. The great Soviet COMMITMENT TO ETHNIC EQUALIZATION! (Prolonged stormy applause.) The Bolshevik fathers created nations. Stalin for his part deported them. Under Brezhnev, the Union’s original vision of federalism and affirmative action had been revived—as institutional kitsch. The Mature Socialist celebration of ethnic friendship produced a never-ending costume carnival of Dagestani metalwork, Buryat archery skills, Moldavian embroidery. As a kid I lapped it all up. And the barrage of state-sponsored multiculturalism left me in a tizzy of perpetual hunger for the “cuisines of our nations.”