Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (41 page)

So I acquired the second of my Moscow memories—of the two-storied Central Market on the Boulevard Ring, in the company once again of my hard-living Babushka Alla.

The Tsentralny Market was the friendship of nations come to throbbing, screaming, haggling life. Instead of golden statues, shrill Uzbek melon matrons wiped juice-stained fingers on striped
ikat
silk dresses, while Tajik dames hovered witch-like over banks of radishes, their heavy eyes kohl-rimmed, their unibrows a sinister line. I wandered the market aisles, ravenous, addled by scents of wild Uzbek cumin and Lithuanian caraway. After the greenish rot of state stores, the produce here
radiated a paradisiacal glow. Kazakhs hustled soccer ball–size crimson apples (Kazakhstan’s capital was Alma-Ata: “Father of Apples”). Fast-talking Georgians with Stalinist mustaches whistled lewdly at my blond grandma and deftly formed newspaper cones for their
khmeli-suneli
spice mixes, tinted yellow with crushed marigold petals. I was particularly agog at the Latvian dairy queens. The Baltics were
almost zagranitsa
. Polite, decked out in spotless white aprons, these lady-marvels filled Grandma’s empty mayonnaise jars with their thick, tangy
smetana
(sour cream). In contrast to state
smetana
, theirs was a
quality
product: undiluted with buttermilk-diluted-with-milk-diluted-with-water—the usual sequence of Soviet dairy grift.

I gushed, and gushed, about the Central Market—as spectacle, as symbol—in the introduction to our cookbook.

In the friendship of nations spirit, the very first recipe I tested was my dad’s Georgian chicken with walnut sauce (with the bird from my handbag on Broadway). Georgia was the Sicily of the Soviet imagination—a mythic land of inky wines, citrus, poets, tree-side philosophers, and operatic corruption. I followed with Armenian dolmas, then on to Baltic herring rolls, Moldavian feta-stuffed peppers, Byelorussian mushrooms.

Even pre-revolutionary Russian cuisine reflected the span of the empire. With Mikoyan’s 1939
Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
, this diversity got
Sovietized
. As the decades progressed, our socialist cuisine merged into one pan-Eurasian melting pot. Across the eleven time zones, the state’s food service canon included Ayzeri
lulya kebab
and Tatar
chebureki
(fried pies). In Moscow you dined at restaurants named Uzbekistan or Minsk or Baku. And singularly
Soviet
hits such as salat Olivier and the proverbial “herring under fur coat” lent socialist kitsch to Uighur weddings and Karelian birthday parties.

This was the story I wanted to tell in our book.

Please to the Table
came out at the end of 1990. With four hundred recipes on 650 pages, it was heavy enough to whack someone unconscious.

A couple of months after publication, a phone call startled John and me in the dead of an Australian night. (We’d moved to Melbourne, where my Derridarian taught art history.) It was our editor in New York, very excited.
Please to the Table
—if you please—had just won a James Beard Award.

The news was doubly shocking to me.

Because who could
ever
imagine a more ironic moment for a fat, lavish book celebrating the culinary friendship of our Soviet nations? It was the spring of 1991, and our happy Union was coming apart at the seams.

For a principal pair of reasons, arguably. One was Gorbachev’s disastrous handling of ethnic conflicts and secessionist passions in the republics. The other: the piteous mess he was making of the Soviet economy, which left stores barren of almost
everything
edible.

“Ha! Better publish it as a USSR tear-off calendar!” my Moscow friends had joked two years earlier, while I was still researching
Please to the Table
.

The first salvos were erupting from our brotherly republics.

Down with Russian imperialism! Russian occupiers, go home!

Thousands of pro-independence demonstrators marched under these sentiments in Tbilisi, Georgia, in early April 1989. The protests lasted five days. That summer John and I went recipe-collecting in the romantic, mountainous Caucasus. Reaching Tbilisi, we found the histrionic Georgian capital still reeling in shock. On April 9, Moscow’s troops had killed twenty protesters, mostly young women. Everywhere, amid balconies jutting from teetering houses and restaurants dug into cliffs around the Kura River, Tbilisians seethed with opulent rage, calling down terrible curses on Moscow. The Kremlin, meanwhile, blamed the massacre on local officials.

Our hosts in town were a young architect couple, Vano and Nana, I’ll call them—flowers of a young liberal national intelligentsia. Their noble faces convulsed with hatred for Kremlin oppression. But to us Nana and Vano were Georgian hospitality personified. A guest
thereabouts is revered as a holy creature of God, to be bathed in largesse. In our honor,
kvevri
, clay vessels of wine, were dug out from the ground. Craggy wands of
churchkhella
—walnuts suspended in grape must—were laid out in piles. Cute baby lambs had their throats cut for roadside picnics by the crenellated stone walls of an eleventh-century Byzantine monastery. We became more than friends with Nana and Vano—family, almost. I cheered their separatist, righteous defiance at the top of my lungs.

One evening we sat under a quince tree in the countryside. We were full of dark, fruity wines and lavash bread rolled around opal basil and cheese. I felt at home enough to mention Abkhazia. Formally an autonomous republic of Georgia, Abkhazia was making its own moves to secede—from Georgia. We’d all been laughing and singing. Suddenly Nana and Vano froze. Their proud, handsome faces clenched with re-ignited hatred.

“Abkhazians are monkeys!” sputtered Nana. “Monkeys down from the hills! They have no culture. No
history.”

“Here’s what they deserve,” snarled Vano. He crushed a bunch of black grapes savagely in his fist. Red juice squirted out between his elegant knuckles.

It was a preview of what lay ahead for Gorbachev’s
Soyuz
(Union).

What lay ahead also was the furious rumbling of stomachs.

In trying to reform the creaking, rusting wheel of the centralized Soviet system, Gorbachev had loosened the screws, dismantled a part here, a part there, and ultimately halted the wheel—with nothing to replace it. Typical Gorbachevian flip-flops left the economy floundering between socialist planning and capitalist supply and demand. Deficits soared, output stagnated, the ruble plummeted. The economy was collapsing.

Starting in 1989, John and I began living part-time in Moscow and traveling around the USSR—this for another book now, one my Derridarian was writing himself. It was to be a dark travel picaresque about
the imploding Imperium. We stayed during the winter months mainly, during his Aussie summer vacations. I loved our first arrival, after a twenty-hour flight from Melbourne, to Dad’s and Grandma Liza’s welcome spreads, touchingly, generously, improbably conjured out of thin air. Our second arrival a year later was different. In December 1990, Babushka Liza had only diseased boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. I remember the anguished embarrassment in her eyes. The “foreigners” were at her table, and she had only
this
to offer.

“Nichevo v magazinakh!”
she cried. “There’s nothing in the stores!
Pustiye prilavki
—empty counters!”

The socialist shortage vernacular always reached for hyperbole, so I didn’t take her words literally. Counters might be empty of desiderata—instant coffee, bananas—but in the past you could always count on salt, eggs, buckwheat, coarse brown
vermishel
. The next day I went to a Davydkovo store. And came face-to-face with IT.
Nichevo
—nothingness. The glaring existential emptiness of the shelves. No, I lie. The
nichevo
was framed by castles and pyramids constructed from “sea-cabbage salad”—canned seaweed that made you vomit on contact. Two bored salesgirls sat inside the barren store. One was drawling a joke about “coupons for grade #6 dogmeat.” The joke involved fur, claws, and chopped wooden bits of the doghouse. The other was assembling a mini–Lenin mausoleum ziggurat from the cans.

“A tomb for socialist edibles!”

Her laughter echoed amid the empty counters.

On a TV concert that New Year’s Eve, the big-haired pop diva Alla Pugacheva bellowed a song called
“Nyam-nyam”
(yum yum). Usually Pugacheva bawled about “a million scarlet roses.” Not now.

“Open your fridge and take out 100
taloni/
Add water and salt, and bon appetite/ Yum yum/Ha-ha-ha. Hee-hee-hee.”

Taloni
(coupons)—one of many official euphemisms for the dread word
kartochki
(ration cards). Other evasions included the alarmingly suave “invitation to purchase.” They only rubbed salt in the truth: for the first time since World War II, rationing was being inflicted on
Homo sovieticus
. What’s more, Gorbachev’s new glasnost meant you could now scream about it out loud. “Glasnost,” explained a Soviet mutt to an American mutt in a popular joke, “is when they loosen your leash, yank away the food bowl, and let you bark all you want.” The barking? You could hear it from space.

As centralized distribution unraveled, food deliveries often de-toured into the twilight zone of barter and shady semifree commerce. Or stuff simply rotted in warehouses. There was something else, too, now: nasty economic un-friendship within our happy Soviet fraternity. Granted increased financial autonomy by Gorbachev, regional politicians and enterprises fought to keep scarce supplies for their own hungry citizenry. Georgia clung to its tangerines, Kazakhstan its vegetables. When Moscow—and scores of other cities—restricted food sales to locals, the neighboring provinces halted dairy and meat deliveries into the capital.

So
everyone
hoarded.

My dad’s four-hundred-square-foot apartment, besides being overcrowded with me and my six-foot-three Brit, resembled a storeroom. Blissfully unemployed, Dad had all day to forage and hunt. In the torturous food supply game, my old man was a grossmeister. He stalked milk delivery trucks, artfully forged vodka coupons, rushed to beat bread stampedes. He made his own cheese, soft and bland. His ridged radiators resembled a Stakhanovite bread rusk-drying plant. The DIY food movement of late perestroika would awe modern-day San Franciscans. On the rickety balconies of my friends, egg-laying chickens squawked among three-liter jars holding lingonberries pureed with rationed sugar, holding cucumbers pickled with rationed salt—holding
anything
that could be brined or preserved. 1990:
the
year of sauerkraut.

To shuffle as John and I did between Moscow and the West in those days was to inhabit a surreal split-screen. Western media gushed about Gorby’s charisma and feted him for the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the dark, frosty air swirled with conspiracies of doom, with intimations of apocalypse. Famine was
on its way
. Citizens were
dropping dead
from expired medicine in humanitarian aid packages sold by speculators. (Probably true.) “Bush’s Legs,” the
frozen chicken parts sent by Bush père as relief aid had
surely
been injected with AIDS. The Yanks were poisoning us, trampling our national pride with their diseased drumsticks. Private kiosks sold piss inside whiskey bottles, rat meat inside pirozhki. Ancient babushkas—those kerchiefed Cassandras who’d seen three waves of famines—lurked in stores crowing,
“Chernobyl harvest!
” at the sight of any misshapen beet.