Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (5 page)

“Where did you weather the revolution?”

Mom: “I was born in 1934.”

“What do the Soviets think about Kerensky?”

Mom: “They don’t think of him much.”

“I heard there’ve been major changes in Russia since 1917.”

Mom: “Er … that’s right.”

“Is it really true that at the races you now can’t bet on more than one horse?”

The Russian we spoke seemed from a different planet. Here we were, with our self-consciously ironic appropriations of Sovietese, our twenty-seven shades of sarcasm injected into one simple word
—comrade
, say, or
homeland
. Talking to people who addressed us as
dushechka
(little soul) in pure, lilting, innocent Russian. Despite this cultural abyss, we cherished every moment at these people’s generous tables. Boy, they could cook! Suckling pig stuffed with kasha, wickedly rich Easter molds redolent of vanilla, the Chekhovian blini plumper than “the shoulder of a merchant’s daughter”—we tasted it all. Mom approached our dining sessions with an ethnographer’s zeal and a notebook. Examining the recipes later, she’d practically weep.

“Flour, milk, yeast, we had all those in Moscow. Why, why, couldn’t I ever make blini like this?”

One day, an old lady, a Smolianka—a graduate of the prestigious St.
Petersburg Smolny Institute for Young Women, where culinary skills were de rigueur—invited us over for kulebiaka. This was the moment we had been waiting for. As the pie baked, we chatted with an old countess with a name too grand to even pronounce. The countess recounted how hard she cried, back in 1914, when she received a diamond necklace as a birthday gift from her father. Apparently she had really wanted a puppy. The kulebiaka arrived. Our hearts raced. Here it was, the true, genuine kulebiaka—“naked, shameless, a temptation.” The mushrooms, the
blinchiki
, even
viziga
, that gelatinous dried sturgeon spine our hostess had unearthed somewhere in deepest Chinatown—all were drenched in splashes of butter inside a beautifully decorated yeast pastry mantle.

As I ate, Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
flashed into my mind. Because after some three hundred pages describing Vronsky’s passion for Anna, his endless pursuits, all her tortured denials, the consummation of their affair is allotted only one sentence. And so it was for us and the consummate kulebiaka. We ate; the pie was more than delicious; we were satisfied. Happily, nobody leapt under a train. And yet … assessing the kulebiaka and studying our hostess’s recipe later at home, Mom started scribbling over it furiously, crossing things out, shaking her head, muttering, “
Ne nashe
”—not ours. I’m pretty sure I know what she meant. Dried sturgeon spine? Who were we kidding? Whether we liked it or not, we were Soviets, not Russians. In place of the sturgeon, defrosted cod would do just fine.

It took us another three decades to develop a kulebiaka recipe to call our own—one that hinted at Russia’s turn-of-the-century excess, with a soupçon of that snooty French elegance, while staying true to our frugal past.

But that recipe just wouldn’t do for our 1910s feast tonight.

We needed to conjure up the real deal, the classic.

My mother is finally rolling out her kulebiaka dough, maneuvering intently on a dime-size oasis of kitchen counter. I inhale the sweetish tang of fermented yeast once again and try to plumb my unconscious
for some collective historical taste memory. No dice. There’s no yeast in my DNA. No heirloom pie recipes passed down by generations of women in the yellowing pages of family notebooks, scribbled in pre-revolutionary Russian orthography. My two grandmothers were emancipated New Soviet women, meaning they barely baked, wouldn’t be caught dead cooking “czarist.” Curious and passionate about food all her life, Mom herself only became serious about baking after we emigrated. In the USSR she relied on a dough called
na skoruyu ruku
(“flick of a hand”), a version involving little kneading and no rising. It was a recipe she’d had to teach
her
mother. My paternal babushka, Alla, simply wasn’t interested. She was a war widow and Soviet career woman whose idea of dinner was a box of frozen dumplings. “Why should I
bake
,” she told Mother indignantly, “when I can be reading a book?” “What, a
detektiv
,” Mom snorted. It was a pointed snort. Russia’s top spy thriller writer, the Soviet version of John le Carré, was Grandma’s secret lover.

Peering into the kitchen, I prod Mom for any scraps of pre-revolutionary-style baking memories she might retain. She pauses, then nods. “Da, listen!” There were these old ladies when she was a child. They were strikingly different from the usual bloblike proletarian babushkas. “I remember their hair,” says Mom, almost dreamily. “Aristocratically simple. And the resentment and resignation on their ghostly faces. Something so sad and tragic. Perhaps they had grown up in mansions with servants. Now they were ending their days as kitchen slaves for their own Stalin-loving families.”

My mom talks like that.

“And their
food
?” I keep prodding. She ponders again. “Their blini, their pirozhki (filled pastries), their
pirogs
 … somehow they seemed airier, fluffier …” She shrugs. More she can’t really articulate. Flour, yeast, butter. Much like their counterparts who had fled Bolshevik Russia, Mom’s Moscow old ladies possessed the magic of yeast. And that magic was lost to us.

And that was the rub of tonight’s project. Of the flavor of the layered Silver Age kulebiaka we had at least an inkling. But the botvinya
and the Guriev kasha dessert, my responsibilities—they were total conundrums. Neither I nor Mom had a clue how they were meant to taste.

There was a further problem: the stress and time required to prepare a czarist table extravaganza.

Over an entire day and most of the night preceding our guests’ arrival, I sweated—and sweated—over my share of the meal. Have you ever tried making Guriev kasha during one of the worst New York heat waves in memory?

Thank you, Count Dmitry Guriev, you gourmandizing early-nineteenth-century Russian minister of finance, for the labor-intensive dessert bearing your name. Though actually by most accounts it was a serf chef named Zakhar Kuzmin who first concocted this particular kasha (
kasha
being the Russian word for almost any grain preparation both dry and porridgy). Guriev tasted the sweet at somebody’s palace, summoned Kuzmin to the table, and gave him a kiss. Then he bought said serf-chef and his family.

Here is how Kuzmin’s infernal inspiration is realized. Make a sweetened farina-like semolina kasha, called manna kasha in Russian. Then in a pan or skillet layer this manna with homemade candied nuts, and berries, and with plenty of
penki
, the rich, faintly burnished skins that form on cream when it’s baked. Getting a hint of the labor required? For one panful of kasha, you need at least fifteen
penki
.

So for hour after hour I opened and closed the door of a 450-degree oven to skim off the cream skins. By two a.m. my kitchen throbbed like a furnace. Chained to the oven door, drenched in sweat, I was ready to assault palaces, smash Fabergé eggs. I cursed the Romanovs! I cheered the Russian Revolution!

“Send your maid to the cellar.” That charming instruction kicked off many of the recipes in the best surviving (and Rabelaisian) source of pre-revolutionary Russian recipes,
A Gift to Young Housewives
by Elena Molokhovets. How my heart went out to that suffering maid! Serfdom might have been abolished in Russia in 1861, but under the Romanovs the peasants—and, later, the industrial workers—continued to live like subhumans. Haute bourgeois housewives gorged on amber fish
broths, rosy hams, and live sterlets, while their domestics had to make do with
tyuria
(a porridgy soup made with stale bread and water), kvass, and bowlfuls of buckwheat groats. Yes, the revolution was necessary. But why, I pondered in my furnace kitchen, why did things have to go so terribly wrong? Woozy from the heat, I brooded on alternative histories:

Suppose Kerensky’s provisional government had managed to stay in power?

Or suppose instead of Stalin, Trotsky had taken over from Lenin?

Or suppose—

Suddenly I realized I’d forgotten to skim off new
penki
. I wrenched open the oven. The cream had transformed into cascades of white sputtering lava covering every inside inch with scorched white goo. I’d need a whole cadre of serfs to clean it all off. I screamed in despair.

Somehow, at last, at five a.m., I was done. A version of Guriev kasha, no doubt ersatz, sat cooling in my fridge under a layer of foil. Falling asleep, I recalled how at the storming of the Winter Palace thirsty, violent mobs ransacked the Romanovs’ wine cellar, reportedly the largest and the best-stocked in the world. I congratulated them across the century, from the bottom of my heart.

Unlike me, my septuagenarian mom actually relishes late-night kitchen heroics. And her political thinking is much clearer than mine. Yes, she loathes the Romanovs. But she despises the Bolsheviks even more. Plus she had no reason for pondering alternative histories; she was sailing along smoothly with her kulebiaka project.

Her dough, loaded with butter and sour cream, had risen beautifully. The fish, the dilled rice, the dusky wild mushrooms, the thin
blinchinki
for the filling layers, had all come out juicy and tasty. Only now, two hours before the party, right before constructing the pie, does Mom suddenly experience distress.

“Anyut, tell me,” she says. “What’s the point of the
blinchiki
? Filling dough with more dough!”

I blink blearily. Ah, the mysteries of the czarist stomach. “Maybe excess is the point?” I suggest meekly.

Mom shrugs. She goes ahead and arranges the filling and its anti-mush
blinchiki
into a majestic bulk. Not quite a Testov-style skyscraper, but a fine structure indeed. We decorate the pie together with fanciful cut-out designs before popping it into the oven. I’m proud of Mom. As we fan ourselves, our hearts race in anticipation, much like they did for our encounter decades ago with that true kulebiaka chez White Russian émigrés.

But the botvinya still hangs over me like a sword of doom.

A huge summer hit at Giliarovsky’s Moscow
traktir
s, this chilled kvass and fish potage—a weird hybrid of soup, beverage, fish dish, and salad—confounded most foreigners who encountered it. “Horrible mélange! Chaos of indigestion!” pronounced
All the Year Round
, Charles Dickens’s Victorian periodical. Me, I’m a foreigner to botvinya myself. On the evening’s table I set out a soup tureen filled with my homemade kvass and cooked greens (
botva
means vegetable tops), spiked with a horseradish sauce. Beside it, serving bowls of diced cucumbers, scallions, and dill. In the middle: a festive platter with poached salmon and shrimp (my stand-in for Slavic crayfish tails). You eat the botvinya by mixing all the elements in your soup bowl—to which you add, please, ice.
A Gift to Young Housewives
also recommends a splash of chilled champagne. Ah yes, booze! To drown out the promised “chaos of indigestion,” I’ll pour my horseradish vodka.

“Fish and kvass?” says my mother. “
Foo
.” (Russian for
eek
.)

“
Aga
(Yeah),” I agree.

“
Foo
,” she insists. “ ’Cause you know how I hate poached salmon.”

Mom harbors a competitive streak in the kitchen. I get the feeling she secretly wants my botvinya to fail.

“You’ve made what? A real botvinya? Homemade kvass?”

Our first guests, Sasha and Ira Genis, eyeball Mom’s table, incredulous.
Mom hands them the welcome
kalach
, a traditional bread shaped like a purse. Their eyes grow wider.

Sasha (the diminutive of Alexander) is a freewheeling émigré essayist and cultural critic, something of a legend in Russia, where his radio broadcasts are adored by millions. He’s a serious gourmet, too. Dinners at the Genis home in New Jersey feature mushrooms gathered under a Siberian moon and smoked lamprey eels smuggled from Latvia.