Adventures in the Slavic Kitchen: A book of Essays with Recipes

Yastremski

Part I

The Philosophy of the Kitchen

The Origin of the Kitchen

The kitchen appeared when people first began to use fire to protect themselves against the cold and predators, and that was just as great an invention for humankind as spoken language and hand tools. In the beginning there were the hearth and stove with the tamed deity of fire; next to it a butchering table (as a kind of altar for sacrifices), and utensils. Next came the creation of a set of basic, essential food products and dishes. Finally, came the ritual of eating at the table, a repast, and feasting as a particular religious rite (that is why it was customary to thank spirits or the Creator before a meal) and the symbolism of the absence of enmity (from this fact come the round tables of contemporary scholars and politicians, those mass produced clones of the Round Table of the Knights of King Arthur). We can speak of Homo sapiens and the birth of civilization since the time when people began to bury other people and started to cook food (that is, they performed the revolutionary transition from the raw to the cooked in Claude Levi-Strauss’ formulation¹).

It is not surprising that the food chain formed differently in different geographic and climatic zones; even more so the differentiation of tribes living in the same zone happened because one tribe of its own volition chose to feed itself in one way, and another tribe in another: tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. Today we witness the inverse process, but it has not changed the essence of the question: in order to cook a global soup you need fundamental individual ingredients and some firm rules. If the salt stops being salty, and a bay leaf fails to taste like a bay leaf, if you combine herring with ice cream and sprinkle it with curry, you will get nothing but swill for creatures who barely resemble people by their unique pantophagy (eating-no-matter-what-it-is), but not people as such.

Why did the astronauts in the film Solaris² tie strips of paper to a fan? Why did the Russian prince, who had grown accustomed to his life in Polovtsian captivity, suddenly come to his senses and return to rule over his people when envoys from his homeland placed a bunch of steppe sagebrush to his nose?³ Why do not only their kitchens smell different, but the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Mongolian people themselves smell differently than the Russians with the latter’s specific cabbage-soup Russian odor? There is no racism in this, only biochemistry and the conservatism of human nature, which biologists call imprinting, science-fiction writers – the matrix, and all the rest of people – a code. If something is intrinsic for individual people, then it must be intrinsic for entire nations. Purposeful creative activity is covertly interwoven with biochemistry and cultural memory. Food does not determine abilities, but seemingly diverts and directs them along the resultant forces of the parallelogram. That is why icon-painters observe a strict fast before painting an icon, athletes – before matches, and dancers – before performances, and why Pavarotti brings his own chef when he goes on tour. Thus, one person has a bell canto voice like no one else in the world, and another – a throaty singing voice, a third – diligence, and a fourth – inspiration, etc. In short, everything is interconnected in the human world as it is in the universe with the endless circulation of energy and matter.

This entire deep philosophy in shallow waters is needed just to proclaim once again: any kitchen is not just a collection of recipes, but a flexible, ramified system connected with some natural conditions and existing in unexplained relationships with all aspects of national, regional, and personal life.

That is what happens with the Russian kitchen – sometimes it overshoots, sometimes it undershoots the standards; sometimes it is sour (kvasnoi) patriotism⁴ (which received its name from the Russian kvas—a bread-based brewed libation!); other times it is the sour doubt in the very existence of the Russian kitchen (borsht is Ukrainian, pelmeni [meat dumplings] are from China, potatoes are from America, pickled herring is from the Atlantic, etc.). And it is not a question of life on Mars! Besides nature and the population, such uncelebrated and celebrated practitioners have worked on the creation of Russian cuisine that in its best periods it has been one of the tastiest and most diverse kitchens in the world. The problem is that in terms of theory, only the illustrious culinary specialist and writer W.V. Pokhlebkin has articulated a systematic approach to it. It is understandable that every bird is inclined to like its own nest, therefore let’s try to look at this matter from without.

In terms of the effectiveness of food, its convenience, and accessibility in the modern world, McDonald’s and pizza parlors (those, figuratively speaking, unpretentious culinary Kalashnikov machine guns), or to put it differently, the almost universally established system of fast food and the use of pre-prepared food, which more and more is ready for consumption, beat everything else. In proportion to the disappearance of the peasantry with its traditional kitchen, it could not be any different from what might be expected.

However, in terms of cooking, everything is different and more complex. Here the mighty culinary inertia that represents one of the most important elements of national culture continues to play an important role. Here the luminaries are the over-sophisticated and long-playing French and Chinese kitchens. These kitchens are Imperial, continental, totalitarian, and their hidden pathos consists of achieving maximum power over the base product – in the transformation of its taste and appearance (to feed a goose to the point it dies, to let mold eat through cheese, to bury eggs in lime for a year, to present soy as meat or fish, to decorate dishes and transform the table into some kind of theater). The island kitchens, that stand in opposition to them, the British and Japanese ones, are inclined to minimal interference over the taste of the original raw material (bloody roast beef, raw fish, culinary purity), although during their Imperial period, these kitchens did not shy away from violence either (the British tenderized pigs by pounding them while they were still alive to achieve a more palatable taste, and the Japanese acquired a taste for poisonous fish in the same way as the Chinese did for snakes). Strictly speaking, the French kitchen is the most advanced and richest variant of the so-called Mediterranean or Roman kitchen, that is, of the whole bouquet of kitchens that to some degree originated in or were influenced by the super-sophisticated kitchen of Ancient Rome. In this respect, the magnificent but less Imperial and more democratic Italian kitchen echoes and at the same time stands opposite to the French kitchen.

The Russian kitchen of the last two centuries is also an Imperial, continental kitchen that went through the school of the best French chefs after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. Without losing its Slavic simplicity, the Russian kitchen managed in the course of two centuries to digest and appropriate so many dishes from the diet of the subjects of the Russian (and later Soviet) Empire and its near and distant neighbors (starting with borsht and pelmeni [Russian dumplings] and ending with shish kebab and pilaf) that it took it out of the ranks of conservative, ethnic kitchens and made it supra-national. I mean here not the expansion of exotic restaurants, which have the function strictly of entertainment all over the world (roughly speaking, they serve culinary tourism), but rather the inclusion of certain dishes for the Russian family table – their taming or domestication.

Every kitchen has its limitations, even taboos, as well as strong and weak points. For example, Russian wine is vodka (made of grain and not from grapes), and Russian meat is boiled or stewed beef (the Russian stove could not teach Russian women to fry meat, and you feel that to this day). However, no one can take away our vodka table with the spectacular selected hors-d’oeuvres and the rich, neutral taste of beef. Similarly, you cannot deny the huge list of soups (from cabbage soup and borsht to the Europeanized solyanka [vegetable and meat soup]), the richest fish and mushroom table, an entire school of pickled vegetable dishes (not the necrotic marinades) and preserves (and not pectin comfitures). The shortcoming of the latter is their excessive sweetness, but to this end we have black tea (borrowed from the Chinese and Asian Indians, and the samovar – from the Japanese); but it is compensated for by the freshness of garden and forest berries, by their taste, smell, and health benefits, which the foreign competitors of correctly prepared preserves do not have. Among baked goods we must point out black and gray bread (white bread also turns out well sometimes, but never as well as with Italian or French bakers), Russian bliny (unsweetened crepe-like thin yeast-dough pancakes), Siberian pelmeni, and an enormous range of meat-, fish-, vegetable-, and fruit-stuffed pies. Pastries are not our strong point. Instead we have baked kashas (especially buckwheat) and soft-boiled potatoes (sprinkled with dill and served with pickled herring or common canned stewed meat) that no one else can even try to prepare. Similarly, the Italians will never understand the Soviet marine style macaroni. For the contemporary Russian person, the main vegetable after cabbage and the potato is the cucumber; the main fruit is the Antonov apple;⁵ the main berry – the raspberry; the main vegetable oil – sunflower, among cultured milk products – sour cream and authentic kefir (just try to find it west of the Oder in Europe). We can go on, but the principle is clear – a filled-in space followed by a blank space as a cipher or the key to it, in a word – a menu.

Gourmets prefer to read, study, enjoy, and collect… menus! A menu is the algebra of the culinary discipline. They are collected and stored like herbaria. They are studied just as elegantly played chess games are. A culinary Sherlock Holmes can determine, studying a hundred-year-old menu, everything that took place at the dinner table that day; he can laugh at the mistakes and enjoy witticisms. In a similar way a more or less clear profile of the country, its people, the author and his times, inevitably shows through the recipes of dishes and culinary recommendations on the pages of cookbooks.

The present book does not claim to give a full picture, but simply represents an attempt to compose something like culinary prose, which is good for reading and stirring up ideas, and with that, awakening appetite in the most literal sense of the word. It could be called Rehabilitation of the Appetite because, as Anton Chekhov said in his play Ivanov: Humankind has thought and thought and still has not invented anything better than a pickle as a chaser for a shot of vodka.⁶

The Professor of Sour Cabbage Soup, or Homage to William Pokhlebkin

Why when we think about food, which has become an obsession with us, three names inevitably rise to the surface in our native tradition: Gogol,⁸ the drake that escapes vexed hunters;⁹ the furry and flesh-eating last name Molokhvets, and Pokhlebkin, the latter a William to boot, who sat down sideways at their table? It is very simple – the table is the desk, and the sheet of paper lying before each of them turns, by magic, into a self-replenishing magic tablecloth.¹⁰ These three are writers of different scales, destinies, and literary schools, but one common theme rises in hyperbolized form in the works of all three of them – if we say it is the theme of food and gourmet dishes, that would say nothing. A writer always represents the memory of loss, trauma, and the need to heal it. All three, as a psychoanalyst would say, wished to be fed, wished to return to the world of care and nurturing, wished to overcome the interpersonal coldness of human relations through a sense of satiety and warmth. They wrote their books because their hunger was not physiological and could not be satisfied through practical measures. They are playwrights (isn’t it where the name William comes from?), while cooks, gourmets, and eaters are the directors, characters, and performers of this singular, very ancient, and constantly rewritten drama that has its origins in the mystery play. Today this drama is desacralized (and it would seem conclusively and irrevocably). Not so long ago it was customary among people to give thanks for food in a prayer, and in the Stone Age – even to ask forgiveness from the spirits of the killed animals and appease them for permission to eat their bodies. However, nowadays, the all-penetrating obshchepit¹¹ (public food service) sweeps away the last barriers and obstacles, and this process takes place not only in life – in culinary areas of the West and the East – but also in literature and consciousness.

Fortunately, sooner or later at such moments, the mechanism of the archaic conservative counter-revolution switches on to save the values that still can be saved and to restore the connections that are being torn apart. William Pokhlebkin is one of those last Knights of the Kitchen Table. Let’s remember the background – to promote female cooks to the status of Deputies of the Supreme Soviet!¹² Let’s remember the policy of the elimination of women homemakers as a class, a huge expansion of the Soviet system of public cafeterias, the enlargement of food production factories – huge industrial complexes and plants, and the phantasmagorical impoverishment of product variety when not just some products but even their classes and kinds disappeared without a trace, and only generic types remained: kielbasa (ringed sausages) in general, meat as such, or simply fish. One of the possible definitions of Socialism is precisely this impoverishment of product variety, which, in the world of food, means nothing extra, only the necessary stuff, preferable in that it is commonly accessible. It must be said that there were some positive achievements on this path: thanks to rigid state standards, we had good bread, tolerable vodka, ice cream for everyone (thanks to the ambitious Mikoyan and his 1937 Program¹³), very decent candies and cakes, and those kinds of vegetable oil, sour cream, mustard, mayonnaise, and herring to which we have become accustomed and therefore have not needed any others. Let’s forget all the cellulose ringed sausages, sour beer, deteriorated kinds of vegetables that can pass only as cattle feed, watered down milk, and it would be better left unmentioned, schnitzel with garnish and Thursday is fish day (remarkable also for the anonymity of its inventor).¹⁴ It just happened that the 1970s turned out to be crazy about searching for something tasty, epicurean, and festive – all these were not just bought, but obtained – by quota, through connections, or from under the counter; and by some miracle settled, scorning all expiration dates, in the freezers of Soviet citizens. People visited each other with pleasure because it meant eating well. Restaurants with a good kitchen existed only here and there in the capitals of Soviet republics and, for some unknown reason, in unpredictable places in the provinces. The return of housewives to the kitchen had begun; husbands also started to drop in there more and more