My new adult novel,
Trinity: The Koldun Code, first in the Trinity series, which is set in modern Russia, comes out as an e-book today, November 13, and in paperback on December 4. To celebrate it I'm going to be republishing over the next couple of weeks earlier posts of mine about Russian food and cooking, starting with a couple of posts about a trip to Russia I made in 2010, where I first discovered the pleasures of Russian cuisine!
Excursion to Russia:
I was drawn magnetically to this extraordinary country, its colourful,
passionate, turbulent, imaginative people, their frightening and
inspiring history, and magnificent literature, music and art. As a child
and adolescent I read lots of Russian fairytales, plays, novels and
short stories, and listened with delight to recordings of Russian folk
music we had at home. For years, I dreamed of going there, but it wasn't
till May 2010 that I was finally able to fulfill that dream. Not only
did the country meet my expectations, it far exceeded them. Even the
things I was expecting: the awe-inspiring scale of rivers and lakes and
forests and plains, the gorgeous distinctiveness of the architecture,
the scary relics of the past, the amazing richness and depth of the
artistic traditions that still remain, had a huge impact, at first hand.
But other things were quite unexpected: a combination of dry humour,
nonchalance and exuberance; riotous spring vegetation and clothing and
bright blue skies; the charming,intimate beauty of smalltown houses, the
vibrant energy of the cities. And the excellent food.
Food wasn't
really something I'd ever thought about in connection with Russia. Aside
from caviar, vodka, pickled fish and borscht, I had no real image of
it. And of course during the long Soviet dictatorship, there were so
many food shortages and privations that the notion there was such a
thing as Russian cuisine fell by the wayside, at least in Western minds.
The few tourists who braved Soviet restaurants reported stodgy, badly
cooked, badly presented food, and though the upper classes of the Soviet
system ate very well out of the public eye, the majority of people
certainly did not. And that did not improve but actually worsened for a
while after the regime finally crashed in the early 90's. We kept
hearing horror stories from people who'd visited Russia in the past, and
resigned ourselves to an amazing cultural experience but bad food. So
it was wonderful to be surprised into the discovery that things had
completely changed. In my opinion, it's as good a sign as any of a
country's recovery from hard times, when people start taking pleasure
and pride in preparing and cooking food again, not only for themselves
and their families and friends, but for strangers. And not just for
tourists, or the wealthy, either, but for ordinary locals looking for a
meal out. But the excellence of the food wasn't the only surprise; the
other was the discovery that this was no modern phenomenon, and that
travellers in pre-Soviet times had also commented on the excellence of
the food.
A fascinating 1857 English book I own called
Russians at
Home, by Sutherland Edwards, describes the menu at a typical modest
restaurant in Moscow then: 'the usual dinner supplied for three-quarters
of a rouble(half a crown) consists of soup, with a pie of minced meat
or minced vegetables, an entree, and some kind of sweet. That, too, may
be considered the kind of dinner which persons of moderate means have
every day at home. ' Edwards also talks about a popular Russian cookbook
of the time, entitled 'Forty-Two Dinners' which rather in the manner of
the successful Four Ingredients cookbooks of today, centred around a
gimmick: four dishes only per dinner, up to dinner 42, with always a
soup to start with(starting with soup is very much a Russian
tradition.)Edwards quotes some of the menus: Dinner Twenty-Seven, for
instance features a/batvinia, a hearty soup made of boiled beef, boiled
beetroot, spring opinions, caraway seeds, and a puree or sorrel or
spinach, with some chopped boiled egg; b/stuffed carrots; c/roast
mutton with mushrooms; d/ Compote or jelly of almonds. Thirty-Three, a
Lenten dish(Russian Orthodox tradition strictly observes the no-meat
fast all through Lent), was: a/Oukha, or sterlet soup(the sterlet is a
popular fish found only in the Volga); b/Fish cutlets with a sauce of
oil and vinegar; c/Fried perch; d/Kissel(a kind of blancmange made with
almond milk and fine oatmeal.) Other foods he mentions include various
sorts of game, icecream, gingerbread(he makes the intriguing remarks
that in pre-Christian times pagan Russians used to makes offerings of
carved gingerbread to their deities—the tradition of shaped and
decorated gingerbread endures to this day.) He also lists traditional
drinks, from gallons of tea of course; kvass, an effervescent drink made
from the flour of black bread and malt and served very cold(though
rather an acquired taste for foreigners, it is still very popular in
Russia); vodkas of all sorts, from the plain kind to flavoured
ones(there are many kinds: for instance in Dr Zhivago a red rowanberry
vodka is mentioned; and in Russia we sampled a honey and pepper vodka
from Ukraine)and champagne, of which, he says, the Russians are very
fond and consume in great quantities. While wealthy people drank French
champagne, most people then as now drank the bubbly made in the Crimea
or the Don River area, which cost only a fifth of the French variety.
By
contrast, while Edwards extols these home-grown champagnes, the
Frenchman Etienne Taris, in his 1910 book,
La Russie et ses Richesses,
sniffily says that the Russian wines can appropriate French place-names
all they like, 'one can always tell their true origin'! Grudgingly, he
admits that the soups are very similar to peasant soups in France; that
the mushrooms are excellent, the fish and game very good; but otherwise
he is not enamoured of Russian food, with its sweet and sour dishes,
pickled fish, sour cream and black bread, tastes which are foreign to
the French repertoire: and he makes the acid observation that 'no wonder
there is such a fashion for French food in Russia!' But in both books,
the exuberant Russian attitude to food—and life—is amply documented and
obviously delighted in by the writers; but that's even more obvious in
the quintessential Russian cookbook, Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young
Housewives, which was the massive best-selling cookery tome of its day.
It was an amazing compendium, a mix of hilariously extravagant,
slapdashly insouciant and thriftily careful recipes, and a good deal of
household advice, written by an extraordinary woman who ran a country
estate. Reprinted umpteen times from its first appearance in 1861 to
1917, it became a huge cultural phenomenon, cherished by generations,
carried into exile, and lovingly parodied by Chekhov, among others.
Repudiated by the Bolsheviks as a symbol of 'bourgeois decadence', the
book went underground after 1917, was circulated in 'samizdat' copies,
and was never officially reprinted in its entirety during the whole of
the Soviet period. But a few short months after the crash of the Soviet
regime, reprinted copies of the book were being sold on the streets of
Moscow, and today the book has once again taken its place as the great
classic of Russian food writing. (It is now available in English,
translated by Joyce Toomre, as 'Classic Russian Cooking', Indiana
University Press)
That exuberance and abundance has come back now;
and so we discovered a Russia where markets and shops are again filled
with colourful arrays of fresh ingredients from every corner of this
vast land; where even modest restaurants offer simple, fresh and
delicious traditional menus and street-corner vendors sell smoked
sausage hot dogs, cold glasses of kvass, caramelised almonds and
luscious icecreams. We discovered the most spectacular and tasty candied
fruit ever, specialities of southern Russia, from whole cumquats to
apricot and strawberries; beautiful salads, from grated beetroot with
garlic and vinegar to spectacular bowls of greens, tomatoes and olives;
fantastic smoked and fresh fish from the cold northern lakes; a wide
variety of soups; mushrooms served in all kinds of ways(Russians are
very very fond of mushrooms—it's a favourite family outing, gathering
mushrooms in the forest) a tempting array of zakuski, the tapas-like
nibbles served with vodka, from olives and gherkins to pickled fish and
little pies and dumplings; lovely berry and nut tarts; and the prettiest
gilt gingerbread outside of fairytales. We also discovered that
Russians, like Australians, love cooking outdoors, and a favoured recipe
for a good meal out with friends consists of a handy river bank, a
barbecue constructed of stones and charcoal, some freshly-caught fish,
lamb shashliks with spicy sauce, various salads, some loud music on a
radio, and plenty of beer!
Traditionally, Russian cuisine is
dominated by the bounty of waterways and forest, by fish and game and
mushrooms and nuts and berries and honey, but also by the necessities of
long winters: by lots of pickled and smoked and salted fish, meat and
vegetables. But because of the vastness of the land and its many
climactic zones, it has access to an extremely wide variety of other
things: the Caucasian vividness of fruit, vegetables, wine and lamb, for
instance, and rich dairy products, especially cream, but also good
yoghurt, and some cheeses. And the imaginative quality which has always
characterised the Russian temperament is being fully applied now to
local cuisine, so that traditional dishes are not only being cherished
for what they are, but also experimented with, and new ways of
highlighting the country's excellent produce, borrowing from all kinds
of culinary traditions, are being tried.
