Okroshka and pirog
Virginia Llewellyn Smith
The Food and Cooking of Russia Lesley Chamberlain (Allen Lane £9.95)
The worker's is, as often as not,he worker's canteen lunch in Moscow' mashedf potato, plus maybe a frankfurter: food Western origin, unknown to his Peasafr, forebears, whose cabbage soup and kas,"` was just as nasty. Lesley ChamberAll would be the last to deny that Russian 10°' has its lower depths, but her book is a reminder of, and an incitement to, better things. It is not confined to indigenous dishesd' for in Russia, as in the United States, f°° has in fact become more varied and aginative through the influence of ai migrant and adjoining cultures. Who Aenann wonder if snowed-up Russians aball"- boiled beef and carrots for spicy, colourf.ti Georgian stew whenever they can find as ingredients on the black market? But 1, °fle opening this book, felt my stomach twing,, with nostalgia for borshch and black breao and the other authentic tastes of native 141 sian cooking. To recapture these tastes is the red1 challenge, and Lesley Chamberlain fact stoutly, though her best black bread feew,S comes, she admits, from someone el,sey cookbook. Its miracle ingredient is b °. dark breadcrumbs, toasted; to obtain thud strikes me as involving considerable ea% and risk of burnt crumbs, not to menti(leire sort of chicken-egg problem. Short-cuts ht. what appeal to me, though I flinched OP ly at that recommended for okroshica mixing club soda with yoghurt. But PerhaPos the author finds these fermented soups to detestable as I do anyway. She admits, ,s disliking the basis of them, kvas, a Pe°,40 drink, and as vile in its own sour-sweet as American root-beer. But I now belie; good kvas exists, because Lesley Chamberlain says she drank it — once' ''se invites such acts of faith precisely hecalitie she doesn't claim to enjoy all the food s describes, having the talent — mach eartco' than that of cooking well — of being ablety write about food without exuding a swe'at enthusiasm which takes my appetite' ve least, away. Cooking bores me, and I "but not tested a single recipe in this book' yen having read it I am inspired: I might erred try the 'excellent' Soviet recipe for tuna-fish soup. can
The book itself reads
social history. What do the Russians rual`of of their food, and what does it make .„, them? Refined, fast and junk food is beg n, fig to infiltrate Soviet guts; during MY s in Moscow, when schoolchildren's snack
well as canned,,e
were still raw garlic on bread, a neon sign '4ent up in the Arbat advising 'Eat Corn- flakes' and now, we learn, pancake mixes `Ire available. Russians, as this book makes clear, have a sweeter tooth than is good' for ,17111, and unhealthy also is their predilec- h"n for eating and drinking in determined 'tiles, a tendency reinforced by centuries ? religiously imposed fasts and feast-days., Yet from the tradition of meatless and fatless days derived one of the great s,tteagths of Russian cooking — its use of fish and mushrooms. Lesley Chamberlain kites Aksakov on fish and Nabokov's '"arvellous description of his mother's mushroom-hunting. The smell of damp !oods and clear streams, positive gusts of Ine healthy life, sweeps through their teatiniscences. .11ut the gentry's chefs, under French in- atence, in the 19th-century brought Rus- sian food to a zenith of artificial elegance, ttild it is this 'which marks the Soviet con- eep„, t of haute cuisine. Azerbaijani wine is marketed under the name of shato ikem; `!taurant tables are graced with mounds of :taborately garnished 'Russian salad' - l:tegret to them — often whited sepulchres o
More mashed potato.
f It's perhaps the perspective of ancestral makes and glittering banquet tables that 'flakes Russian attitudes to food often seem ifItiain itlY unsophisticated. The great Easter as g, so grandly symbolic of spring, with tall Easter-cake or paskha marked with the
sign of the cross, also includes lambs
moulded of butter made to look fuzzy, with tai• Sin eyes and parsley collars. We read how countess would serve green cheese rnbled on a plate, into which each i);!stecratic guest in turn then plonked his e_ad, butter side down; and how it was hstomary at name-day parties in some the (not frequented, one imagines, by the three sisters) to break a kasha pie over the head of the celebrant. kiclihe Russian pie, or pirog, solid, warm ill steamy as a peasant's hut, is an almost t.Ystical concept (never seen in (rstitaurants), and Lesley Chamberlain pays di,e tribute to it. The names of its Do'inUtive versions, ushki, pynchki and ftIchki are indeed 'endearing', but also aiOtlY grotesque: one is reminded how the tra.t Russian satirists — Gogol, Gon- krri°v, Saltykov — seized on the homely
aY of Russian dishes and made them an
o`essory after the fact in their indictments th Witless self-indulgence; yet they re selves were clearly not immune from pi, bizarre fascination exerted by soups, ';',,and pancakes, pickles and preserves. (he great realists, on the other hand — Turgenev, Tolstoy — hardly ever 150,`," on food as such. Not having a sweet tio„1, I regretted the rather arbitrary inclu- t.x' la this admirable compendium of an illoerPt from War and Peace, with that rilaskt.eloying of heroines, Natasha Rostova, @Lit oll! a pest of herself about ice-cream. Ile can't expect to find everything to kti s. taste in a cookbook — especially a sstaa one.
Previous page
