Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (6 page)

Mom’s face blossoms with pride as Sasha confesses that, in his whole life, he’s
never
tasted botvinya and tiered kulebiaka.

“And Guriev kasha?” he cries. “Does it really
exist
outside literature?”

Suddenly all the guests are here, crowding Mom’s tiny foyer, kissing hello three times, handing over bouquets and bottles. At table, we are: a documentary filmmaker, Andrei, and his wife, Toma, sexy in her slinky, low-cut cocktail frock; my South African–born partner, Barry; and “distinguished American guests”—a couple from Brooklyn, both in the culture business.

“A proper fin-de-siècle
traktir
setting,” Mom expounds to the Brooklynites in her museum-docent tones, “should be a blend of art nouveau and Russian folkloric.” The Brooklynites nod respectfully.

Zakuski devoured, first vodkas downed, everyone addresses my botvinya. Mom barely touches hers, wrinkling her nose at the salmon. I both like the botvinya and don’t: it tastes utterly alien.

And then, gasp, Mom carries out her kulebiaka. A choral whoop goes up. She cuts into the layers, releasing fishy, mushroomy steam into the candlelight. Slowly, bite by bite, I savor the voluptuousness of the dough-upon-dough Slavic excess. The fluffy layers put me in the mind of luxurious Oblomovian sloth, of collapsing into a huge feather bed. I think I finally get the point of the
blinchiki
. They’re like marbling in a steak.

Sasha Genis raises his vodka glass to Larisa. “This is the most patriotic meal of my life!” he enthuses. “Putin should be taking note!”

His toast puzzles me. More, it perplexes, touching on what I’ve been turning over in my mind. Patriotic about what? The hated czarist regime? The repressive State we fled decades ago? Or some collective
ur-memory of a cuisine never rightfully ours? Back in the USSR,
patriotism
was a dirty word in our dissident circles. And for that matter, what of our supposed
Russianness
? At table we’re a typical pan-Soviet émigré crew. Andrei is a Ukrainian Jew; his wife, Toma, is Russian; both are from Kiev. Although the Genises hail from Riga, they’re not Latvian. Mom, also Jewish, was born in Odessa and lived in Murmansk and Leningrad before moving to Moscow. I’m the only born Muscovite among us.

My ruminations on patriotism are drowned out by more toasts. Mom’s air conditioner chugs and strains; the toasts grow more ironic, more Soviet, more “ours” …

What was going on in the Russia we’re bidding adieu to here, in the year 1910? our Brooklyn culturati are asking. “Well, Chekhov has been dead for six years,” answers Sasha. “Tolstoy has just died at a remote railway station.”

“His strange death a major cultural milestone,” Mother chimes in, not to be outdone. “It caused a massive media frenzy.”

In 1913, I add myself, revisiting my patriotism theme, the tone-deaf Czar Nicholas II created a minor public relations disaster by serving a Frenchified menu at the banquet celebrating three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty.
Potage a tortue
—definitely not patriotic.

Cautiously I dig my spoon now into my Guriev kasha. Rich yet light, with a texture somewhere between pudding and torte, it tastes like a celestial version of my dreaded kindergarten breakfast farina. The guests giggle at my three a.m.
penki
fiasco.

And then it’s suddenly time for au revoirs. To Mom, to me, to czarist excess. The Genises head off down the hallway to the elevator. Suddenly Sasha comes running back.

“
Devochki
(Girls)! The kulebiaka, I just have to say again: wow! Inserting blini into yeast pastry!? Unreal.”

Maybe I do understand Sasha’s brand of patriotism and nostalgia. It’s patriotism for that nineteenth-century Russian idea of Culture with a capital C—an idea, and an ideal, that we ex-Soviets from Ukraine and Moscow and Latvia have never abandoned. They
still stir us, those memories of savoring orgiastic descriptions of edibles in Chekhov and Gogol while dunking stale socialist pies into penitentiary-style soups.

I want to ask Mom what she thinks of all this, but she looks too exhausted. And sweaty. I have a feeling she’s welcoming the seven and a half decades of frugal Soviet eating ahead of us.

CHAPTER TWO

W
hen I was four, I developed a troubling fascination with Lenin. With Dedushka (Grandpa) Lenin, as the leader of the world proletariat was known to us Soviet kids.

For a grandfather, Vladimir Ilyich was distressingly odd. I puzzled over how he could be immortal—“more alive than all the living,” per Mayakovsky—and yet be so clearly, blatantly dead. Puzzling too how Lenin was simultaneously the curly-haired baby Volodya on the star-shaped Octobrists badge of first-graders and yet a very old
dedushka
with a tufty triangular beard, unpleasantly bald under his inescapable flat cap. Everyone raved about how honest he was, how smart and courageous; how his revolution saved Russia from backwardness. But doubts nagged at me. That cheesy proletarian cap (who ever wore such a thing?) and that perpetual sly squint, just a bit smirky—they made him not entirely trustworthy. And how come
alkogoliks
sometimes kicked his stony statues, mumbling “Fucking syphilitic”? And what awesome revolutionary, even if bald, would marry Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who resembled a misshapen tea cozy?

I decided the only way to resolve these mysteries would be to visit the mausoleum in Red Square where Vladimir Ilyich—dead? alive?—resided. But a visit to the
mavzoley
wasn’t so easy. True, it stood just a short distance from my grandma Alla’s communal apartment, where I was born. All I had to do was walk out of her house, then follow
the block-long facade of GUM department store into Red Square. But here you encountered the
mausoleum line
. It was longer than the lines at GUM for Polish pantyhose and Rumanian ski boots combined. No matter how early I’d trudge over, thousands would already be there in a mile-long orderly file. Returning in the afternoon, I’d see the same people, still waiting, the bright enthusiasm of a socialist morning now faded from their glum, tired faces. It was then I began to understand that rituals required sacrifice.

But the foremost obstacle between me and Lenin’s
mavzoley
was my mother’s dogged anti-Soviet hostility. When I started kindergarten, where instructive mausoleum field trips were frequent, she forbade me from going, warning the teachers that I threw up on buses (true enough). On class trip days the kindergarten became eerily peaceful—just me and cleaners and cooks. I had instructions to sit in the Lenin Corner and draw the mausoleum and its bald occupant. The red and black stone ziggurat of the low little building—that I could reproduce perfectly. But the mysterious interior? All I came up with was a big table around which my kindergarten mates and Dedushka Lenin were having tea. On the table I always drew apple cake. All Soviet children knew of Lenin’s fondness for apple cake. Even more, we knew how child-Lenin once secretly gobbled up the apple peels after his mom baked such a cake. But the future leader owned up to his crime. He bravely confessed it to his mother! This was the moral. We all had to grow up honest like Lenin.

Actually, the person who knew all about Lenin and the mausoleum was my father, Sergei.

In the seventies, Dad worked at an inconspicuous two-story gray mansion near the Moscow Zoo on the Garden Ring, discreetly accessed through a courtyard. Most passersby had no clue that this was the Ministry of Health’s Mausoleum Research Lab, where the best and brightest of science—some 150 people in many departments—toiled to keep Lenin looking his immortal best under the bulletproof
glass of his sarcophagus. The hand-washing and sterilizing of his outfit, of his underwear, shirts, vests, and polka-dot ties, were strictly supervised at the lab, too, by a certain zaftig comrade named Anna Mikhailovna. A physics of color guy, Dad manned the
kolorimeter
, monitoring changes in the hue of Lenin’s dead skin. (In his seven years there, there weren’t any.)

Dad and those of his rank of course were never allowed near the “object” itself. That required top security clearance. Mere mortal researchers practiced on “biological structures”—cadavers embalmed in the exact same glycerin and potassium acetate solution as the star of the show. There were twenty-six practice stiffs in all, each with its own name. Dad’s was “Kostya,” a criminal dead from asphyxiation and unclaimed by relatives. On Dad’s first day his new colleagues watched cackling as he nearly fainted at a display of severed heads. It was a pretty gruesome, over-the-top place, the lab. Embalmed limbs and fetuses bobbed in the basement bathtubs. But my father quickly got used to the work. In fact, he came to quite like it, he says. Because it was classified as dangerous to employees’ health, the job brought delightful perks. Shortened work hours, a free daily carton of milk, and, best of all, a generous monthly allotment of purest, highest-grade
spirt
(ethyl alcohol). In his reports, Dad noted the alcohol’s use for cleaning “optical spheres,” but he often came home with the robust smell of mausoleum spirits on his breath. Behold Soviet science.

I was sufficiently older and smarter by the time of my father’s necroemployment that Lenin no longer bewitched and bothered me. But certain curiosities linger even today, such as:

What did Lenin and his fellow Bolshevik revolutionaries actually eat?

Mom, on the other hand, has no such curiosity. “Over
my
dead body!” she almost bellows at my suggestion that we reproduce some Lenin-esque menus. Although she does chuckle when I mention Dad’s
pet cadaver. Her own memory of his mausoleum days is just the alcohol breath, and she doesn’t find that one amusing.

Mom has her own notions of how the 1920s should be dealt with gastronomically. Rightly, she characterizes the decade as a fractured chaos of contradictory utopian experiments and concessionary schemes leading nowhere—all forgotten once Stalin’s leaden hand fell in the thirties.

“For us today,” she propounds, ever the culture vulture, “the Soviet twenties are really remembered for the writers. And the avant-garde art—the Maleviches, Rodchenkos, and Tatlins on museum walls all over the world!”

So besides digging into family history for her grandmother’s gefilte fish recipe, Mom assigns herself the task of leafing through art albums to troll for food references.

And I’m left to tackle Lenin. Dedushka Lenin.

From my kindergarten nanny, Zoya Petrovna, I knew that her dear Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870, some 430 miles from the Kremlin, in the provincial Volga town of Simbirsk. Volodya (the diminutive of Vladimir) was the smart, boisterous third child of six in a large and happy family. At the cozy Ulyanov homestead there were musical evenings, tea in the garden gazebo, gooseberry bushes for the kids to raid. Mom Maria—a teacher of Germanic and Jewish descent—cooked stolid Russo-Germanic fare. The family enjoyed
Arme Ritter
(“poor knights,” a German French toast) and lots of
buterbrodi
, the open-faced sandwiches that would become staples of our Soviet diets. About the proverbial apple cake reliable scholarly sources are silent, alas.