Wednesday, 23 November 2022

A history of the Soviet Union in twenty dishes

[an important fountain in Moscow, the friendship of nations fountain, well known to the author. I believe the gilded ladies are sturdy collective farmers in traditional dress, representing the nations of the Union. Including, no doubt, the Ukraine]

‘Mastering the art of Soviet cooking’ is a book I came across by chance on a table in Epsom Library. A cooking flavoured memoir of the Soviet Union by a lady of Russian-Jewish-German stock who started growing up in Moscow and emigrated to the US when she was 11 in 1974 – so a lot of this memoir is stories from her wider family. A family which included a senior officer in naval intelligence, lucky enough to survive both war and purge, was on the fringes of the nomenklatura and was entitled to some privileges as a result – eatable ones being particularly important, given that food seems to have been a problem, certainly in Moscow, for more or less all of the time – starting with the Romanovs, on through Khrushchev with his weakness for maize and not ending until Putin turned up to sort out the mess created by Gorbachev – who might have been a star internationally, but was not a star at home. Not least because he tried to bear down on the consumption of vodka – grossly excessive though it was.

She started out trying to be a concert pianist and when that fell through she took to writing about food, very successfully, if the number of her books for sale on Abebooks is anything to go by. In the course of all this she went back to the Soviet Union, then Russia, a number of times over the years.

One of the opening recipes is for gelfite fish, a dish which I had heard of and which, for some reason, thought was a species of cold white fish fried in batter. I now know better. Take one large pike and bash it on a table for a while to loosen the skin. Remove the skin, in one piece. Fillet the fish. Mince up the fish with onions, carrots and various condiments. Some people like to add sugar, some don’t. Stuff the mince back into the fish skin and steam for some hours. Various other manipulations, perhaps involving an oven, after which the fish is served, entire and decorated. Eaten, I suppose, by the slice. Our own experience with pike, maybe forty years ago now, was not encouraging and we did not go on to explore the esox cuisine

I offer a few more titbits

Her father one of the team of around 120 people who worried about the maintenance of Lenin’s corpse in presentable condition. With the relevant institute holding a great stash of fresher material to work on - plus an excellent supply of near pure ethyl alcohol – that is to say the active ingredient of the stuff you drink. The whole relic business striking me as very Catholic, so perhaps also very Orthodox - and maybe the Bolsheviks were unable to shake off this bit of the past, despite having declared religion to be dead and buried? To be fair, we are also told that maybe two thirds of Russians now think that it is time to retire this corpse and bury it in the usual way.

Queuing for food and other necessities was a big part of metropolitan Soviet life. Young Pioneers made a business out of queuing for others. Romances were made in queues. So much so, that older Russians get quite nostalgic about them.

Some of the Bolsheviks were sent into Central Asia where they found there was no proletariat, just Islam and tribes. So as part of liberating Soviet women from their family duties, they had an onslaught on Islamic dress for women, with mass veil burnings and such. But the men fought back with much violence, rape and misery. After which the Bolsheviks went a bit quiet.

I read of an old Bolshevik who survived, despite being an Aremenian, perhaps because his younger brother was one of the founders of the MIG aircraft operation – where the M is for Mikoyan. The present Mikoyan was one of the first Soviet leaders to visit the US and spent three months in the United States in 1935, where he learned, inter alia, about its food industry. When he returned, he introduced a number of popular American consumer products to the Soviet Union, including hamburgers, ice cream, corn flakes, popcorn, tomato juice, grapefruit and corn on the cob. And so responsible for the Russian take on the hamburger called kotleti, a take which lost the bun. Also took a personal interest in the quality of ice cream sold in parks. Died in his bed at the grand old age of 82 in 1978.

Most of the staff of Stalin’s personal dacha outside Moscow – where he held elaborate feasts with fancy table furniture – got executed after he died – on Beria’s orders. However, his many evils & horrors notwithstanding, he appears to remain a hero to many Russians to this day.

A lucky find. My own copy is now on its way from somewhere in the Abebooks (that is to say Amazon) empire.

References

Reference 1: Mastering the art of Soviet cooking: a memoir of food and longing – Anya von Bremzen – 2013.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuntsevo_Dacha. ‘… The building remains shrouded in secrecy: the grounds are fenced and closed to ordinary visitors. However, the dacha is still preserved in good condition, along with all of Stalin's personal belongings, including his study with the war-time desk and the sofa where he slept…’.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anya_von_Bremzen

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastas_Mikoyan. Promoted the famous ‘Book of Tasty and Healthy Food’ which went through lots of editions and sold millions of copies. My own retread, in English, also on order from Amazon.

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