I decided to stretch my reviewing muscles and try something a little different this time around, by accepting two regional cookbooks. The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe is now out as well, but today, from the same author, we celebrate Mother Russia.
The Food and Cooking of Russia is a reissue of a cookbook first released in the mid-1980s, and begun in the late ’70s, in the midst of the Cold War. Chamberlain, at the time, was a trainee correspondent for Reuters, living in and reporting from Moscow. Her goal with this book was to collect, catalogue, and preserve a culinary tradition that seemed to be dying under Soviet rule, as well as to portray those ordinary Russians to the West, who seemed buried under a sea of propaganda and political divisiveness. She writes in her introduction to the new edition:
I had never been a Communist supporter, and I rejected a Marxist reading of history. But I was quite sure Russians were ‘normal’ people who had hopes and fears, who grew up in a wide variety of family circumstances, loved or hated their teachers, fell in love, achieved or failed in their ambitions, enjoyed books, films, holidays, walks in the country, and meals together. Against a background of decisions taken by their government that influenced world events, Russians led ‘ordinary lives’, which I wanted to portray. I probably should have written a novel, but what was possible at the time was a cookbook.
With this lofty goal in mind, we embark on a culinary journey, to know and taste a rich and long-standing culture. In a sense, this is two books, and I must review both of them. The three hundred plus page tome contains many recipes, of course, over two hundred of them, but as much as half the text describes the history of the recipes and Russian food in general. Every chapter, sub-chapter, section, and sub-section has an introduction of sorts. The book itself starts with a brief history, and throughout the rest of the book, there may be a few lines, a couple of paragraphs, or several pages, on the use of honey versus sugar, the significance and role of carrots in Russian dishes, the relationship between grain crops and the current (at the time of writing) Marxist economy, and personal anecdotes of how she tracked down this or that recipe.
These tidbits are sometimes relevant to the task of finding and using particular ingredients correctly, and sometimes entirely tangential, but always interesting. This book is absolutely full of neat little did-you-knows crammed between the recipes. Just as often it has short essays and insightful narratives, illuminating the motivations, hearts, and souls of the Russian people, and quoted passages from Russian writers, contemporary and from centuries past, on such topics as mushroom hunts or the significance of berries. There are also occasional illustrations, themselves usually borrowed from older Russian works, and serving, I think, as charming additions. This half of the book is fascinating, and provides, I’d say, a much more personal connection to the culture than a text of Russian political history.
Now what of the other half of the book, the recipes themselves? Well, here’s the pickle: I can’t cook. So, of course, doing my homework such that I might write this review became an adventure in and of itself. I recruited my girlfriend and her kitchen, we made a trip to the grocery store to pick up some of the unusual items that most Westerners do not keep in stock, and we attempted some recipes.
I have a Ukrainian uncle, and have borscht frequently. We therefore didn’t bother testing one of the several recipes for this classic Uke staple. Instead, we tried an Armenian recipe for Spas/Tanabour, or yoghurt soup, including eggs, mint, onions, and barley. We used rice as an alternate to the pearl barley, which has to be soaked overnight. This recipe was relatively easy, taking about an hour from start to finish, but this included a lot of cooking time, so it’s a good thing to make while you’re also cooking other things. It’s sour, but tasty and filling. It’s something I would cook again, but I would use more rice next time, as I could tell it wasn’t as thick as it should be.
The grated beetroot was a bit of a disappointment. I’m not sure what I was expecting. The recipe calls for two pounds of grated beets, sour cream, one cooking apple, and a handful of other minor additions. It tastes as you would expect: like boiled beets and sour cream. The other seasonings, and the apple itself, are entirely overpowered by the flavour of the beets. What’s worse, grating two pounds of hard, raw beets is a lot of work. It was very time-consuming, and probably too much trouble, even for an appetizing dish. I also lost a piece of finger on the grater in the process, but that didn’t affect the taste either. We still only tasted beets.
We made potato pancakes and this was the big winner of the night. After more than five hours of cooking by this point, but surprisingly little actual eating, we fried ourselves up a couple fresh ‘cakes, and they were to die for. I’ve never had such good potato pancakes. I will definitely be making these again. This also involves grating, but potatoes are much easier to grate than beets, which, as root vegetables, really do have the hardness of tree roots. Better yet, you can make yourself a big bowl of potato pancake batter, and save the leftover batter for a couple of days. There was probably enough in the recipe for six people. We barely put a dent in it, and we were starving.
We attempted a traditional Russian black bread, or peasant bread. Unfortunately, this recipe includes an hour or two of letting it stand, followed by some other step, then several more hours of rising, followed finally by the baking. It’s an all-day venture and we were approaching midnight and only just reaching the step which involved several more hours of waiting, so we tried to store it in the fridge to finish later. It underwent a frightening transformation, and the resulting mess had to be thrown out. I can’t therefore report on the bread, but if you’re someone who makes bread, know that there are many recipes for it.
There are a lot more recipes that I wanted to try, and haven’t yet, and there are a lot of recipes that I don’t need to try to know that they are probably good. The instructions are fairly straightforward, and I appreciate the completion in the collection, rather than expecting every single dish to suit my particular tastes. I do have one complaint about the recipes themselves, and that’s in the ingredient measures. Units include cups, tablespoons, and the like; measures of volume, like pints and millilitres; and measures of weight, in grams or ounces.
Often mixes of these units are included in the same recipe, so that even relative amounts can’t be determined, or else these are consistent, but the recipe will include something like a certain number of eggs, or apples, so the appropriate ratio of these items to the mass of some measured item is still unknown. You need a scale to weigh items in order for many of these recipes to work, and you need to be able to measure volume and weight in both imperial and metric, as well as the classic cup and spoon measures of most cookbooks. This is an unfortunate oversight, likely a result of an extensive cataloguing of old recipes from many sources, and also many of which have been tied down to specific measures for the first time, but it’s an oversight nonetheless.
Even so, I recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in learning about Russian food and cooking. I’d say it’s probably the definitive Russian cookbook, but even were it not, its colour and history make it stand out from the rest.
This past summer, I read a book chronicling the history of blues music from the late 19th century almost to the 1980s, when it was published. The way to read that book is to learn about the people that have been involved in developing the musical genre, read the descriptions and quotes about their music, then track down their songs that are anywhere from 50 to over 100 years old. It’s a book about the history of music. You shouldn’t just read about it, you should be listening. And we live in an age where that’s possible, even without the exhaustive list of albums included at the back of the book.
Similarly, this is a book to learn about the food and cooking of Russia, not just a book of recipes. For the adventurous types, I recommend flipping through it, reading about traditional Russian fish dishes, ethnically diverse soups and light stews, and the past, present, and speculated future of pyranik, amongst other things, and when something sounds particularly different and interesting, endeavour to taste it. Learn and taste. Only then will you be taking advantage of all this book has to offer.
(Bison Books, 2006)
