Outrage and salo, and vegetables

So I was talking with a friend today whose grandmother grew up in Russia ... or Ukraine. With Americans, you never really know which.

The important thing is that her grandmother was extremely proud to have never eaten a raw vegetable. Ever. In her life. She ate cabbage, beets, potatoes, turnips, onions, even cucumbers -- but only in soup, or pickled, or in some way processed.

This is a fascinating thing about Russian (and often Ukrainian) cooking. In some of the research I've been doing I have noticed a tendency to preserve everything.

Tomato sauce, fresh salsa, jams and jellies -- and apple pie.

I think it must be a genetic fear of the long, cold winter. And it's not limited to those living in the former tsarist lands. I felt it myself this autumn when I arrived back to my house from a half-year of sojourning through Europe and the east coast -- my shelves were empty, and I needed to fill them. So we canned about 12 quarts of tomato sauce, pints of raspberry and blackberry jam, even green tomatillo and corn salsa. We also made basil pesto for the freezer.

My children went at the jam immediately -- there have never been so many PB&J sandwiches in their lives, not to mention toast with jam in the morning -- but there are a couple of jars left. Plus lots of tomato sauce and pesto for those winter pasta meals.

The beets from my CSA drove me crazy, though. Somehow my kids don't want to eat borscht every day, and I haven't started in on preserving root vegetables. Maybe next year.

Which is why I was so touched to read in one of Sasha Genis's essays that his grandmother ate borscht every day: "Моя бабушка считала день без борща напрасно прожитым, таких, впрочем, у нее и не было." [My grandmother considered that there was no point in living a day without borscht -- and she never did.] I imagine that Sasha's grandmother and my friend Muriel's grandmother may have grown up in the same village.

In another essay Genis mentions that his book Russian Cuisine in Exile was being printed in the Soviet Union in 1991 during the worst days of defitsit, when there was literally nothing on the store shelves. I wasn't in Russia that year, but have been reliving 1987 and 1988-89 this month as my daughter completed her graphic novel Out of the Dustbin about my life as a foreign student during perestroika.

When I was in Moscow (during what I like to call the "milk products crisis of 88-89"), citizens began to be issued ration cards. Because I lived in a dormitory and don't take sugar in my tea, I didn't bother to collect mine -- though I had a right to several kilograms of sugar a month, I think. But then I went to visit my friends in still-Leningrad, and was cursed roundly by Lidiya Aleksandrovna, my friend Vasya's mother, who couldn't believe I would come by train with no sugar in my luggage. "We have to put up berries for jam this summer -- don't you dare come back without bringing some Moscow sugar," she admonished me. I still feel guilty.

That same year out in Novosibirsk another friend's mother, who lived in a 5-story apartment building, had a tragedy -- her pogreb was robbed. Out near the rows of metal garages by their building was a set of holes in the ground: cellars, with lids and locks. This is where these citydwellers kept all their potatoes and beets and onions and 3-liter jars of jam and preserves. And it was going to be a difficult winter now that their stores had been stolen.

Ready for soup in Kyiv
 (photo credit Andriy Lyubka)

As a young person, I had a hard time understanding the culture of jam, but now I get it -- among other things, those berries meant vitamins. And although as a vegetarian I am on Tolstoy's side -- I don't need to eat 2 pounds of meat a day, because I am working at a desk, not out in the fields -- I think about meat in the context of that genetic fear of cold. On the barricades in Ukraine, reports the New York Times, it is outrage and salo that are fueling the revolution. This was my favorite quote from the story:

One cook, Yuri Dorozhivsky, shared this recipe for buckwheat with salo (feeds thousands):
1) Heat a 50-gallon kettle over an open fire.
2) Brown 20 pounds of salo and 10 pounds of onions.
3) Fill with water and bring to a gentle boil, stir in 60 pounds of buckwheat kernels.
4) Simmer for an hour, then remove from direct heat, salt to taste.

It's the salo that helps fight the cold, I think, but the soup also warms the demonstrators from the inside. Genis says that salo, or cured pork fat, is the very essence of Ukrainian cooking, and I'll take his word for it. I prefer borscht and shchi, and I'm afraid I tend to make them à la Tolstoy.

I'm planning a running set of proverbs for my food course, and we'll start in January with one that is probably being pronounced right now, in Ukrainian, on Maidan: "Щи да каша, пища наша." [Cabbage soup and kasha are our food.] Good for the shchipiashchie, the hushing sounds in Russian, and true -- for Russia and for Ukraine.

Now if they could only sort out their political differences.

I'm sticking with Sasha Genis, who says he can't resolve the Russia/Ukraine question, and doesn't want to. He loves both countries, and both cuisines. I do too ... except that I can't embrace the salo.