A Tale of Teapots -- Russian Cuisine in Ohio, Part 1

Vail and Genis's Russian Cuisine in Exile

Teaching this course on Russian cuisine, my favorite book has become Petr Vail and Alexander Genis's Russian Cuisine in Exile. It's a wonderful set of essays that are part nostalgia, part recipe, part cultural commentary, part advice column ("If you want to buy a clay pot for stewing Russian soups, best to go to other immigrant shops -- African or Caribbean.")

I'm quite sure they named the book after Gleb Struve's classic Russian Literature in Exile, but it is eminently more readable and inherently more fun. I couldn't help quoting Vail and Genis while making tea the other day for my students at our big Russian feast: "[The Russians'] habit of diluting tea with boiling water is a historical misconception. This custom arose from poverty and grew into a superstition according to which it is unhealthy to drink strong tea." The authors go on to explain that this is utterly preposterous, and to describe the right method of brewing a good cup of tea.

Classic Soviet teapot

Funny. In Russian there is one word, chainik [чайник], for both the teapot in which you brew tea and the kettle in which you boil water. One of my favorite teapot designs is the Soviet one pictured at right. Even the size of it suggests that brewing strong tea -- zavarka -- and diluting it with kipiatok -- boiling water -- is the "right" way to make tea Soviet-style. Of course I personally learned to make tea in the old Soviet Union in a dormitory in Leningrad, where my Russian friends, university students from Siberia, actually were poor. We would brew that strong zavarka and then use it for days, until my friend Nadya would finally declare: "Now we're drinking White Nights" [теперь мы пьем Белые ночи]. It was a joke, really, and not even a bitter one -- we're too poor to afford a decent cup of tea, so we'll pretend it's something wonderful and exotic, like the long Northern summer days in St. Petersburg.

When I decided to teach a course on Russian cuisine in literature and culture, I didn't realize how much time I would spend strolling along memory lane. After all, I more or less learned to cook myself from Nadya in that dormitory entryway-cum-kitchen. We fried potatoes and garlic and onions -- vegetables sent in wooden boxes from her mother's garden in Udmurtia. In exchange Nadya would purchase clothes for various relatives -- things that were unavailable in her small village, where there is no store at all, not even to buy bread -- and sew them up in canvas sacks to send back home. We made soup, and for special occasions salat olivier (with chicken and ham, so as a vegetarian I didn't partake) or baked chicken tabaka in a small electric oven (ditto on the not partaking).

Jon with the Fish Kulebiaka -- gorgeous!

My bliny recipe is the one Nadya taught me to make in 1999, long after we'd graduated from college, when she traveled back to St. Petersburg to meet my future husband who was visiting from the States while I led a study abroad group. Everything about cooking makes me think of Nadya -- even reading Vail and Genis and chuckling at their complaints about tea bags ["who wants the taste of glue in their tea?!!" they rail] reminds me of her. The year I was at Leningrad State we were thrilled to buy chai v paketikakh, tea bags -- they seemed so very modern and sophisticated to my Siberian Russian roommates. And I just liked the way it sounded: "tea in little bags," or more literally "packets."

For our cooking day, my students made six or eight varied dishes according to Russian recipes, some from the internet, others from a classic 1911 edition of Elena Molokhovets's cookbook [every student I've shown that book to asks "what language is that?!," because it is printed in the old, pre-revolutionary orthography]. After reading Anya von Bremzen's memoir, I coerced some of the young men to make a fish kulebiaka with a yeast dough, and another student and I put together a mushroom kulebiaka with a rich pastry dough (see below).

Jacob and I chopped a lot of mushrooms for our kulebiaka.

We chopped and stirred and baked and then sat down -- about 25 of us -- to an amazing feast. I brewed pot after pot of tea (the real way, according to Vail and Genis) and poured for the students from my special Lomonosov factory teapot. It felt like a fancy way to honor the students' achievement.

A gift for our wedding from dear *American* friends -- a chainik from the Lomonosov factory.

Did I mention that these students -- 3rd and 4th year language students -- mostly spoke Russian for our 4-hour session? When they had down time they compared notes on study abroad or watched Russian youtube videos on their phones and sang along. I sang too -- my favorite Zhanna Bichevskaya and Okudzhava songs -- so it's a good thing we were drinking tea and not vodka. As Vail and Genis say, "Tea is not vodka -- you can't drink a lot." Lucky for me, or I might still be singing.