Lately I've been doing some research into Russian food culture, which led me to think more about the issue of hospitality.
The Russian word for hospitality is "gostepriimstvo," literally "guest-reception." A synonym for this reminds me of what that translates to in real life: "khlebosol'stvo," bread-and-salt. When you receive guests, what do you do with them? You feed them. This I can relate to -- I love to fill my own house with the smells of baking and cooking and then with people who will consume all that I produce.
I've written about hospitality before. The traditional greeting for guests entering a Russian village involves a woman, preferably I imagine a comely maiden, holding an embroidered scarf between her arms with a loaf of bread and a cellar of salt perched atop. Not an everyday occurrence anymore, but I've experienced the ritual, and it is both lovely and a little weird. I've reproduced the ritual for my classes off and on (without the traditional costume, of course), and they always find it amusing. Salt? Really?
I've had some wonderful meals in the homes of friends and acquaintances over the years, most cooked almost exclusively from scratch. (One of my colleagues who emigrated here from Russia claimed not to understand the concept of "from scratch" in English. You either cook/bake, or you buy prepared foods. Another friend, though, who was not interested in cooking but whose husband required that she generate a daily meal, crowed to me about the joys of polufabrikaty -- frozen vegetables, pre-made dumplings, etc. -- which enabled her to hold down her job and also put an evening meal on the table.)
According to scholars, Russian men rarely spend any time in the kitchen. Not my experience -- my life in Russia featured Vasya's pumpkin kasha and Gera's fried kabachki. Even Sasha, my artist friend, managed to slice the inevitable rossiiskii cheese and put out bread and jam with the tea he poured out, or pickles and chocolate with the vodka. My male friends have not been afraid of the kitchen. They were, though, all born to women who lacked daughters -- maybe that's why they embraced hospitality as well as what sometimes seems the drudgery of daily meals?
When another friend, whose mother is actually a Leningrad Siege survivor, invited us to visit his parents in Vyborg, they fed us from morning to night with pastries filled with berries from their garden and specially marinated shashlyk (meat kabobs, Georgian-style) in the forest. The pastries were a female affair, while the meat was an exclusively male endeavor. Baking indoors, in the oven or Russian stove, as opposed to open air cooking. One scholar I've been reading claims that Russian men's only "interior culinary effort" is peeling potatoes; I guess preparing the marinade for a picnic doesn't count.
In his 1836 novel The Captain's Daughter Pushkin famously warned: "God save us from witnessing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless." I felt almost the same way about Siberian hospitality. Relentless. Overwhelming. Utterly merciless. Visiting Siberia in the late 80s, I met with what could only be called extreme hospitality, so extreme that in the end I had to flee back to Moscow.
Maybe Pushkin was onto something broader than just violence? The Captain's Daughter is a historical novel about the Pugachev rebellion, which did feature some real atrocities wreaked on Catherine's officers and the outposts they commanded. But then, we can't say that Catherine showed mercy either, what with the punishments she meted out when the rebellion was finally crushed.
Or maybe Russian and "extreme" are synonyms in their own right?
The Russian word for hospitality is "gostepriimstvo," literally "guest-reception." A synonym for this reminds me of what that translates to in real life: "khlebosol'stvo," bread-and-salt. When you receive guests, what do you do with them? You feed them. This I can relate to -- I love to fill my own house with the smells of baking and cooking and then with people who will consume all that I produce.
I've written about hospitality before. The traditional greeting for guests entering a Russian village involves a woman, preferably I imagine a comely maiden, holding an embroidered scarf between her arms with a loaf of bread and a cellar of salt perched atop. Not an everyday occurrence anymore, but I've experienced the ritual, and it is both lovely and a little weird. I've reproduced the ritual for my classes off and on (without the traditional costume, of course), and they always find it amusing. Salt? Really?I've had some wonderful meals in the homes of friends and acquaintances over the years, most cooked almost exclusively from scratch. (One of my colleagues who emigrated here from Russia claimed not to understand the concept of "from scratch" in English. You either cook/bake, or you buy prepared foods. Another friend, though, who was not interested in cooking but whose husband required that she generate a daily meal, crowed to me about the joys of polufabrikaty -- frozen vegetables, pre-made dumplings, etc. -- which enabled her to hold down her job and also put an evening meal on the table.)
According to scholars, Russian men rarely spend any time in the kitchen. Not my experience -- my life in Russia featured Vasya's pumpkin kasha and Gera's fried kabachki. Even Sasha, my artist friend, managed to slice the inevitable rossiiskii cheese and put out bread and jam with the tea he poured out, or pickles and chocolate with the vodka. My male friends have not been afraid of the kitchen. They were, though, all born to women who lacked daughters -- maybe that's why they embraced hospitality as well as what sometimes seems the drudgery of daily meals?
When another friend, whose mother is actually a Leningrad Siege survivor, invited us to visit his parents in Vyborg, they fed us from morning to night with pastries filled with berries from their garden and specially marinated shashlyk (meat kabobs, Georgian-style) in the forest. The pastries were a female affair, while the meat was an exclusively male endeavor. Baking indoors, in the oven or Russian stove, as opposed to open air cooking. One scholar I've been reading claims that Russian men's only "interior culinary effort" is peeling potatoes; I guess preparing the marinade for a picnic doesn't count.
In his 1836 novel The Captain's Daughter Pushkin famously warned: "God save us from witnessing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless." I felt almost the same way about Siberian hospitality. Relentless. Overwhelming. Utterly merciless. Visiting Siberia in the late 80s, I met with what could only be called extreme hospitality, so extreme that in the end I had to flee back to Moscow.
Maybe Pushkin was onto something broader than just violence? The Captain's Daughter is a historical novel about the Pugachev rebellion, which did feature some real atrocities wreaked on Catherine's officers and the outposts they commanded. But then, we can't say that Catherine showed mercy either, what with the punishments she meted out when the rebellion was finally crushed.
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| Suvorov putting Pugachev in the cage used to transport him to Moscow... where he was beheaded and his head put on a pike for all to see. |
I'm currently dating a Georgian guy, and while he'll swear until he's blue in the face that he doesn't cook because he's a man, he's actually pretty good at rescuing my kitchen crises. He also loves chopping (which is the worst part of cooking for me), so he's actually pretty helpful in the kitchen. As long as it isn't called cooking...
ReplyDeleteSo what does he call it?!
DeleteJust an interesting FYI - (which I am sure you know) - one of my favorite bands is Steeleye Span and they had an album named "Below the Salt" which made me curious about its meaning.
ReplyDeleteMeaning
Common or lowly. See also 'beyond the pale'.
Origin
'Below the salt', or 'beneath the salt', is one of the many English phrases that refer to salt, for example, 'worth one's salt', 'take with a grain of salt', 'the salt of the earth', etc. This is an indication of the long-standing importance given to salt in society.
In medieval England salt was expensive and only affordable by the higher ranks of society. Its value rested on its scarcity. Salt was extracted from seawater by evaporation and was less easily obtainable in northern Europe than in countries with warmer climates, where the evaporation could be brought about by the action of the sun rather than by boiling over a fire. This method was abandoned in England in the mid-1600s when natural rock-salt began to be mined commercially in Cheshire. Prior to that date the high value of salt was the source of the high symbolic status given to it in the day-to-day language that originated from England in the Middle Ages.
At that time the nobility sat at the 'high table' and their commoner servants at lower trestle tables. Salt was placed in the centre of the high table and only those of rank had access to it. Those less favoured on the lower tables were below (or beneath) the salt.
Thanks for that. Interesting stuff.
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