Summertime, and the Borscht features Fresh Veggies!

Last week I spent two days at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where my friend and colleague Catherine O'Neil leads a STARTALK program every summer. This government-supported language school runs four weeks, from 8:30-3:30 every day, and features fabulous language teachers from the Naval Academy. With a goal of 90% Russian language every day, the teachers have to be imaginative (after all, they don't take total beginners, but some of their students have had only a year of formal language training). They do exercises and readings, have conversations, play games and watch films (including Volodymyr Zelensky in Servant of the People, conveniently available on Netflix this summer). All in Russian.

I also learned about their coffee break every morning, during which students have to go to the "cafe" and ask the grouchy post-Soviet barista (one of the fabulous instructors) for coffee, tea, or anything else they like. That seems brilliant--on the one hand the students are getting a break, but on the other they are require to activate and use their language skills.

Invited to give a food-related lecture, I put together a presentation on what I called "three Russias": traditional Russia, Soviet Russia, and emigre Russia. The level was pretty high, but I think most of them followed what I was saying. (I felt compelled to explain vocabulary in somewhat nutty ways: to transmit the idea of "exile," as in Russian Cuisine in Exile, I started with the word "diaspora," a cognate, but then went a little crazy, forcing my colleague to draw a sheep as I demonstrated the word "drive," as in "to be driven out." Another high point was when I was quoting Vail and Genis on the evils of "nutrition-based" cooking--they prefer to think about taste and let the nutrition follow, instead of counting carbs and proteins--and crawled under the desk to vivify "vpolzaet v dushu". The students had bemused looks on their faces. Oh well.)

The fun part was the cooking. I was given teams of 4-5 students at a time to instruct in washing, chopping, and assembling ingredients, and though they had a lot of vocabulary in advance, it was still hard at first to understand how to instruct them all, in Russian, while also moving the process along. (We had two cooking sessions, one Thursday afternoon and one Friday morning, and then a big banquet.) I figured out that by making stations around the kitchen and writing out post-it notes with each set of tasks, I could supervise and still "teach" them both language and cooking. Having to give basic instructions ("first wash your hands...") meant that we hit the Russian-language target pretty easily!

Our Salmon Kulebiaka featured a 2+ lb
piece of fish--and was decorated like a U.S. flag.

Will they remember words like "jewelry"? (In order to explain "decorate," as in "think about ways to decorate the Russian pies," I was pointing to earrings and bracelets, talking about Red Square and other "beautiful" things... The students got "ukrasheniia," though the relationship between a necklace and a pie may have escaped them...)

The pies were gorgeous, but so was the summer borscht. I heard a girl who has trouble digesting sour cream praising the lighter pink color of her classmate's borscht. And one of my faculty colleagues, who doesn't like oil in her food, was ecstatic to take home the leftover liter or so of soup.

Russian food has a reputation of being heavy, but in summer the favorites are filled with fresh, uncooked veggies: radishes, scallions, cucumbers and dill. Light and refreshing. The kompot, too, was a revelation--I've never made this fruit drink before myself, and we used it as our sladkoe, our dessert. Delicious!