I have never been to Russia, despite majoring in Russian and Eastern European history in college, speaking the language to the level of a moderately articulate toddler, and having spent a year in Eastern Europe (mostly Romania, some Hungary and Ukraine) on a Fulbright research fellowship. That year I was studying the effect of EU accession on the historically fraught relationship between Hungarian and Romanian populations in Transylvania, but also ended spending time in Kiev, looking at the cultural residue of Soviet control of the area.
In Ukraine, the locus of this focus quickly became culinary, and, in particular, narrowed down to one restaurant: Katyusha. I was staying with a friend in an apartment building just outside the city, but managed to make him take me to Katyusha three times, each of which was better than the last. The restaurant offered a really fantastic amount of stereotypical Ukrainian peasant-type food, with little ceramic vats of dumplings, complimentary champagne on New Year’s, and little plates of herring before meals.
Since returning to the US, I’ve gradually forgotten most of my Romanian and a great deal of my Russian, but maintain my interest in Russian culture solely by following lots of Russian-language food accounts. Russian Instagram foodies have developed along a slightly different trajectory than American TikTok culinary influencers. In these videos, the really striking difference between American and Russian videos is the presence of one immediately ascertainable ingredient: mayonnaise.
This obsession with mayonnaise is a relic of Soviet-era eating practices that favored caloric density over taste and . . . mouthfeel. There is currently a (relatively small) backlash to this type of cooking going on among aficionados and producers of Russian cuisine. This controversy has been concentrated in American interpreters of the cuisine, such as the fantastic Darra Goldstein and Alissa Timoshkina, as well as in restaurants like Kachka in Portland and Dacha 46 in Brooklyn, but the movement also exists in Russia itself as well.
One of the interesting things about the state of Russian cuisine is that its evolution is heavily reliant on two texts, each of which were issued with varying degrees of involvement from the Russian state. The first of these texts is “A Gift to Young Housewives”, written by a Russian noblewoman named Elena Molokhovets. This book includes some really insane recipes, appropriate to the kitchen of a Russian noble engaged in both serfdom and marital coverture (Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya, in reviewing an interpretation of the classic text, refers to the original as “slave labor”). Recipes in the book include such delicacies as eel and green pea soup and a recipe for babka calling for nearly a hundred eggs.
This was a heavily medieval cuisine, with deeply complicated recipes. It was intended to fit the labor structures of the time, which included, as Tolstaya notes, slavery and near-slavery. This difficulty and perceived aristocracy led to the development of a different cookbook and style of eating by the Soviet state, the “Book of Healthy and Tasty Food”, which was collectively developed at the behest of a Stalinist planner. This book contains less a collection of recipes than a manual on how to leverage Soviet agricultural production into individual meals. It contains lengthy descriptions of various mass-produced food items, like champagne and ice cream (and, of course, mayonnaise), as well as numerous menus that requires only the opening of cans and the dumping of boxes.
This mass-produced type of cooking, and sometimes just eating, fit the lifestyle that the Soviet state primed to produce – factory style ingredients, calorically dense, guaranteeing to keep at bay the very recently real specter of starvation. Variety and presentation were less of an issue.
Today’s Russian food Instagram is a baroque look into how that cuisine has remained, but also how little has changed since the end of the Cold War, a war that, after all, had no legal or political endpoint.
After the end of the Cold War, actually, life in Russia got a good deal worse than it had been before, largely due to American-style economic reforms. This lasted for quite a long time. While American cuisine incorporated sun-dried tomatoes, newly upmarket California wines, and dressed-up pizzas, Russian foodways remained on a similar track to what they had been under the USSR – simple, preserved, mayonnaise-y.
As a result, perhaps, of this lack of wellbeing to match the political upheaval that the nation faced, many of the foods from the “Book of Healthy and Tasty Foods” remain. Mayonnaise, now as ever, is a staple, as is sour cream and packaged sausage.
When I lived in Eastern Europe, people seemed generally optimistic about their lives and the futures of their countries. They seemed, too, however, a little bit confused by Americans’ attitude to the region, which seemed to think that there was nothing else to be done after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They felt, even in 2012, that too much remained the same as it had been before 1991 for things to simply start over again.
Since the big news item in Eastern Europe in early 2022 is the potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, I think that this continuance of the Cold War dynamic in a useful frame for understanding why the conflict is occurring. The cultural and political reorganization of the region is an ongoing project, with borders and identities still in flux. While it may seem obvious in the US that the conflicts of previous eras have concluded, this is far less clear in the area, especially when so many other aspects of that time remain.
READING LIST
· Few people are moving to the Upper South
· $12 million dollar cube placed in Central Park, alongside crypto rollout.
· Long eggs are very graceful when extruded