A Cook's Tour (14 page)

     Strangely, once out of the water, I felt fine. In fact, I felt incredible. I wasn’t cold at all. With a confident, even jaunty, spring in my step, I walked along the surface of the frozen lake, ankle-deep in snow, feeling as toasty and comfortable as if I’d been sitting in front of a fire in a big woolly sweater. I walked around the cabin for a bit, pausing to chat with a barrel-chested naked Russian hockey coach, who informed me that he didn’t even bother to use the sauna before jumping in the lake. He came only to swim. Every few seconds, there was another splash as a naked Russian flopped into the water. The coach wanted to talk about American hockey, but as my bare feet were beginning to stick to the ground, I stepped back inside. I sat with Zamir and gratefully slugged back a mouthful of vodka. I felt good. Really good. So good that after a bit more of the black bread and sausage, a few nibbles of fish, and lots more beer and vodka, I was ready to go again.

     I was drunk. I was happy. If not
the
perfect meal, this was, in many ways, a perfect one. Good food, good company, exotic ambience, and an element of adventure.

     Back in Saint Petersburg, we turned the corner by the Hermitage, only to get pulled over once again by a traffic cop. ‘Aw, this isn’t fair,’ complained Alexej. ‘We just got shaken down in the same place a few hours ago. We paid already!’

     The cop considered this for a moment, peered into the car, and agreed. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s not fair.’ He closed his little pad, withdrew his hand, and waved us along.

In a well-worn rabbit-fur coat, Sonya pushed her wide shoulders through the crowded entryway of the Kupchina market. This was a working-class district, and the other customers around her, also in ratty furs, bore the same resigned expressions and stooped postures you see on the IRT train bearing passengers in from Queens for morning shifts at city restaurants – the look of hardworking people going to and coming from unglamorous jobs. Given her dark mascara and rough Slavic features, her less-than-diminutive size, and the seriousness of her intent, the others got out of Sonya’s way as she approached the long row of butcher counters. She was a woman on a mission, a heat-seeking missile, a professional at shopping. ‘What’s this?’ Sonya inquired of a leathery-looking man in an apron as she disdainfully fingered a perfectly fine-looking pork shoulder draped over his countertop.

     ‘Beautiful pork shoulder,’ said the butcher, already wary. He knew what was coming.

     ‘It looks older than I am,’ sneered Sonya, easily in her late thirties. ‘How much?’

     After getting an answer, she spun away without a backward glance, her eye already on another piece a few yards down. The butcher called her back, the pork suddenly cheaper by a few rubles. I traveled slipstream in Sonya’s considerable wake, doing my best to keep up as she barreled from vendor to vendor in the hangar-sized unheated space, keeping my eyes constantly on the massive rabbit coat and the mop of red hair as she careened purposefully down the crowded aisles, collecting meat, root vegetables, herbs, and
mise-en-place
for our lunch. Few running backs ever had it so good. People saw Sonya coming and moved quickly aside. I didn’t know what she was saying to these people, but I had a pretty good idea. Sonya examined a bunch of beets, hefted a couple of them, then launched into a gruff interrogation of the merchant. Unsatisfied with the response, she headed for another neatly arranged pile, muttering something over her shoulder that was certainly not a compliment.

     I had been led to believe that Russia was all bread lines, shortages, empty shelves, produce rotting in the train yards, oranges only a rumor. And surely that must have been the case elsewhere. The country, as we are constantly reminded by panicky anchormen, is in financial shambles. The army hasn’t been paid. Most people live on about a dollar a day. Gangsters roam at will, bombing, assassinating. Saint Petersburg itself is the contract-killing capital of Russia – which is perhaps why so many flatheads are able to find steady employment as bodyguards. Mail arrives – or it doesn’t. Farms lie fallow, factories molder. So why, in a not at all well-to-do neighborhood, is there a public market that could give Dean & Deluca or Zabar’s a run for their money? In front of me lay counter after counter of pristine-looking vegetables: yellow peppers, melons, fresh herbs, bananas, pineapples, tubers, root veggies, lettuces. Butchers broke down on site whole sides of beef, lamb, pork, whacking away with heavy cleavers against deeply bowed and scarred chopping blocks. Beautiful free-range chickens, head and feet still attached, were arranged in orderly and attractive rows over deli counters. Little of it was refrigerated – but it was cold in there and the stuff was moving fast. There was a customer for every steak, hoof, scrap, bone, foot, and jowl. Women in heavy coats and babushkas considered single squares of pork fat as if shopping for a new car. People didn’t so much haggle as argue, delivering impassioned rants about the virtues and deficiencies of a slab of bacon, which almost always ended in a sale.

     What the Kupchina market lacks in foreign specialties and produce, it makes up for in homegrown exotica: yard after yard of brightly colored homemade pickled vegetables; every variety of absolutely gorgeous-looking smoked fish – sturgeon, sable, salmon, sprats, chubs, sterlet (a cousin to the sturgeon), herring – heaped one on top of the other inside glass display cases; tubs of caviar and fish roe; a dairy section where white-uniformed, white-kerchiefed women offer varieties of fresh and aged farmer cheese, yogurt, sour cream, hand-churned butter, curds, and sweet condensed milk.

     Sonya, however, was not impressed. She did not look around. She knew what she wanted. She finally found some potatoes she liked and loaded them into the growing cargo of plastic shopping bags under her arms, then clomped across a few feet of concrete floor to lift a bunch of carrots with a skeptical pinkie finger.

     ‘You call this a carrot?’ she challenged. A few moments later, she was bullying an old woman over a bunch of fresh dill. Having given another butcher a few moments to reflect on her requirements, she veered back in his direction, settling – after more bitterly fought negotiations – on a slab of pork belly, some lightly cured bacon, and a fat beef shank. She counted out each ruble as if giving away nuclear codes.

     I was in love. If I could ever fall for a woman who reminded me of Broderick Crawford, it would be Sonya. She’s a fabulously imposing, nonstop talker, a great cook, a survivor, an artist, a hard drinker – a force of nature. There’s a whiff of Janis Joplin about her. Unflappable, been around the block, she’s a woman of surprising dimension and abilities. Her shopping list nearly complete, she stepped out into the cold, picked her way across a thick layer of soot-covered ice, and bought half a handful of fresh garlic from one of the impoverished-looking babushkas lined up outside.

     ‘I live this way,’ she barked, in heavily accented English, beckoning with her head.

     I followed obediently.

Sonya lives with a roommate in a walk-up apartment, which she reaches by climbing up a flight of unlit concrete stairs. The kitchen is cramped but homey, with cracked linoleum floors and a
Sputnik
-era TV set, small gas stove, sink, refrigerator, and a little round table that doubles as a prep bench and serving area. The common areas are filled with the accumulated possessions of many years: shoes, boots, knickknacks, photographs, weathered furniture, a Commie-period poster of a kerchiefed female factory worker with her finger to her lips, the Cyrillic admonition clearly stating something like ‘Loose lips sink ships.’ One thing you get plenty of in Russia, no matter what your economic circumstances, is irony.

     Sonya takes photographs in her spare time. The walls are decorated with her work – severe yet strangely beautiful studies of a now nearly invisible feature of Russian urban landscape: the air vents and entryways to Cold War bomb shelters. They sprout like toadstools from vacant lots, poke up through the weeds of public parks, and in the crumbling corners of Stalin-age housing developments. She has self-published a calendar, each month represented by a mushroom-shaped cylinder of concrete and metal grillwork.

     ‘I like Texas,’ she said as we stood in her kitchen. ‘You like Texas?’ She had recently traveled across America on a Greyhound bus, visiting friends. ‘Also I like Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, and Miami. Miami is very nice.’ She had seen far more of my country than I had, I told her.

     ‘This is a lot of work,’ she said. She’d been rolling out dough for
pelmeni
, meat-filled dumplings – a distant relative of the wonton, a legacy of one of the long-ago Mongol incursions – and would like it very much if Mr. Famous Traveling Chef Author Guy – or somebody,
anybody
– would pitch in. I stepped in, helping her to spoon dots of the meat into the dough on an octagonal cutter. Sonya laid on a top layer of dough, clamped down on the cutter, and about sixteen
pelmeni
at a time dropped through the other side. I tamped them closed, pinched and shaped, then placed them on cookie sheets in neat rows. She kept up a steady stream of patter in Russian and English, bopping back and forth between the two languages, making use of whichever was most comfortable at the time. Zamir sat next to me, filling in the blanks in her English, offering explanations when needed. Alexej sat across from me, looking morose. Outside the kitchen door, Igor, a hired cameraman from Moscow, hovered, filming – or not – according to his own mysterious agenda.

     When the
pelmeni
were assembled, Sonya swung her attention over to the borscht simmering on her stovetop. I had been looking forward to this. In Russia, as my old friend Dimitri memorably pointed out to me, borscht is barely a soup; it’s damn near an entrée: a chunky hot stew of meat, onions, carrot, cabbage, beets, and potatoes, a rib-sticking dark red concoction perfect for filling the belly cheaply on an icy winter night. The cold, watery bright pink puree you might have seen in the States is barely related. Sonya had made a stock from selected cuts of meat in a pressure cooker, a piece of kitchen equipment, by the way, that, while rarely seen in America, is viewed as a godsend by much of the rest of the world. Then she began sautéeing onions, carrots, and bay leaf, added the stock, threw in the meat and potatoes, then the cabbage, and finally, so as not to discolor or overcook it, grated in the peeled beet at the last minute. I saw some caraway seeds and a few other herbs go in, but when I asked her what they were, she pretended not to understand me. Cooks. The same everywhere.

     ‘A drink,’ Sonya said pointedly, ‘for the workers,’ casting a skeptical eye at the inactive Russian contingent in her kitchen. Soon we were all toasting with tall shot glasses of her homemade cranberry vodka, and readying ourselves to eat. Sonya dropped table settings and condiments around the wiped-down table as if she were dealing a hand of blackjack. A heaping bowl of fresh sour cream appeared at the center of the table, along with bowls of fresh chopped dill, chopped scallions and parsley, and some bottled condiments for the
pelmeni
: horseradish, mustard, and, unexpectedly, a bottle of catsupy stuff that tasted like Heinz chili sauce.

     We wiped out the cranberry vodka as Sonya ladled big chunky portions of hot borscht into chipped bowls; she demonstrated how to complete it by heaping a huge spoon of sour cream into mine, topped by a fistful of dill and scallion. Just before sitting down to eat, she reached into the freezer and extracted a full bottle of Russian Standard vodka, plunking it down without comment.

     ‘No one drinks water in this country,’ I said to Zamir.

     ‘Not advisable,’ he replied. ‘The tap water here is very bad for you. You don’t drink the water in Russia. Not that we would  . . .’

     Another toast to hands across the water, another to the spirit of international cooperation, a toast to the chef, a toast to the guests – and we were off.

     The borscht was sensational. I worked my way through two bowls, noticing that the wiry Alexej finished three. The
pelmeni
were up next. Sonya cooked them in boiling water until tender, fished them out with a strainer, and deposited a pile on each of our plates. One dresses one’s own, according to preference, from ingredients at the table. I selected a little sour cream, dill, mustard, and horseradish. To my surprise, the Russians all went for the catsup.

I ate my way around Saint Petersburg for a week, with Zamir, Alexej, and Igor coming along. Alexej had loosened up considerably around me. One night, he invited me back to his flat, where his wife had made blintzes. It was in an uninviting-looking workers’ block, with thick graffitied concrete walls, and dark hallways. But behind the multiple door locks, Alexej lived like a New York City nightclub owner: raised carpeted floors, recessed lighting, an enormous bathroom with hot tub, Jacuzzi, and full sauna, a wet bar, home recording studio, wide-screen TV, and entertainment center. My Russian driver lived far better than I do! I was introduced to his lovely wife, and his young son, who, along with his father, treated me to some Stevie Ray Vaughn covers on a brand-new drum kit and Stratocaster guitar.

     On another night, we ate braised reindeer in juniper at the Povorodye restaurant, a steeply gabled log structure on the outskirts of Pushkin Park, where Catherine the Great’s gaudy summer palace still stands. Gaping at the gigantic gold and pastel-colored behemoth set in a wooded estate and surrounded by the stately former homes of nobles and retainers, one could easily understand the rage of the peasantry in pre-Revolution days. The palace must have been a grotesque affront to a largely starving, uneducated, downtrodden peasantry, people who were struggling even for bread. Looking at this gorgeous Italian-designed abomination, where maybe ten people and their servants lived, one could understand the blind exultation they must have felt when the Romanovs were brought down.