Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love
Page 9
Ruena stared at her six-year-old boots on the floor next to the booth—their drooping tops, scuffed heels, toes scraped raw from a shoe polish brush. For once they weren’t hidden under the table but in plain view. She could feel burning spots blooming on her face and neck. Why was it that he assumed she wanted to marry him? Was it because of the breach in her careful detachment the last time, the hazardous leak of affection? Or perhaps there was another, more cynical reason for his assumption: It was natural for her—poor, lonely, and uprooted—to want to marry him—stable, successful, secure. The worst thing was that he might have been right. What if she did want to marry him? What if she did hope he would ditch his fiancée one day and marry her?
“Look, Ruena, I don’t want to hurt you. I really like you. I would have wanted very much to continue seeing you, if only we could find the right balance. You see, right now our relationship is out of balance.”
Ruena watched spoonfuls of spinach vanish in his roomy mouth while he talked. She’d felt that mouth on hers every week for several months. The wave of repulsion made her dizzy.
“Fuck you and your balance!” she wanted to yell. But instead of cursing his balance, she waited. The man chewed on a piece of naan.
“You don’t have to worry about balance. I have a fiancé too. I am sorry I didn’t mention him before; the right moment never came up.”
Ruena smiled. It was easier than she’d imagined. Her heart pounded, but that didn’t worry her. The heart wasn’t anything that people could see.
THE NEXT WEEK, over épinards à la crème, she told him her fiancé’s name was Pavel. They sat opposite each other in a small restaurant with wicker chairs, maps of France on the walls, and rude waitresses who spoke with an accent (Ruena wasn’t sure if it was French). The épinards à la crème, for some reason, was adorned with a fried egg.
“Pavel?” Her lover pierced the egg yolk with his fork. “Pavel is a beautiful name.”
Ruena thought so too.
“What does he do?”
Pavel was a physicist. He’d graduated from Prague University and was offered a job in France. (For some reason the combination of physics and France thrilled Ruena.) He lived near Strasbourg, in a village at the crossing of two rivers, the names of which she had forgotten. Ruena was looking at a map behind the man’s back.
It didn’t take a lot of effort to endow Pavel with a name, a profession, and a place of residence. All she had to do now was to add a few details, which turned out to be easy, even enjoyable.
All the men who used to be unattainable—her girlfriends’ boyfriends, college professors, movie actors, movie characters, dead writers, cousins, uncles—were now at her disposal, providing appearance and character traits, lifestyles, habits, even clothing patterns. How many times before had she wished that her boyfriend had one or another wonderful trait he lacked or had been spared the nasty one he possessed? Ruena felt as if the doors of a magic store were opened for her. She could roam between shelves, picking items she liked, refusing others. She chose her cousin Pavel’s name, Uncle Milan’s smile, her ophthalmologist’s beard, the heavy eyelids of her favorite Russian actor, and the aquiline nose of a French one. She selected the loose corduroy pants that her philosophy professor wore, and the plaid shirts favored by her first boyfriend, Zdenek. She spared her fiancé Uncle Milan’s schizophrenia, the Russian actor’s weak chin, and Zdenek’s habit of picking his nose while reading. She could have a man made to order.
Épinards à la crème tasted better than most of the spinach dishes she’d tried before. It wasn’t overdone, yet it didn’t have a grassy taste. She ate several large spoonfuls before answering more questions about Pavel. No, they didn’t mind the separation. It had been their choice to lead separate lives for some time before marriage. No, Pavel didn’t know about this particular lover, but they both had a realistic concept of “separate lives.”
The man had an attentive look on his face. He stopped eating and sat making holes in his spinach with the fork. There were yellow traces of egg yolk around his mouth. “Your Pavel sounds too perfect,” he said at last.
“Does he?” Ruena scraped the remains of creamed spinach off the bottom of her bowl. “Well, he is not.”
Ruena began granting her fiancé flaws. What started as a way of achieving authenticity soon turned into a source of pleasure. It was the imperfections—the awkward strokes of a paintbrush, tiny dabs of dirt, barely visible scratches on the canvas—that made Pavel lovable. Ruena had to confine herself to granting Pavel only one fault at a time. Over German spinach salad with walnuts and apple bits, Pavel was given a gift of clumsiness. Over Mongolian spinach dumplings, he acquired slightly crooked front teeth. Over yet another dish of sautéed spinach, stubbornness. (By that time Ruena had become proficient at slicing spinach. It wasn’t tricky or sophisticated, as she’d thought before. It simply required some practice.)
“Pavel grips the fork in his fist. He pierces his food as if he were a knight with a spear. I laugh at him, but he insists that it’s more convenient,” Ruena said once, watching the annoyingly elegant movements of her lover’s fork. Lately, she had noticed that most of Pavel’s favorite imperfections sprang from the things she didn’t like about her lover. She was surprised that there were so many of them.
Soon Pavel obtained a real presence at their table. They could almost see him in the extra chair or the corner of the booth, quiet, a little clumsy, wiping pieces of food off his beard with a napkin, his checkered elbow dangerously close to a glass of water or a puddle of sauce on the table.
“Pavel hates spinach,” Ruena announced. The waiter had just handed them menus. “He likes vegetables that remain bright when cooked: carrots, peppers, zucchini, asparagus. ‘I want my plate to look like a painter’s palette,’ he says.”
She suddenly realized that was exactly what she wanted: a plate that looked like a painter’s palette, heaped with colorful, crunchy chunks sprinkled with garlic and lemon juice, glistening with butter. She reached for the menu. Somehow it didn’t look as frightening as before. It was just a list of dishes in a puffy cover. She would look up something called “grilled vegetables” and say it aloud. How difficult could that be?
Her lover was smiling. “I can’t believe you’re going to order!” he said.
He was right. It was too late. If she ordered what she wanted now, it would be a confession that for almost a year now she’d been eating food she didn’t even like. On the other hand, she felt that she couldn’t eat spinach any longer, not a single bite.
Ruena put the menu back.
“We can’t see each other anymore,” she said.
Her excuse was simple and clear.
“Pavel is coming.”
ROUNDUP OF RECIPES
1. SALAD OLIVIER
Salad Olivier is the Russian’s Thanksgiving turkey. I can’t think of any other holiday dish that would come close to Salad Olivier in popularity. The biggest, most cherished, and most important holiday in Russia is New Year’s Eve, and Salad Olivier has always been the centerpiece of that holiday meal. There are so many childhood memories and nostalgic cravings centered around Olivier that it’s hard to say what really makes it so important, the dish itself or the complicated emotions that arise with it. There are many stories of its origins and just as many versions of an original recipe, so I don’t trust any of them. The core ingredients are boiled potatoes, eggs, pickles, and some kind of chopped meat; the rest is open to interpretation. Here, I’m including two of the traditional class-oriented versions and a third one I created especially for health-conscious Americans, with the vague hope of persuading them that Salad Olivier is well worth eating and can be quite delicious.
PLEBEIAN VERSION
Bologna from a Russian food store
Boiled potatoes
Pickles
Boiled egg
Canned peas
Boiled carrots
Mayonnaise dressing
Lots of mayonnaise is essential; add more an
d more until the salad makes a wet slurping sound while you mix it, similar to the sound of the snow slush on the streets of Manhattan when you step in it. There is not enough mayonnaise until the salad makes that sucking sound.
The plebeian version is usually served in a two-gallon enameled bowl. The important thing is to pile up the salad so high that it forms a sloppy mound in the middle of the bowl.
ARISTOCRATIC VERSION
Boiled chicken breast
Boiled potatoes
Pickles
Boiled egg
Canned peas
Possibly a peeled green apple
Half mayonnaise/half sour cream dressing
(the same slurping sound is expected)
The aristocratic version—absolutely no carrots—is served in an elegant cut-crystal bowl. There should be the same mound in the center, but a neatly formed one. The mound is shaped with the back of a mixing spoon and smoothed down along the sides as you would do when icing a cake. Most people also decorate their salads. You will find a really nice outlet for your aristocratism and creativity in adorning the salad. There are many elegant ways to lay slices of eggs and/or pickles on top of your salad mound.
SOMETHING-AMERICANS-MIGHT-EAT VERSION
Grilled chicken or turkey breast
(excellent way to use leftover Thanksgiving turkey)
Boiled potatoes
Pickles (very firm and not too sweet)
Boiled egg (or maybe not)
Canned peas (well, you can skip them too)
Possibly a peeled green apple
Mayonnaise dressing
Use just a little mayonnaise, so the salad won’t be so damn high in fat content (don’t even go near the slurping sound), but not low-fat mayonnaise. If you use low-fat mayonnaise, you might as well throw the whole dish out. It will taste a little dry, yes, but your weight won’t go up as dramatically as with the two previous versions. Serving on lettuce leaves will help create the illusion that this is a healthy dish.
For all versions, potatoes should be boiled in their skins, then peeled and diced. Everything else should be diced as well into tiny little cubes (14 inch), although the plebeian version might allow larger and sloppier cubes.
The ratio of ingredients is as follows: for every two cups of diced potatoes, use one cup of diced meat, one cup of diced egg, one cup of diced pickles, one cup of peas, half a cup of carrots, and half a cup of apple. Or it could be whatever you want.
Oh, writing about this made me so hungry. I have a craving for some Olivier. But I’m at a trailer park in Moscow, Pennsylvania. I don’t know why it’s called Moscow, for there are no Russians and no Russian delis here. I have hardly any ingredients at hand. We’re out of eggs, let alone canned peas or pickles, and my car is in the city in my husband’s care, and shopping in rural America without a car is a rough sport. So I’m making myself an extra-simple and extra-plebeian version of Olivier, using what I have in the fridge: two boiled potatoes, three slices of nice bologna, and half a tablespoon of mayonnaise. I know this doesn’t sound too appetizing, but it is, it is, just trust me!
2. SPINACH
This one is going to be easy. We didn’t have spinach in Russia, except the kind that came in jars as baby food, so there is no family recipe for spinach. I tried making some of the spinach dishes I mention in “Slicing Sautéed Spinach,” based on recipes I found in cookbooks, but none of them came out very well. Below is the only spinach recipe I mastered, but since I learned it only recently, it didn’t make it into the collection of spinach dishes that my characters eat.
Baby spinach
Finely sliced red onion
Sun-dried tomatoes
Goat cheese
Balsamic vinegar
Extra-virgin olive oil
Take a pile of baby spinach, put it in a bowl, and add as much of the other ingredients as are needed for desired balance.
3. MEATBALLS
Since two of the stories have meatballs in them, it was particularly important to find an ultimate meatball recipe. I had never cooked meatballs myself, and I wasn’t particularly happy with the family recipe, because it seemed like the main goal of my mother’s and grandmother’s version was to make the meatballs as dry and hard as rye-bread croutons. “Why waste meat?” I would ask them. “Why not just buy croutons and serve them with pasta or mashed potatoes?”
They didn’t answer; perhaps they were perfectly satisfied with crouton meatballs. But I wasn’t. Now and then, at some family dinner or at a restaurant, I would happen upon a real meatball—large and juicy and perfect.
Russian meatballs are very different from what Americans call meatballs. First of all, they are not shaped like balls; they are shaped like a flattened egg, and they are never buried under spaghetti or smothered in tomato sauce but are usually served hot and crispy with mashed potatoes.
I like Russian meatballs so much that I always thought if I ever wrote a story about two women trying to seduce a man with a certain dish, meatballs would be the dish. But where would I find a perfect recipe? Now I have actually written a story about two women trying to seduce a man with Russian meatballs. Neither of my characters is a professional chef, so I searched among families and family recipes. I managed to collect countless versions, but none of them satisfied me. They were all too complicated, too fussy. Meatballs is a very simple dish. I simply couldn’t trust a recipe that required more than twenty ingredients.
And then suddenly found the right one. I knew it was the right one the second I heard it (actually, I read it in a friend’s e-mail). Surprisingly, this recipe came not from a seasoned grandma but from a single father who didn’t know how to cook and who learned to cook meatballs so he could feed his daughter. This is his recipe:
“Take a pound of regular ground turkey, put it in a bowl, add one egg, some bread soaked in milk (three or four thick slices of white bread, half a cup of milk), lots of garlic and salt and pepper, and mix it. Then pour a little olive oil onto a hot skillet and do this: form the meatball-shaped thing with your hands and throw it onto the skillet, keep the water running, rinse your hands from time to time. [I think it’s better to keep a basin of water nearby, so as not to waste water.] Fry meatballs five minutes on each side.”
I tried it and it worked. The meatballs came out crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. The only problem was that they weren’t ruinous enough for one’s health, and I needed a killer recipe. After some consideration, I simply took my friend’s recipe, substituted extravagant red meat for mild ground turkey, and added mind-blowing amounts of fat. Actually, the character in “Luda and Milena” dies after eating these meatballs, but not as a result of eating them. I can’t guarantee that meatballs based on the recipe I used in the story can actually kill a person. The recipe has never been properly tested to determine that. However, it contains such an extravagant quantity of red meat and fat, most doctors I know swear that consistent consumption of this dish will cause if not immediate death than eventual clogging of the arteries. So if you need to kill yourself or another person and don’t mind that the process will be slow and painful, here is the recipe.
1/2 pound fat ground lamb
1/2 pound fat ground beef
1 cup white bread soaked in heavy cream
1 finely grated medium onion
2 or 3 finely chopped garlic cloves
1 egg
1/4 pound butter, lard, bacon, or any other spectacular animal-fat product to use for frying
4. COLD BORSCHT
I’m sitting on the deck, leaning against the wall of the trailer we rent in Moscow, Pennsylvania. My kids are splashing in the lake, and I feel so jealous. It’s 88 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and about 130 inside. Plus there’s the smell of fried lard and garlic. I’ve just cooked several batches of meatballs to make sure I got the recipe right. I did get it right, by the way—it’s a killer recipe. You can easily have a heart attack simply by cooking those meatballs; you don’t even have to eat them.
The
last thing I want to do right now is to think about borscht.
The characters in my story are eating rich, hot borscht, which is a wonderful dish when there is a February snowstorm outside, or at least a chilly November rain. But right now, what I really want to eat is cold borscht. It is probably my favorite summer food, being that rare combination of very healthy, cheap, extremely easy to make, and amazingly delicious. Here is the recipe.
One 24 oz. jar of borscht from the Jewish section of a supermarket (in Moscow, Pennsylvania, it’s right next to the Mexican and Italian foods)
3 hard-boiled eggs (or just egg whites)
1 medium seedless cucumber, or three or four kirbys, peeled
1 scallion
Half a bunch of fresh dill (or a pinch of dry dill)
Sour cream
Lemon slices
Dijon mustard (optional)
What you do is this: Let the jar of borscht chill in the fridge for at least an hour before opening it. The soup is best when it is very cold. Finely chop the eggs, cucumber (chopped cucumber smells amazing!), scallions, and dill, put them in a bowl, add a pinch of salt, and let them stay in the fridge for half an hour, so they can both chill and adjust to one another’s company. Then divide them between four bowls (this recipe should yield four portions, although I could easily eat it all alone), and pour the borscht over, shaking the jar before pouring, to lift the beet slices off the bottom. Sometimes I add a teaspoon of Dijon mustard; I mix it with a little borscht liquid, pour it back in the jar, and shake it well.
Serve with sour cream and slices of lemon; I like to squeeze my lemon slice with a spoon to add a tangy taste to the soup.
5. HOT BORSCHT
Today, it’s a different picture. It’s been raining nonstop, and it’s suddenly cold outside. I’m wearing jeans and a sweater and my husband’s thick socks—I can’t believe I was sweating in a tank top and shorts just a few days ago. The gas heater in our trailer has been broken for years, and the owners won’t bother fixing it. They never live here themselves, and summer renters apparently don’t need heat. “It’s a rundown trailer,” my husband says. “What do you expect?” We rent it for seven weeks for the price of what you’d typically pay for two, and I’m usually happy with the bargain. Not on a day like today, though. We tried an electric heater, but it was expensive and seemed to warm only the ten-inch area around it. What we do is this: We turn all four stove burners on and put four large pots of water on to boil. (We could try baking pies, but there are mice living in the oven, and I really don’t want to go there.) While the water is boiling on the stove, we cuddle with the kids under a huge blanket that the neighbors lent us and watch Young Frankenstein on my computer. (We never get tired of watching Young Frankenstein.) Well, I think, since we need to keep four large pots on the stove, why not cook borscht in one of them? I can cook and still keep an eye on Young Frankenstein.