Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  1/2 cup brown rice

  Kosher salt

  1 medium head green cabbage

  11/2 pounds ground pork (or ground meat of your choice)

  1/2 large onion, chopped

  2–3 cloves garlic, minced

  Black pepper

  1/2 loaf Borodinsky or other sourdough rye bread (5–6 slices)

  1 13-ounce jar sour cherry jam

  Vegetable oil, for the pan(s)

  You’ll want your rice half-cooked before it goes inside the cabbage rolls. Bring 3/4 cup of salted water to a boil, add the rice, lower the heat to a simmer, and cover. You’re boiling the rice in half the water it needs to cook fully, so keep an eye on it. The water should have boiled out in 15–20 minutes, or about half the time you’d need to cook it fully.

  While the rice is going, fill a tall pot with enough water to cover the head of cabbage. Salt it well—1 tablespoon of salt per 12 cups of water. Bring the water to a boil. Meanwhile, cut the stem out of the cabbage head. When the water is boiling, drop the head in, flat part down. The cabbage will bob around, the top peeking out, but as long as there’s enough water, that should be fine.

  Within a minute or two, the outer cabbage leaf will be ready to come off. Use tongs to carefully peel it away from the kachan—that’s Russian for “cabbage head”—and remove from the water. Pat dry with paper towels. Repeat until you have 20 leaves.

  Using a small knife, slice off the part of each leaf rib that isn’t level with the rest of the leaf. You’re not cutting the rib out in a triangular cut; the rib stays in, and you’re just shaving it down so the leaf is entirely flat, and easier to fold.

  Mix thoroughly the pork, onion, garlic, and now somewhat cooled half-cooked rice. Season with salt and pepper.

  Using your hands or a spoon, deposit a clump of the pork mixture at the broadest edge of a cabbage leaf. Fold that edge over the meat, then flap over the right and left sides, then roll over again until you’ve run out of leaf—a cabbage burrito. Set aside and repeat for the remaining pork mixture and leaves. You could also divide the mixture among the leaves before folding any, to make sure you have enough.

  Tear the bread so that the pieces are no larger than a thumbnail and mix with the jam. Combine with 2 cups of water, and salt lightly.

  Choose a covered pan deep enough to hold the cabbage rolls in two layers, or use two pans to fit them in one layer. Coat the bottom of the pan(s) with a tiny bit of oil over medium-low heat and place in the cabbage rolls. Pour the jam mixture around and between the rolls. The top of the uppermost layer of rolls should be peeking out of the liquid.

  Cover, turn the heat down to low, and let braise for 30 minutes. Uncover and cook for another 30 minutes so some of the liquid can boil off.

  My father needed a boost, but only a boost: He graduated with strong grades all around. At the telephone exchange, they noted his accreditation and told him to wait. But no word came—as it never would. They didn’t put Jews in the senior positions. The only way to live like a normal person, he saw again, to get people to forget you were Jewish, was to live the way his girlfriend’s parents lived. But how to do it? Forget the oiliness of it—how could you know who your friends were, and who used you for pork? Anna’s father didn’t trouble himself with the question. Maybe it was too painful; maybe Anna’s parents once wished to live differently, too.

  At the dinner table, the talk turned to what other profession Yakov could try. Arkady, who was just fine with the telephone exchange not working out, was a barber—he could find the young man a “chair.”

  “I’ve tried it,” Yakov said. “It isn’t for me. Thank you all the same.”

  Silence took over the table. The talking resumed, but it was half-hearted. That night, Anna phoned Yakov, her voice tremulous. “Please apologize,” she begged. “If you don’t, they won’t let me see you.”

  Yakov was stubborn, but not about things like that; he went and apologized. Everything returned to the way it was—these people didn’t hold grudges; grudges were impractical. And barbering wasn’t mentioned again. But at the next dinner—he wants to work in telephones, let him work in telephones—he was told to take gifts to the hiring personnel at the exchange; it would dislodge the impasse. To smile at the people who buried his file! No, he couldn’t do it, he said. It was Anna’s mother, Sofia, who spoke now. “Who do you think you are?” she hissed. “Enough! There will be nothing between you.”

  On the walk home, Yakov’s mind squalled. He wouldn’t have agreed for his daughter to stoop to someone like him, either. But who were they? Yes, they were ambitious. About lamb’s-wool coats, rare liquor, and gold spoons. The best fun in the world was a bottle of cognac, a concert on television, and a rich meal they fell upon as if it were meant to save them from something. By now, Yakov loved Anna, and knew that she loved him, too, but he didn’t think he could count on her—she didn’t know how to disobey them.

  He considered calling her but wondered if she would try to speak as if nothing had happened. This was something in Anna he didn’t love: She was capable of falsehood. An irony—she was the most sincere person he’d ever met. It was her parents, slowly coming alive inside her. He called anyway—and hung up when her mother answered the phone. Then called back and announced himself—and was told that Anna was gone.

  For winter recess, her parents had sent her to Moscow and forbidden her to call Yakov. She pleaded with them—Yakov’s father was ill once again—but was told to leave it; they’d check on him. Anna spent the week in terrible agitation, short with her aunt and uncle, unable to sleep, indifferent to the magic of Moscow. But she didn’t touch the phone.

  How did Yakov find out that Anna would return to Minsk on the overnight Arrow? When she stepped onto the platform, there he was, in a warm fur hat, but with shoes so thin they could have been slippers, and a coat no thicker. He held a chaste bouquet wrapped in newspaper. It was the dead heart of winter, but flowers grew year-round in the Caucasus; at the market, the Georgians wedged each carnation into a tall glass with a candle to keep it from freezing.

  By way of greeting, he said, “My papa is no longer with us.” Boris’s kidneys, diseased from his other ailments and with no dialysis to help, had succumbed to a flu. Faina fed Boris sugared slices of lemon—this was the only fruit she could find, and for some reason she thought the citrus would help. As usual, Boris was too embarrassed to go to the doctor, and by the time he finally did, it was too late. It had never occurred to Yakov to ask Anna’s parents for help from any of the doctors in their barter network. They would have helped—health was health—but he was supposed to be out of her life and didn’t even think of it. Anna had never gotten to meet his father. Yakov, ashamed of the meagerness of his home, had never proposed a visit; it wasn’t proper for girls to visit boys at their homes anyway. Anna began to weep.

  “I would like you to meet my mother,” Yakov said quietly.

  He didn’t discuss feelings often; she felt she should encourage him. “I’ve wanted to meet her since we met,” she said.

  The following week, Anna told her parents she was staying late at the university. Lying to them made her feel ill—she had never done it before. It took forty minutes to reach the small apartment in the tall building blocks on the outskirts. It seemed like an impossibly long time to go from one place to another in the same city. Yakov was silent most of the way; he didn’t even put his arm around her. Anna asked if he was all right, but he only smiled tightly. She wondered if this was all a mistake.

  That afternoon, shuttling between shifts as a part-time accountant at two schools, Faina had stopped at a fish market and bought one newssheet’s worth of sardines. The saleswoman in the peaked cap stacked them like little torpedoes, one eye periscoping out from each, and wrapped the bundle at both ends like a candy. Faina had bought the sardines because they were cheap. She splurged on the tomatoes, from Bulgaria.

  At home, she covered the bottom of the cast-iron German pot—scratched here and there but still wo
rthy thirty years later, only that now she cooked on a stovetop—with a little vegetable oil and scattered in two diced onions. While these sizzled, she sliced thick rings of tomato—tomatoes this firm did not end up under her knife very often. Once the onions had browned, she added the tomatoes, watching it all froth the right way. The silver arrows of the sardines went in last.

  When the young couple entered, Faina offered the girl a perfunctory greeting. Anna would have assumed it was because Faina was in mourning, but her boyfriend’s mother was dressed for an exuberant birth: a bright green blouse tucked into an apple-red skirt, big dangling earrings, and fake pearls that took up half her chest. The real reason Faina was short with her was that she couldn’t stray from the gas.

  Anna didn’t have to look around many corners to see it was a homely place—there weren’t that many corners around which to look. There was only one room large enough for a bed, which meant that Yakov slept . . . on that foldout cot. There was no chandelier in the dining room, only a lamp with an old-fashioned fabric lampshade with fringes.

  After Faina shut off the heat, she set down a pitcher of fruit compote, an oval plate with slices of black bread she had charred on the stovetop (toasted bread was unheard of, but Faina liked hers that way, and so the young woman should, too), and then the cast-iron pot with its “nose-ripping” scent. The sardines had kept their shape. The tomatoes were blistered and sugary. The onion had melted almost to paste.

  They ate largely in silence, Faina asking Anna no questions. Anna felt the last of her hopefulness draining away. She was used to the clamor of her parents’ kitchen, someone on the way in, someone out, fish frying to a golden crust, crystal thimbles clinking away. Belatedly, she became aware that the others were staring; lost in thought, she was mindlessly working through sardine after sardine, her utensils forgotten. Everyone laughed.

  Anna’s shoulders relaxed, and she tried a compliment: What a beautiful lamp. Faina nodded: The pattern had been woven by a woman with whom she sang in a choir. A choir! Anna had never met someone who sang in a choir. Was that so? Hear this, then—and Faina broke into song. Then she described every woman who sang with her. If she had difficulty inquiring about Anna, she had none speaking about herself. She told Yakov to get his accordion.

  His what? Why hadn’t he ever told her? He shrugged—it never came up. He proposed a song that was popular that year, about one of the forests outside Minsk (“I understand your eternal sorrow, dense wood”), but Faina rejected that as too downbeat. “Let’s do ‘The Azov Sea,’” she said. She had gone to the Sea of Azov, near Crimea, on vacation; after a concert, she made the singer write down all the lyrics. Mother and son looked at each other, nodded, and:

  Wide is your yonder so blue

  as a seagull flits by the white crest of a wave.

  The clearest dawns blaze above you,

  like the youth of our land.

  The young woman clapped and clapped. Then they buried their faces in what was left of the pot. To mustaches and flowers, Anna added sardines. My mother’s insistence on marrying my father soon after that evening was the first thing about which she ever stood up to her parents.

  Sardines Braised in Caramelized Onions and Tomatoes

  Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

  Serves: 4–6

  Half the time for this recipe goes to cleaning the fish. It’s a lot simpler and more fun than it sounds. The trick is to use scissors instead of a knife.

  1 pound sardines (15–20 sardines)

  2 tablespoons vegetable oil

  1 large onion, chopped

  1 large carrot, grated

  5 vine-ripened or 3 juicy beefsteak tomatoes, cut into pieces the size of a fingernail

  Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

  Rinse the sardines under cold water. Pat dry. Using scissors, cut away all the fins and tails. Then snip off the heads. This will create access to the body cavity; like the surgeon you always wanted to be, cut the fish open lengthwise far enough to get at the guts. (One side of the sardine will be noticeably thinner than the other. That should be the side facing up for the incision.) From here, you’ll want to clear out all the innards—look for white and yellow slime—which would give the sardine a bitter taste. Remove the bone structure as well.

  Heat the oil in a large pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until golden brown. Then add the grated carrot and cook until softened.

  Add the tomatoes, season to taste with salt and pepper, and lower the heat to medium-low. After the tomatoes have broken down and some of their liquid has evaporated (but some is left), add the sardines, stir gently to mix in, turn the heat to the lowest setting, cover, and let braise for 20 minutes.

  Check for seasoning and add more salt and pepper if necessary—but mix it in gently: Whole sardines show up better on Instagram.

  Serve over your grain of choice or with a couple of rough hunks of bread.

  Chapter 2

  1979–1988

  What to cook after you’ve finally slaughtered your pigs

  What to cook if you’re feeding an army of hungry boys helping you with your harvest

  What to cook if you’re vacationing, “savage leisure” style, on the Soviet Riviera

  Faina’s disappearance to the ski tracks on the day I was born was the last of my mother’s concerns: She thought she was giving birth to a child pickled in moonshine.

  After she graduated university with accreditation to teach chemistry, my grandfather secured her a sweet spot: at the school of continuing studies attached to the city’s department of trade and commerce. If the head of a food store’s dry-goods section had been chosen to move to prepared foods, this person needed to learn chemistry. Textiles, shoes—chemistry figured into all of it. Food store managers, however, had no interest in chemistry. Their interest was in trading deficit food items for the grades they needed.

  My mother was an idealist. Her heart rattled when she sang the Soviet anthem. She wore the Young Pioneer kerchief with pride. Her perfect school record, and her father’s connections, ensured her admission, her religion notwithstanding, to the Young Communist League, the pipeline for the Party. She was ready to have less so others had more. Chemistry wasn’t exactly the course on Marxist-Leninist principles, but all the same, teaching was an occupation of great ideological consequence, and she ascended to it with honor.

  But she was also her father’s daughter. When she received her first invitation to a table laid with the finest underground products available to the supermarket elite, she said yes. Somehow, this led to no hand-wringing. Her father went around the law because he was galled to be expected to get by with less, not because he was a dissident. From this perspective, a daughter reared to burn with fealty to Communist principle had better chances of advancement than the opposite, and so she was reared. (Also to ignore the contradictions ignored by her parents.) “My children love Stalin most of all, and me only second,” Boris Pasternak’s wife used to say, and that was exactly how she wanted it. (Doctor Zhivago had made Pasternak an enemy of the state.) Above all, Anna had been taught how to get along and ahead.

  At the getting-to-know-you table with her first “students,” my mother had such a good time that she stumbled home squealing with laughter. My father had never seen her this way. He had to help her undress for the shower. His wife’s giddiness switched to horror a week later when she learned that she had been pregnant for nearly a month. She endured the child’s gestation in terror: She was going to give birth to a two-headed victim of her indiscretion. (Soviet medicine did not possess the means to reassure her.) When I came out in one piece, the family decided to thank fate by saving me from the further harm of being Jewish in the USSR, and joining the Jews streaming out of the country. Alas.

  My grandfather had been only partly right about what gifts to superiors could fix after he and my father left the visa office empty-handed. My grandparents’ beauty salon colleagues couldn’t have cared less if my grandparents rubbed shit over pictures
of Lenin. Same for my father, a lowly housepainter. (Finally, he had found a profession that entailed dealing with a wall instead of a person.) But my mother was demoted to a night school attached to a tractor factory on the outskirts. Its employees, many of whose educations had been interrupted by the war, were required to earn high school equivalency; that curriculum included chemistry. Some were illiterate.

  My mother was responsible for recruiting her own classroom. With my father for support and protection, she rode the distant bus lines to ring doorbells and persuade mechanics and welders to come learn about sodium chloride. (“The various alcohols you derive from . . . nonstandard sources—that’s chemistry in action.”) Incredibly, some hauled themselves in. Maybe it was the chance to stare at an attractive young woman for an hour, though some did try to understand how chlorophyll converts carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen. (Rust, fermentation, combustion—these came more easily.)

  The attractive young woman was earnest about the work. “The periodic table is so important,” she insisted. “You must know it so well that if I wake you up in the middle of the night and ask you to recite it, you won’t scratch your head for a minute.”

  A man whistled, meaning “and how about you ask me to fly.”

  The young teacher admonished him. “You must! What would you do if I woke you and asked you the elements?”

  “I’d say, ‘Get in the bed!’” he answered, and the class roared. My mother shook her head, but she laughed, too.

  I spent my Soviet years differently—with a silver spoon in my mouth. Literally. Almost all Soviet cutlery was made of cheap metals, so I got a special silver spoon that no one else was allowed to touch. It was useful, too, because it made a clean, loud clink against the first tooth when it appeared.

  Ordinary Soviet people saw tropical fruit like bananas and tangerines only at “voting” time, when boxes upon boxes suddenly materialized from God knows where. (They also appeared for the holidays, and were hung like ornaments on holiday trees, too precious to eat.) My grandfather, however, was in bananas and tangerines all the time. Only I was allowed to touch them.