Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  The apartment hummed with festiveness, nerves, and anticipation. Even my father strode around with a strange gregarious bloom. Not long before, he had kicked in the television—the thick, greenish glass shattered—and vanished for days. Nothing was explained to me—a new TV appeared right away—but I knew it had to be another argument about my grandparents making all the decisions, and was filled with anguish. But now he and my grandparents smiled and laughed with each other. How? The only thing my father hated more than too many people was falsehood.

  Roast Chicken Stuffed with Crepes and Caramelized Onion

  Time: 2 hours

  Serves: 6

  My Aunt Lyuba is one of those fabled ex-Soviet women who can “cover” a multicourse table for a dozen guests in an hour without advance warning. This dish takes a little longer but is worth the trouble for an unusual, homey take on a roast chicken.

  4 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus additional for the pan

  11/2 onions, chopped

  Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

  11/4 cups milk

  1/4 cup water

  4 large eggs

  2/3 cup flour

  1 teaspoon sugar

  1/4 teaspoon salt

  1 whole chicken, 5–6 pounds (a larger chicken means a larger cavity for stuffing)

  Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a pan over medium-low heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring once in a while, until golden brown. Season with salt and pepper.

  While the onions are cooking, make the batter by mixing the milk, water, and 2 of the eggs. Then whisk the flour in, little by little. Then add the sugar and ¼ teaspoon salt. And finally, add the 2 remaining tablespoons of vegetable oil, whisking well. Your batter should be pretty liquid.

  Warm up a small (8- to 9-inch) crepe pan or nonstick skillet over medium-low heat. Add a tiny amount of oil (or cooking spray), give it a little time to warm up, and roll it around so it covers the whole pan. Raise the heat to medium.

  Lift the pan off direct heat—otherwise the batter sticks too quickly—and add enough batter that it expands to the edges of the pan (around 2 tablespoons), swirling the batter until it forms as perfect a circle as possible. You want a thin crepe, so try to add as little batter as necessary to reach the edges of the pan after swirling. Return to direct heat.

  After 2 minutes or so at medium heat, the crepe should be sufficiently browned underneath and crisp around the edges for you to be able to use a spatula or a fine-tipped wooden skewer to lift it. Now you have to flip it to the other side. The difficult truth is that there’s no better instrument than your fingers, if they can withstand the heat.

  If the crepe tears, don’t worry: The first crepe always comes out sideways, as we say. You can “darn” the hole by pouring in a little new batter to fill it. Either way, this is a forgiving dish for ugly practice crepes—they will end up out of view. After 2 minutes on the other side, the crepe should be ready; set aside and repeat with the remaining batter.

  Stack the crepes on top of each other and cut into quarter-inch-wide vertical strips, and then cut those strips into thirds horizontally. Mix in a large bowl with the cooked onion, and then add the 2 remaining eggs. Mix thoroughly.

  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. (The high heat will give the skin a nice crispness.) Rinse the chicken and pat dry. Season generously, inside and out, with salt and pepper. Then fill the cavity with the crepe-and-onion mixture, closing the skin flaps around it as much as possible. Lay the chicken down gently in an oven-worthy pan, breasts down so they absorb the dripping juice and the fat of the thighs. Cook for 10–12 minutes per pound, until the juices from a thigh run clear when pricked with a fork.

  People came and went, but my grandmother’s older sister, who never took vacation days and disliked socializing even more than my father, came for the entire day every day, which indicated just how extreme our situation must have been. As did the rolls with sugar and cinnamon she brought, still warm, the crowns shining with egg wash like little brioches—you never saw extravagance like that from her.

  The war had orphaned the two sisters. When the Nazis invaded, their grandmother, not a slim woman, had squeezed behind the furnace and suffocated herself. Their parents and grandfather were killed in the pogrom that finished off those Jews in the Minsk ghetto who had survived the previous three. (My grandmother had managed to slip out the month before, but her grandfather was ailing and her parents would not leave him.) When the sisters returned home after the war, they found it occupied by an ethnic Belarusian who had collaborated with the Nazis. He gave them a corner. When they were out one day, he stole and pawned all the clothes the Red Cross had given them, leaving one dress apiece.

  This affected the sisters very differently. My grandmother became flamboyant and unsparing, her hair half a foot high and her nails always painted; my grandmother’s sister was humbly clothed and allergic to makeup. She took advantage of none of the private perks of the government job she got after going back for more school after the war. She barely touched food. Held on to every ruble. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t laugh with everyone else. If her son was going to the theater, she had to go there after curtain to check that his coat was on one of the hangers and that he’d arrived safely. (Soviet cities not having anything like American traffic or sprawl, it didn’t take her long to get there and back.) In the evenings, the young man hardly late, she’d begin calling police precincts and hospitals. To her husband, his family already lost to Communist purges by the time the Nazis arrived, nothing was holier than fresh lamb “forgotten about” at low heat for hours, or slices off a crescent of veal tongue with horseradish and chased with cold vodka—his last name was actually Golod, “Hunger”—but she always badgered him to cook less. She didn’t hug my grandmother, didn’t kiss her. But they had sat in each other’s kitchens almost every day for forty-five years.

  Her severity had its uses. Every fall, when the cabbage came in, the cellar disgorged a contraption resembling a cross between an ironing board and a giant mandolin, through which the women ran giant heads of cabbage, shreds leaping into the air like wisps of hair when my grandfather barbered. These went into jars the size of a boy’s torso, with peppercorns, bay leaves, rings of onion, and cranberries. When they reemerged, a month or two later, they bit the tongue in a way that was rare during those dead winter months. It was a group job, but when my grandfather’s brother appeared to “help,” he sat down and filled the kitchen with bitter, cheap smoke, which meant the kitchen window had to come open, which meant the boy might catch cold. So he was eased out. Then his daughter came and drank instant coffee and dropped rumors. She was less harmful, but useless, so she was creatively disappeared as well. The job “moved” only when it was my grandmother and her sister.

  Aunt Polina was so undone by my grandmother’s leaving that she even let her husband bring his tongue and braised lamb. Making the most of his rare dispensation, he snuck in a new pièce de résistance: potato latkes drizzled with goose fat and honey.

  Uncle Tima’s Braised Veal Tongue

  Time: 2 hours

  Serves: 4

  The beauty of this recipe is that it requires no vigilance—cover the tongue with water, overload the liquid with spices, bring to a boil, and let simmer at a low setting for ninety minutes. (More if the tongue is bigger than the one used below.) Tongue might take a minute for American eaters, but give it a try and you’ll see what Mexican taco makers and Slavs have known for a long time: There are few tenderer proteins. And it’ll follow your lead: You can pile in whatever spices you want, after the essentials of bay leaf, garlic, and allspice. (You can also go with fresh versions—fresh dill, fresh parsley; you’re creating flavor for the stock.) Veal tongue is more expensive than cow tongue, but not by much, and, for obvious reasons, it comes in smaller, more meal-friendly sizes.

  1 veal tongue (about 11/4 pounds)

  12 garlic cloves, peeled and cut in half lengthwise

  2 tablespoons salt

  7
bay leaves

  25 peppercorns

  1 tablespoon coriander seeds

  1 tablespoon whole allspice

  1 tablespoon caraway seeds

  1 tablespoon dill weed

  Rinse the tongue under cold water. Put into a pot and cover, by 2 inches, with water. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, partly covered, for 90 minutes.

  Stick a sharp knife into the tongue. If it goes through like butter, you’re done.

  Remove the tongue with tongs and run it under cold water. As soon as it’s cool enough to touch, peel off and discard the pale casing.

  Slice and serve with Homemade Horseradish or your condiment of choice.

  The various discouragement taxes remained in place: It cost seven months’ salary per adult to renounce citizenship. The white identity papers we received in exchange were so flimsy that someone figured out how to doctor them: Move up the birthdate and retire sooner in the States. We were all becoming new people; no one needed to know. But the bejeweled and false-furred acquaintance who had visited from America had said no one lied there. If you did, your name went into a file. To a Soviet person, that made perfect sense. My father said no to the age adjustment.

  Émigrés were allowed to ship things forward, but the boxes were rummaged at Soviet customs. People who owned diamonds threw them like beads into the boxes and container units they sent—they might never find the diamonds, but neither might customs. Those shipments that made it to New York encountered new, American dangers—two boxes of my father’s construction equipment were stolen out of the trunk of the relative who received them.

  After the construction equipment, we sent nothing ahead. Our visitor had said America had everything, and for pennies. So we crammed a century of Russian life into five suitcases. The things we carried included a single photo of my parents’ wedding; my checkers set; cupping jars and mustard plasters; the cobalt West German tea set; Italian enamel cooking vessels; my grandfather’s French shearling coat; and three books, the comedians Ilf and Petrov sandwiched by Bulgakov and Pushkin. (This was an American sandwich—Soviets ate only open-face sandwiches.) And we carried everything we had been told would sell in the secondhand markets outside Rome, the next transit point after Vienna: electric drills, Zenit cameras, peaked army caps, Lenin pins, good Soviet linen, Armenian cognac.

  We did not carry my mother’s wedding ring, alone worth more than the allowed limit per person; the Yugoslav entertainment center; my grandmother’s Finnish leather boots; my mother’s Austrian suede heels; my grandfather’s collection of Italian leather shoes; Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, or the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg; my mother’s wedding dress; or the ice skates I never learned how to use. Outside of his tools, my father possessed almost nothing and so had nothing to part with. But we also did not carry the cast-iron cooking pot. It was too heavy. It would have made one last loss to that place that had already taken so much were my grandmother Faina not more than happy to have it back in her hands.

  The train left at six in the evening—it would go to Warsaw, then Czechoslovakia, then Vienna: thirty-six hours. No one knew how long customs would take, so we appeared at the station in the late morning; no one could sleep anyway. First we had to fill out a declaration listing everything in the suitcases. I had been turned into a mule—a gold necklace had been hidden under the top button of my checked shirt, filling me with dread. I fidgeted with the top button, which was eating my neck, but stopped after a tight-jawed look from my mother.

  When our turn came, the customs agent cast out everything my mother and grandmother had so carefully packed—clusters of émigrés were reassembling their crudely dispersed lives all around the hall—and checked it against their declaration. “And this?” he said, holding a kind of briefcase from which gleamed rows of gold-plated utensils, each corseted by a burgundy band. (These, too, were meant for pawn down the line.)

  “Cutlery,” my mother said. “It’s under the limit.”

  “Where is it here?” He waved the declaration.

  He wouldn’t give my mother the form, so she had to try to read it while he fluttered it just out of her reach. It wasn’t there. “I made a mistake,” she said. “I have a terrible earache. I didn’t mean to hide it—you see, it was on top in the suitcase.” The part about the earache was true; she always had inflammations. She reached for the form: “I can add it.”

  The agent moved the paper out of her reach. “It’s confiscated,” he said.

  “She made a mistake!” my grandfather said, his eyes lighting up.

  The agent looked down at him—he had a head over him. “One more word, bitch,” he hissed, “and these spoons won’t be the only thing staying back.” My grandfather’s eyes burned terribly. He had heard such a thing a million times, but every time, he had been able to answer, usually by arranging an encounter between some very hard object and a vulnerable part of the offender’s body. We watched his pride war against his responsibility—almost wearily, because so many times he had chosen the pride. Eventually he stalked off, though the words “fucking fascist” could be heard out of his mouth if you were young enough for sharp hearing. In the heat of the altercation, I had forgotten about the gold around my neck.

  They did not take our salami, hard-boiled eggs, or tinned sprats. Perhaps even a Soviet customs agent would not have taken away a loaf of Borodinsky.

  Not everyone who wished to see us off came to the farewell platform: Things were changing, but who knew where they would end up. My mother’s best friend came, but not her husband, a lauded opera singer and stage actor: things to lose. “You can’t eat two dinners,” he had said when he learned we were leaving. “What do you need over there?” (“Over there” had boiled down to the same single meaning that “leaving” had.) Easy for him to say, the people with one foot on the ledge of the Vienna express may have wanted to think. But it would’ve been false to deny the progress our country had made in the thirty years since my father looked in vain for fruit at the fruit-and-vegetable store.

  When the train moved, we opened one of the bottles of Armenian cognac—damn the lira we could collect for it from the Italians. The adults clinked, uttered brief toasts—“Forward,” “Let’s go,” “To leaving”—and drained the filigreed crystal thimbles that had survived the pillage in the customs hall. These, too, would get sold to Italian cupboards. No one had an appetite, but it was gauche to take alcohol down empty, so a cucumber was dug out and passed around amid remarks that a semi-sour pickle would have done better. My grandfather waved off the cucumber and sniffed hard from his sleeve—what uneducated people did when there was no chaser—and my mother paused her sobbing to glare at him in reprimand. Who was there to be embarrassed in front of now? But the readiness to be—the extreme consciousness of what others would think, with which everyone in that place, but especially Jews, lived—did not let go just because she was finally crossing the border. My mother was thirty-three, my father thirty-five, my grandparents sixty-one. And a Soviet year, like a dog’s life, was like ten years elsewhere.

  My mother had been crying since she reached the platform. It was September; the air was autumnally crisp; she kept saying things like “We will never see this again” and “We will never smell that again.” And then, just like that, we were forever out of the only city we’d known and into the birch-studded countryside where we’d spent so many campfire weekends and my father had picked plums for Grandma Daria (for Grandma Daria’s pigs) all those years ago.

  A mere day and a half later, we rolled into the Other World, Vienna, the West. Living up to her reputation for militant independence, Grandmother Faina had declined to join us—she’d follow six months later with my father’s older brother. Hers were the last family hands to let go of the cast-iron pot, which stayed behind in its (adopted) homeland, and is quite possibly serving someone decently to this day. Belarus may have changed less in the past thirty years than in the thirty years prior.

  A year after we l
eft, the opera singer who had no use for two dinners would turn out to want them as well. He and his wife had a nine-year-old of their own to rescue—the girl who had longed for my clothes while I lusted after her food.

  Chapter 4

  September 1988

  What to cook on your first night in the West

  What to cook when you miss your sister so much you want to die, or your husband needs to ingratiate himself with a black-market middleman

  My father woke first—inside one of his fairy tales. Neatly marked roads, tended fields, country homes carefully painted white and yellow—the suburbs of Vienna were turning into the city. Nabokov, the forced exile, kept writing stories about fairy-tale portholes in Europe on whose other side the narrator’s acquaintance—always the narrator’s acquaintance—finds himself magically transported to the pre-revolutionary Russia of his youth. My father was having a similar experience in the other direction.

  Soldiers in black uniforms with guard dogs clustered on the train platform, though only beside the car that held the émigrés. (In 1973, Palestinian militants had taken hostage a train of Vienna-bound Soviet Jews.) A half century earlier, men in similar dress had overseen, perhaps from the same platform, the shipment of Jews out. Now they were protecting us on the way in. It wasn’t difficult to pick out the Jew in their midst, the local representative of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the American organization sponsoring our passage. Following him out of the station, we passed a kiosk into which we peered like Kalahari tribesmen sighting our first spaceship. The kiosks in Minsk offered two newspapers—Trud (Labor) and Pravda (Truth)—and maybe some pens. This kiosk looked like the Ark. “Guten Morgen,” the vendor said in the language of the people who had destroyed my grandparents’ families—it fell on my grandmother’s ears for the first time in forty-five years. “Gut margn,” my grandfather answered him, stunned, in the language of the people destroyed. They were almost the same.