The three poems I reference by her husband, Osip Mandelstam, have no titles other than their first lines (translations mine):
“We live not feeling the ground beneath us . . .”
“The apartment is as silent as paper . . .”
“A cold spring. Timid, hungry Crimea . . .”
A version of the story, in chapter 6, about the Pepsi cans I returned for the bottle deposit appeared in an essay in the New York Times Magazine entitled “My Secret Pepsi Plot” (July 27, 2014). A portion of the story about my time in the kitchen at Moscow57 appeared in somewhat different form in the Guardian, in an essay called “Russian Soup for the Soul” (July 9, 2016). A part of the story about my grandfather’s decline originally appeared in Tablet magazine, under the title “The Last Thing He Taught Me and the First Thing I Learned” (June 25, 2018).
The translation from Russian Cooking in Exile at the top of chapter 10 is mine. (The book is available in English as Russian Cuisine in Exile.) Robert Irwin’s quote at the head of chapter 11 comes from Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin.
Anna Reid’s Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine is not only informative but wickedly well written.
The help offered by Rebecca Manley’s To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War is self-explanatory.
Someone should really translate Alexander Genis’s Kolobok and Other Culinary Adventures into English. Genis venerates William Pokhlebkin, the dean of Russian food writing (whose Russian Delight: A Cookbook of the Soviet Peoples was also of use), but Genis is my Pokhlebkin. Kolobok—a small round loaf of bread—is a collection of food essays as knowledgeable as they are opinionated and entertaining.
As discussed in Part III, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon and Graham Greene’s novels, especially The Heart of the Matter and The Comedians, were not merely useful but the difference between hard times and much harder.
Anyone wanting a beautiful look, in a more traditional cookbook format, at what ex-Soviet food can do should consult Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking, by Bonnie Frumkin Morales, the chef and owner of the eponymous restaurant in Portland, Oregon, and Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine and Eastern Europe, by Ukrainian-British chef Olia Hercules.
A Word about the Recipes in This Book and an Index of Dishes
The recipe I got to redevelop and test most often for this book was humble pie. I bow low before those who write and test them for a living. It goes without saying that Oksana heads my list of stove magicians, but my thanks to her go far beyond recipes. I won’t repeat here what I’ve taken a book to say, as it goes without saying that the responsibility for any errors and infelicities in the recipes rests only with me. (Though I do thank Karen Rush for saving me from the same in my phrasing, as well as Bonnie Frumkin Morales for her counsel.)
There’s a false idea out there of ex-Soviet food as bland and heavy. It all depends on how you make it, but part of what I hoped to achieve with these recipes was to alert readers, and cooks, to items like pickled watermelon, marinated peppers, and pumpkin preserves; delicate soups, vegetarian stews, and seafood and lean-meat braises; and so much more that refuses the stereotype. This is village food, but it’s rough only in the circumstances from which it must do its conjuring, which make the outcomes feel that much more miraculous.
Villagers figure out how to make a lot from a little, and one of the things that humbles me about the cooking profiled in this book is just how much flavor the women (always the women) responsible for it coax from nothing richer than water, though the Ukrainians sometimes braise in dairy; how versatile a set of dishes they create from the same stable of ingredients (I must have driven up the worldwide prices of garlic, onion, and dill while testing these recipes); their ability to “cover” a table in an hour. This resourcefulness, always unfussy and self-deprecating, makes me weak in the knees in a way to which the cooking of no contemporary celebrity chef can come close. The latter, to be sure, labors under some formidable restrictions herself, but the reasons for those restrictions—the nature of our commerce—are considerably less inspiring.
This is a cuisine more of pots than pans, of time rather than flavor-bomb spices, of ingenuity rather than flash. I hardly amounted to more than a well-meaning student in the five years I spent around it for this project, but it was enough to turn me into one more voice urging us to rethink how we eat, cook, and live.
Index of Dishes
Soups
Ukha—His and Hers
Oksana’s Borshch (v)
Mains
Vegetarian
Solyanka (Braised Cabbage with Shiitake Mushrooms)
Oksana’s Kasha Varnishkes
Potato Latkes with Dill, Garlic, and Farmer Cheese
Banosh (Polenta) with Mushrooms and Sheep’s Milk Feta
Cabbage Vareniki (Dumplings) with Wild Mushroom Gravy
Fish
Sardines Braised in Caramelized Onions and Tomatoes
Pan-Fried Pike Perch with Creamy Mashed Potatoes and Cabbage Salad
Pork
Stuffed Cabbage Braised in Rye Bread and Sour Cherry Jam
Braised Rib Tips with Pickled Cabbage
Poultry
Roast Chicken Stuffed with Crepes and Caramelized Onion
Roast Chicken Stuffed with Dried Fruit and Apples
“Soviet Wings” Braised in Caramelized Onion, Carrot, and Tomatoes
Oksana’s Liver Pie
Sour Cream–Braised Rabbit with New Potatoes
Other
Uncle Tima’s Braised Veal Tongue
Grechanniki (Buckwheat Burgers)
Sides
Solyanka (Braised Cabbage with Shiitake Mushrooms) (v)
Uncle Tima’s Braised Veal Tongue
Roasted Peppers Marinated in Buckwheat Honey and Garlic (v)
Oksana’s Kasha Varnishkes (v)
Potato Latkes with Dill, Garlic, and Farmer Cheese (v)
Homemade Horseradish (v)
Pickled Watermelon (v)
Dessert
Wafer Torte with Condensed Milk and Rum or Vanilla Extract (v)
“Sand” Cake (Cocoa-Lemon Layer Cake) (v)
Pumpkin Preserves (v)
“Housepainter” Syrniki (v)
In Order of Appearance
Solyanka (Braised Cabbage with Shiitake Mushrooms) (v)
Stuffed Cabbage Braised in Rye Bread and Sour Cherry Jam
Sardines Braised in Caramelized Onions and Tomatoes
Pan-Fried Pike Perch with Creamy Mashed Potatoes and Cabbage Salad
Roast Chicken Stuffed with Crepes and Caramelized Onion
Uncle Tima’s Braised Veal Tongue
Roast Chicken Stuffed with Dried Fruit and Apples
“Soviet Wings” Braised in Caramelized Onion, Carrot, and Tomatoes
Grechanniki (Buckwheat Burgers)
Roasted Peppers Marinated in Buckwheat Honey and Garlic (v)
Oksana’s Kasha Varnishkes (v)
Potato Latkes with Dill, Garlic, and Farmer Cheese (v)
Homemade Horseradish (v)
Oksana’s Liver Pie
Wafer Torte with Condensed Milk and Rum or Vanilla Extract (v)
Ukha—His and Hers
Oksana’s Borshch (v)
Banosh (Polenta) with Mushrooms and Sheep’s Milk Feta (v)
Braised Rib Tips with Pickled Cabbage
“Sand” Cake (Cocoa-Lemon Layer Cake) (v)
Cabbage Vareniki (Dumplings) with Wild Mushroom Gravy (v)
Pumpkin Preserves (v)
Sour Cream–Braised Rabbit with New Potatoes
Pickled Watermelon (v)
“Housepainter” Syrniki (v)
Acknowledgments
The adolescent cries out: “I didn’t ask to be born!” The grown writer takes his revenge: “I’m writing a memoir!” I come from private stock (not the Biggie kind), so my first thanks is to my family for allow
ing me to tell our story as I saw it. By now, that family has in it only my perplexed, weariless parents. But I am doing my best to enlarge it.
My grandfather Arkady. He was a survivor whose resourcefulness I carry within me but won’t ever match.
Writing literary fiction and nonfiction means the best calves in the business, seeing as you can never drop from your toes. My agent, Henry Dunow; my editor, Terry Karten; and my publisher, Jonathan Burnham, have chosen, heroically, to serve as my spotters in this dark, frosty gym, for which I feel both great gratitude and admiration.
It’s even darker without your early readers: Jessica Cole, Alana Newhouse, Alex Halberstadt, Cyd Oppenheimer.
In 2012, CEC ArtsLink, an arts organization that facilitates exchange between artists in the United States and Eastern Europe, gave me a grant to follow Oksana to her hometown. That support was as meaningful because of the funding as because of the vote of confidence. Thank you especially to Fritzie Brown, Zhenia Stadnik, and Maxim Tumenev. Apologies for being a bit late with my final report. A special thanks to Max Avdeev, who photographed that journey, as well as Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. No one so young should be so phenomenally talented.
Massive thanks to certain friends and supporters whose friendship and support have risen to the Russian standard (not the vodka, but that, too): Joel Berkowitz, Gary Ashman, Ellen Sussman and Neal Rothman, Peter Godwin, Jonathan and Zach Plutzik, Asher Milbauer, Dina Nayeri, Neel Mukherjee, Karen Goldstein, the Wise Bauer family, the Kan family, Vance Serchuk, Rob Liguori and Nicole DiBella, Alana Kinarsky and Gabe Rosenhouse, and the generous and indefatigable Carolyn Hessel of the Jewish Book Council. Thanks as well to Sunil Amin for medical fact-checking. Elena Lappin gave me some invaluable counsel, in a difficult moment, on how to keep going.
This book unofficially began its gestation on May 4, 2013, when a dozen or so intrepid souls took on the handful of recipes I had by then transcribed from Oksana, and we made a party of it in my old apartment on the Lower East Side. A big thanks to them all.
The biggest is to the person with whom I share my new apartment, in addition to so much else. Jessica, I adore and admire you beyond what I can express.
My last thanks are to you, dear reader, for remaining interested in complex work—by which I mean stories without clear answers or foregone conclusions; stories in which people want contradictory things, express their wishes in garbled ways, and exhibit both nobility and weakness as they do their best to make sense of uneasy lives—during times that have often seemed hostile to such books. You’re keeping alive an indispensable flame.
Announcement
© Max Avdeev
Please see www.borisfishman.com for more photos from Brooklyn and Ukraine.
About the Author
BORIS FISHMAN was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Travel + Leisure, the London Review of Books, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, which was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He teaches in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and lives in New York City.
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Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo
A Replacement Life
Copyright
savage feast. Copyright © 2019 by Boris Fishman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photograph by Max Avdeev
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition February 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-286791-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-286789-6
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