Tatiana's Table: Tatiana and Alexander's Life of Food and Love

by Paullina Simons

  Babushka Anna cooked on stoves that wouldn’t light, and in ovens that had no wood. She cooked on cast iron that was rusted and not covered by enamel, and on thin frying pans that always burned. Grumbling, she scrubbed the rust off before she lit the flame and seasoned the pan so it would rust less next time. She used not olive oil but lard. There were no refrigerators. Whatever Dasha or Mama bought they had to cook that day, unless it was winter and they could stick it on the windowsill; the irony, of course, was that in the winter there was much less food to stick on sills. They lived on the fish they caught and salted in Luga over the summer, on the cucumbers they grew and pickled, on homemade blueberry jam, on dried mushrooms, with which they made soup, and pies and small pastries. They had potatoes because Tatiana’s Babushka Maya brought her own from across the river Neva. She lived in Dubrovka, and grew them on a tiny lot in her backyard. Often, people would come through her fence and steal the potatoes. She had to keep them hidden, grow them under trees and bushes. There was never much, but what there was Maya brought to her daughter’s large family. It was this Babushka Maya who had had the feel for cooking, it was she who always managed, no matter what ingredients she had on hand, to make it come out all right in the end. She had the artist’s approach to cooking, which was just as well, for she was an artist, a painter, and cooked as she drew—from her instinctive heart.

  And this was the gift Babushka Maya passed down to her youngest granddaughter, who had been given much.

  It was not, however, a gift that was handed to Tatiana’s mother, Irina. She would rather have mopped the kitchen floors, cleaned bathrooms, washed clothes, stood in line for three hours than make food. Throughout her adolescence, Tatiana was convinced she was walking in her mother’s footsteps. Her sister Dasha, and Babushka Anna, and her twin brother Pasha, and her father all mocked her. “Tania,” they would say, “how are you ever going to get married? What is your poor husband going to do? When he comes home and asks what’s for dinner, what are you going to tell him?”

  “I’m going to tell him, go wash up, darling, I’ve got six cooks in that kitchen.”

  And they would laugh. “Now that’s a way to keep a husband.”

  “There are women who don’t cook,” Tatiana defended.

  “Name us one.”

  Tatiana wanted to name her mother, but didn’t, out of respect. Because Mama did cook a little bit. What Tatiana wanted to articulate and couldn’t was that Mama didn’t want to cook. Her grandfather, whom she called Dedushka, was her sole defender. “Leave the girl alone. When it’s time, she’ll learn. The time has obviously not come.”

  But Tatiana was certain: I will be like Mama. I will cook, but I will never like it.

  And she might have continued in this fashion, and perhaps indeed become like her mother, who cleaned and sewed and ironed and kept the family train crankily running. But a thing happened that Tatiana hadn’t counted on.

  She fell in love.

  She still didn’t know how to cook, but when she broke her leg and couldn’t work, she had to start to help her family, and little by little she did, with failed starts and meager attempts. She felt herself to be useless, and thought that not only would Alexander not love her after eating her food, but might actually grow to detest her when he saw just how hopeless she was.

  And yet he came when he could and sat at her table, smiled at her, said, “So, what’s for dinner tonight? Don’t tell me. Put it on my plate and let me guess.”

  She would put it on his plate. “Hmm,” he’d say, chewing and contemplating. “Fish sticks?”

  “No! It’s hamburgers with zucchini.”

  “Oh. Yes, also good.”

  But his eyes twinkled.

  Just as she was learning how to love, food became more scarce, then disappeared altogether. Still Tatiana tried to cook to give her family life. She toasted crusts of bread, made oatmeal with water, chicken soup without chicken, simmered beans and barley. Every once in a while, when Babushka Maya brought a few potatoes from Dubrovka, she cooked them as best she could, and when there was no more heat to cook with, she cut them up and the family ate them raw, then ate the peelings. Tatiana sliced her daily ration of cardboard bread, and ate the damp, shrivelled chicory beans they had used to make ersatz coffee on the bourzhuika, a little wood-stove, and dreamed of a time when she could cook and Alexander would eat her food and rejoice in it.

  The man she fell in love with was from a different world. But Tatiana often felt that she too was from a different world. She felt in many ways she thought herself to be slightly apart from her friends, from her cousin Marina, from her family. She didn’t know what it was about herself that was different and kept these thoughts to herself, tried to keep herself to herself. She didn’t want other people to notice her eccentricities.

  But when she met Alexander Belov that summer day in June, Tatiana wordlessly felt that he was a soul also slightly apart, and yet a soul not apart from her. He was familiar in both tangible and intangible ways, but also as alien from her guileless, innocent understanding as a man could be and still remain part of the same species.

  He was born Alexander Barrington in Barrington, Massachusetts, United States of America, on 29 May 1919, the day of a full solar eclipse when the moon completely obscured the sun. This day of his birth was significant for other reasons in the history of mankind. It was on this day, an ocean away, a man by the name of Arthur Eddington of the Royal Astronomical Society in Greenwich, England, was photographing this solar eclipse under which Alexander came into the world to once and for all test a certain theory by a certain clerk in a Swiss Patent Office by the name of Albert Einstein.

  Einstein speculated that space and time were not absolutes but rather relative to their position to other objects and relative to the speed at which the objects were traveling. If the test failed and the sun’s rays did not bend as Einstein had postulated, Einstein said his theory of relativity would be false. If the test showed that the sun’s rays traveled at twice the speed Einstein predicted, the theory would also be false. At 1:30 p.m. on 29 May 1919, Eddington took sixteen photographs of the earth moving out from the shadow of the moon. At 6:30 p.m., three thousand miles away, Alexander came into the world.

  And before Tatiana and Pasha were born in 1924—what a year to be born! Lenin dying, Stalin taking power—before her sister, Dasha, was born in 1917—what a year to be born! the Tsar abdicating, one Party coming to power, unrest, a putsch, a coalition of parties vying for power, a violent revolution—before all that, Tatiana’s dutiful, diligent, morose mother Irina was born in 1898 to a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Maya and her husband Fyodor. Maya was the Tsar’s cook, and Fyodor the Tsar’s Praetorian guard, stationed at Pavlov Barracks. Fyodor served three tsars and in the spring of 1904 left for Japan, leaving behind his wife and seven-year-old daughter, his only child. He never returned. Maya waited for him a long time. Since she never received a telegram regarding his fate, she continued to believe that perhaps he was having a hard time making his way back to her.

  A decade passed. Then another. And another.

  Maya lived carrying the hope in her heart that her Fyodor was just around the corner, and might any minute be back. She never remarried. “How could I?” she would say to Tania when she asked why the wonderful Uncle Misha never became Maya’s legal husband. “I think there is a law against that, no? I’m already married.” No talk of divorce on the grounds of abandonment would sway her, and when she died in the winter of 1941, she died not Fyodor’s widow but his wife.

  When younger, Maya had liked to read Lermontov, the unabashed romantic of the Russian poets. She, a young woman in St. Petersburg, an artist, a painter, waited a long time for love. Her friends were married and had had children ten years before her, but yet she waited, despite being petite, charming and sought after. She waited for the man her own mother would have approved of. When she met Fyodor, who was five years her junior, she knew, despite the scandalousness of the age difference, that she h
ad found that man.

  Maya’s mother, Liza Prisvetskaya died young at fifty-one when Maya was twenty, and she always maintained that her mother had died of a broken heart. Although the official cause of death was heart failure, Maya would declare, “Like I said, a broken heart.” Maya had loved her mother, who taught her how to sew, how to read poetry—and how to cook. Everything Maya knew about how to be a good woman she had learned from her mother, who in turn had learned it from her mother.

  Liza Prisvetskaya’s mother, Milla, was in her own day the pastry chef’s assistant at the royal court. When Milla was barely seventeen, she fell in love with a man who was in love with another woman—his wife. But this man’s wife, Natalya Goncharova, treated her husband terribly. A poet, he needed to stay home to do his work, but Natalya, much younger than he, loved parties and dancing, loved the attention of male eyes and male hands. She would frequently leave her husband home to write his poetry, which she considered a silly and melancholy endeavor, while she gallivanted around the numerous St. Petersburg balls by herself. At one of these occasions, she began an inappropriate dalliance with a middle-aged man named George D’Anthes, quite a few years older than she. Rumors of their flirtation reached the ears of the poet, as he was writing his great masterpiece. Crazed with jealousy, he confronted his wife, who denied all charges, called her husband irrational, then pledged her love. But her nocturnes continued, undimmed by conjugal responsibility. Natalya persistently denied her husband’s accusations, even though, as a joke, St. Petersburg high society made him a member of the “Petersburg Society of Cuckolds,” unbeknownst to him but beknownst to everyone else, including Milla.

  Enraged and confused, the husband began going out on his own to reclaim what remained of his pride, of his good name. Paradoxically, to do so he gambled and drank. At one of the gambling clubs he frequented, he met Milla, Liza’s mother, Maya’s grandmother, Irina’s great-grandmother, and Tatiana’s great-great grandmother. The romance, if there was one, was secret and short-lived. Secret because Milla was engaged to marry one of the poet’s gambling-club partners. Short-lived because the poet, at the end of his rope and unable to bear the terrible things that were being said about his wife, challenged George D’Anthes to a duel. On an icy February morning in 1837, the poet met with George D’Anthes in a deserted St. Petersburg field. D’Anthes fired first, gravely wounding the poet, who fired second, only to superficially wound D’Anthes.

  The poet died later that night.

  George D’Anthes was expelled from Russia, never to return. He died in exile in 1895, and never saw Natalya Goncharova again. The poet was secretly buried in a monastery by Tsar Nicholas I himself, because he was afraid of having a revolution on his hands if the residents of the city found out where their beloved poet laureate was being put to rest and how ignominious had been his end.

  The poet was Aleksandr Pushkin. The narrative poem he wrote in the months before his death was “The Bronze Horseman.” It was the last thing he wrote.

  Meanwhile, Milla married her career civil servant and gave birth to a child, Liza, on 12 October 1837, nine months after Pushkin’s death. And though Milla never mentioned Aleksandr Pushkin to anyone, dying herself just four years later of tuberculosis, there were whispered rumors—never proven and never corroborated since both witnesses to the truth were now dead—that Liza Prisvetskaya was Pushkin’s child. After Milla’s death, the rumors quietened down and then vanished altogether, for it was evil to speak ill of the dead. Milla’s death ensured that the truth was buried with her. But she did pass her beauty onward, and she did teach her daughter Liza who taught her daughter Maya who taught her daughter Irina who taught her daughter Tatiana the secrets of pastry, pies, pelmeni, and poetry.

  Beef Stroganoff

  Tatiana made this only once for Alexander in Leningrad because by the time she was learning to cook, the meat was nearly gone. She managed to buy half a kilo of pale-looking, fatty beef and stretched it for ten people by adding noodles, mushrooms and a little sour cream. There wasn’t enough sour cream, not enough butter, not enough noodles, or meat, or even mushrooms. Only onions were abundant. Alexander ate the Stroganoff, and continued asking for it even when meat was long gone, and then noodles, and soon even onions. But still he persisted, a joke on pale par with the piece of beef he now longed for.

  “Alexander,” Tatiana kept saying, “why do you ask for this? You know we have no meat. Are you joking with me?”

  “Not joking, torturing you, Tania,” Dasha said in her philosophical, no-nonsense tone.

  “Someday, Tania,” Alexander said, “I’d like to have Beef Stroganoff again.”

  “And someday you will,” interrupted Dasha, “if my sister doesn’t kill you first!”

  They said nothing, Tatiana and Alexander. He lit a cigarette and busied himself with the small oven. She went to fetch water in a pail so they could have tea. But what she prayed for was this: Please. Someday let me make Beef Stroganoff for Alexander.

  1lb (450g) sirloin steak, rib-eye, or shell steak

  ¾ cup (110g) all-purpose, (plain) flour

  2 teaspoons salt

  1 teaspoon pepper

  4 tablespoons (50g) butter

  1 large onion, thinly sliced

  8oz (225g) button mushrooms

  1lb (450g) fettuccine, cooked, drained, and buttered

  8oz (225g) sour cream

  Trim the fat off the steak and slice into ½-in (1cm) thick strips 2–3 inches (5–7.5cm) long.

  In a medium bowl, combine flour with salt and pepper, mix thoroughly, then add the steak, coating each piece. Use more flour/salt/pepper mixture if need be.

  In a large skillet, on medium-high heat, melt 2 tablespoons of butter, add onion, cook until golden. Add another tablespoon of butter, and the mushrooms, cook until mushrooms are golden. Add the rest of the butter, and the steak, and continue cooking on medium-high, turning occasionally, about 10–12 minutes. When the meat is cooked through, turn off the heat, and stir in the sour cream. Adjust the seasoning as necessary. Salt is usually needed. Serve over the buttered fettuccine. The Russians served it with wide egg noodles, or vermicelli, which are tiny egg noodles. Lapsha, they called it. But not much lapsha in Russia in 1941 … 1942 … 1943 …

  Meat Cutlets with Onions

  Cutlets sounds fancy in English. Something extra special with meat, which was also pretty special, since it was so hard to come by. But really, meat “cutlets,” or Kotlety in Russian, was just another name for hamburgers, with eggs, breadcrumbs and onions. Meat was what made these special. “We’re having meat cutlets!” meant someone was in the shopping district, saw a line, stood in line for forty-five minutes, possibly ninety, and got lucky enough to buy beef when they got to the counter.

  Tatiana found out, during her seventy-eight-day sojourn in Stockholm, that in Scandinavia, these were made smaller, rolled into little balls and called Swedish meatballs. But the recipe was almost identical, except the Swedes served it with lingonberry jam and cream gravy. Tatiana liked it that way, too. Having meat again after so many years was one of her few joys in Stockholm.

  To eat it like the Russians do—serve the meat cutlets with boiled new potatoes tossed in dill and butter, or with egg noodles, or with mashed potatoes. If you want to do like the Americans, serve in hamburger buns, with French Fries on the side. What’s good about the recipe is that it’s multi-centric and multi-cultural while unchanging in its essence.

  2½lb (1.15kg) ground beef sirloin

  1 medium onion, grated or very finely chopped

  1 large garlic clove, grated or very finely chopped

  2 eggs, lightly beaten

  3 slices bread, pulped for a few seconds in a food processor, for fresh breadcrumbs, or ⅔ cup (85g) store-bought breadcrumbs

  2–3 ice cubes, or ¼ cup (55ml) ice water salt and pepper, to taste

  In a medium bowl, combine all ingredients and mash together, either with a masher or with your hands. But be forewarned, hands will be numb, as
the beef and the ice are quite, umm, icy. Shape into large ovoid balls, slightly smaller than tennis balls. Flatten them if you wish; Tania’s mother did not, but in the U.S. because they like to put the burgers between buns, flattening them makes them easier to eat. Shallow fry on medium-high heat for 7 minutes on each side until golden brown.

  Pelmeni

  Pelmeni was everyone’s favorite winter food, next to blini. Who wouldn’t like meat wrapped in a small fistful of dough, frozen, then dropped into boiling chicken bouillon and served with butter and sour cream?

  Tatiana knew who didn’t like pelmeni. The person who had to make pelmeni. And that would be Babushka.

  Babushka Anna would rather stand in line for three hours in winter to buy pelmeni at the store than make it herself. As she would say, “Slishkom mnogo vozni.” “Too much effort.”

  But her family loved it. And so Babushka, groaning and sighing, creaking and complaining, getting an impatient Dasha to help her, made pelmeni.

  A food processor would have made things easier—the mincing of the beef, chicken, veal. The kneading of the dough. But there was no food processor. A freezer would have definitely made things easier. There wasn’t one. And since pelmeni needed to be frozen and kept frozen, it could only be made in the winter. The little dough balls were placed on metal sheets and put on the windowsill, with the window left slightly open so they could freeze, and after that, were collected into bags and left on the ledge.