Savage Feast Read online

  Combine the chicken and pork in a large bowl. Add the cooled buckwheat, the egg, half the chopped dill, the remaining chopped onion, the garlic, coriander, curry, and black pepper. Season with a teaspoon of salt, or to taste. Mix gently until well combined.

  Using your hands or a spoon, shape the mixture into small patties the size of mini-burgers. (You should end up with 30 or so.) Put the flour onto a plate and dredge the patties lightly on both sides, patting off any excess.

  In a large pan, add enough oil to coat the bottom well, and warm over medium heat. Brown the patties, in batches if necessary, 5 minutes on one side and 3 on the other.

  Place the patties into the pan with the braising liquid (the patties should be half-covered by the liquid) and cook, covered, over medium-low heat for 30 minutes, stirring gently every 10 minutes. If you would prefer a slightly thicker broth, dust in a little flour after the first 10 minutes, or cook uncovered so the liquid can boil down.

  Crown with the remaining dill.

  Serve over your favorite grain: quinoa, couscous, bulgur wheat. The grains will soak up the braising broth.

  Roasted Peppers Marinated in Buckwheat Honey and Garlic (v)

  Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

  Serves: 4

  The pepper needs to be meaty—like a person.

  —Oksana

  Peppers

  3 large red bell peppers

  6 cloves garlic, put through a garlic press

  Kosher salt, to taste

  Marinade

  1/4 cup white vinegar

  2 teaspoons sugar

  1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

  1 teaspoon buckwheat honey (substitute another honey if you can’t find buckwheat)

  1 tablespoon sunflower oil (sunflower oil doesn’t become solid in the fridge)

  Chopped fresh dill, to taste

  Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the peppers, whole, into a pan and roast in the oven, turning them every 10 to 15 minutes. After 45 to 60 minutes, the skin should have a golden-brown crust and seem like it’ll peel off easily.

  Meanwhile, combine all the ingredients for the marinade in a bowl.

  When the peppers are cool enough to handle, remove the skin and seeds. Do this over a bowl to catch the peppers’ juices, and add them to the marinade.

  Slice the peppers lengthwise—6–8 “leaves” per pepper—taking care to remove stray seeds.

  In a container, layer the pepper slices, covering each layer with some of the pressed garlic and a generous pinch of salt. You should end up with 3 or 4 layers.

  Pour the marinade gently over the pepper layers, making sure it penetrates all the way to the bottom. Gently spear the peppers in several places with a fork to get the marinade to penetrate better.

  Generously sprinkle the uppermost layer with dill, and refrigerate for a day.

  A stovetop alternative, which uses a slightly different marinade

  Time: 45 minutes

  Serves: 4

  Peppers

  2 tablespoons vegetable oil

  3 large red bell peppers, sliced lengthwise into quarters and cleaned of seeds

  The cloves of 1/2 a head of garlic, peeled and minced

  Kosher salt, to taste

  Marinade

  3/4 cup water

  1/3 cup white vinegar, plus additional to taste

  Juice of 1 medium lemon

  11/2 tablespoons sugar, plus additional to taste

  In a deep sauté pan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the peppers and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 15 minutes.

  Meanwhile, combine all the ingredients for the marinade in a bowl, adjusting to taste. As Oksana says, “This dish is all about the contrast between sweet and tart, sugar and vinegar.”

  Add the marinade to the pan with the peppers, throw in the garlic, season lightly with salt, and cover the pan. The lemon may turn the garlic blue, but it won’t affect the taste. Bring to a gentle simmer, tasting the marinade every 5 to 10 minutes; if it’s too vinegary, add a little sugar. If you’re running low on liquid, make more of the marinade according to the specifications above, or see the note at the end of the recipe.

  When the liquid in the pan—the yushka—has turned cloudy, the marinade will be flavorful, but the peppers will probably need more salt: They can absorb a lot without becoming oversalted, thanks to all their moisture. Add more salt now and, as Oksana says, “don’t be stingy with it.”

  After 30 minutes, the peppers should be fully soft without losing shape.

  Let cool, transfer the peppers to a jar, and cover with the marinade.

  Refrigerate overnight—they are a cool, refreshing side to starches or meat dishes.

  Note: If you end up with extra marinade in the first variant, it serves most suitably if the second ends up needing more liquid.

  Chapter 8

  2006

  What to cook for Passover if you’re an atheist

  What to cook for a bunch of Jews on Passover if you’re an Orthodox Christian

  Passover—one of the non-negotiable gatherings. I had been a perfunctory presence at the mandatory family assemblies for years now, but I hadn’t managed to work up the ruthlessness to break my mother’s heart and fail to appear altogether. I was weary of south Brooklyn the way you give up on someone you cared for once because they’re still addicts.

  To sit at a table like my family’s was to reinfect oneself with the addiction. They passed around conspiracy theories—George W. Bush had not said that; someone pretending to be him had given that interview. They shared medieval wisdom: Women in the Netherlands had a lower birth rate because it was cold there. They did not bother with innuendo, and enjoyed a powerful tolerance for cognitive dissonance—just because south Brooklyn was filled with ex-Soviets defrauding Social Security and Medicaid didn’t mean the welfare rolls were anything but 100 percent black. Blacks carried generations of trauma passed down by slavery? But Jews had been abused—slaughtered, ghettoized, disadvantaged—in Russia for centuries, and that didn’t stop them from high earnings in a country they barely knew. As for their own activity on the wrong side of the law, did they not deserve the perks after so much abuse? And, what, America had clean hands? Enough—pass the pork.

  I had kept arguing, but then I gave up. When my father moved us out to New Jersey, I had tried to pass myself off as a Bobby. The shape-shift was short-lived, and I retreated back to bits of Russianness now and then. But for years now, it had taken more and more to make myself go down to my grandfather’s neighborhood.

  Passover seemed like an easy time for a no-show—we were atheists. In our first years, the American Jews had tried their best with us. They hired us; plied us with food bundles and free synagogue memberships; got their knife on my privates for a very belated circumcision, the pain of which surely would never leave my subconscious. It all came to nothing. My parents were fanatic defenders of Israel, and my mother liked Hanukkah so much, she kept the menorah lit well past the ritual eight days—why not, it looked nice. But that was it. The people who fought so hard for our release never imagined that getting us out would be the easy part.

  But Passover was near enough my mother’s birthday to make it an expensive collateral hit. In Minsk, it was Lenin’s birthday, several days from my mother’s, that always ruined her birthday weekend, because everyone had to spend the weekend after His birthday doing volunteer labor. And now Passover would do the same in America? Fate always gave us the short end.

  So I went, though I made no effort to hide how I felt. And this time, at least, there was a palliating reason to join them. In the preceding months, we’d started hearing about a new home attendant with “golden hands at the stove.” Oksana had been a day sub, but then the regular home aide had over-reported her hours and suddenly there was an opening for the weekdays. Previously, Oksana had been assigned to some lunatic ogress, but this was why my grandfather kept the ladies at the assignment agency in chocolates and perfume. A quiet reassignment. My grandparent
s had scrolled through a half dozen home nurses since my grandmother had been formally diagnosed. None had been singled out for her or his cooking. Singled out for anything. Passover would be our first time at Oksana’s table.

  I was coming from Washington, D.C., where I was bivouacked on a writing project, with a stop at my girlfriend Alana’s apartment on the Upper West Side, where I was bivouacked while my apartment got some repairs. She wasn’t coming to our phony version of Passover—her family did all of it: the prayers, the rituals, the restrictions. Except that she kept kosher only at home. This choice was supposed to indicate a conscious, personal engagement with religion, but to me it seemed like convenience, another version of our phoniness. What was the merit of doing something unless you did it all the way?

  Before Passover, she scrubbed and boiled until the kitchen was pure, so I returned from Washington to half of it wrapped in tinfoil to prevent use during the holiday, which lent it the slightly touched look of a DIY alien-contact station. She was following obsolete rules, I wanted to say. Also, I could buy very tasty chicken for a third of the kosher price—in south Brooklyn, in fact, where produce and other groceries were often twice as good at half the cost. (Often, this was what tipped the scale toward going there, after all.) But I said nothing. It would offend.

  On the subway down to my grandfather’s, I carried an item as alien as a kilo of heroin—I hid it from view every time I opened my bag. I was a practiced concealer—abroad, I wrapped my guidebooks to avoid being exposed as a tourist; at home, I wrapped the books I was embarrassed to be seen reading. It was a Russian-language Haggadah, the ritual Passover text. For decades, Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union had passed around the same text with the same secrecy. I was free not to bother, but I didn’t have their devotion. I lowered my voice every time I said the word “Jewish,” just as we had in the Soviet Union.

  I’d procured it from a skullcapped Jewish Uzbek barber in my neighborhood. It was ugly and unceremonious—modern graphic design may never come to books in Russian. The cover showed nineteen guests—all men, all hirsutely Central Asian, all wearing versions of Joseph’s dreamcoat—seated around a Passover table framed by a floating panorama of beet- and gold-colored crowns, Stars of David, and generic arabesques. It was 86 pages—128 if you counted the local-restaurant ads in the back. Or, rather, in the front—they wanted you to read it like Hebrew, back to front.

  Eighty-six pages—I’d make them go all the way. If it was a Jewish holiday and I had to be there, my way would have to be taken into account. They did not restrain themselves with me, and so, them, I would not worry about offending. But the home aide was outside that circle. I wondered if it’d be awkward with her. She was Christian.

  In the elevator of my grandfather’s building, I held the door for one of “ours”: sleeveless housedress, netted slippers, mail in her hand. She didn’t know what to do with me. My darkness could have been Georgian, but Georgians didn’t wear boat shoes and politely tight looks. “Shlyut i shlyut,” she tried, shrugging at the stack of catalogs in her hands. “They send and they send”—there hadn’t been a fraction of all this mail, so wasteful and oppressive, in the Soviet Union. I shared her bafflement. But I only smiled noncommittally. “Gudbai,” she said when her floor came. “Goodbye,” I said in clean English.

  Oksana wore the other uniform of our women: tights and a close-fitting T-shirt instead of the housedress. She had close-set eyes and puffy white arms. She was first into the foyer after I opened the door, but stopped shyly.

  “Your grandfather’s told me so much about you,” she said. She used the formal “you.”

  “And me about you,” I lied. I had avoided my grandfather for months. Didn’t visit, barely called. “Your buzzer’s broken,” I said when he appeared in the foyer. “I rang and rang.”

  He shrugged. “Everyone I need is right here,” he said. “And your parents, of course.”

  “Well, they won’t be able to get in,” I said. “I’ll wash my hands.” I always washed my hands when I got in. Arriving home, I changed my clothes. Soviet notions of hygiene. This caused much amusement for my American girlfriends. I’d never had a Russian girlfriend.

  “My father washed his hands for ten minutes after coming home,” I heard him say to Oksana as I receded. “Scalding hot water. Then tea. Three glasses, four glasses. Then he was ready to talk. Though he wasn’t much of a talker. My mother was the talker.”

  I’d never heard my grandfather talk about his mother or father. I pictured a man in a wooden dwelling, his suspenders around his waist, his shirt cuffed to the elbow. “Why did he do that?” I said when I returned.

  “Who?”

  “Your father, who.”

  “He delivered safes,” he said. “Quarter-ton each. He’d haul them up the flights on his back. They didn’t have a file for him at the medical clinic until he was seventy-two.”

  “So you’re making up for lost time,” I said. He glowered. Then he turned to Oksana and softened. “My father had the best horses in the city.” He counted on his fingers: “Beetle, Pegasus, Boy. With the first set, though, he got taken in. At the horse market, it was all Gypsies. The horse can be young, good strong teeth, but only they know he’s lazy. I had a talk with them—we were friendly, people didn’t mess around with me. And they gave my father his money back.”

  Was he making it up? He’d never talked to me about these things. I’d filled out my grandmother’s Holocaust restitution application a decade before and, as she told her story, he dropped a detail of his own now and then, but she silenced him—she didn’t want me to know what he got up to. Occasionally I probed him for more, but he answered so vaguely I didn’t know how to start clarifying. I’d quit asking. I wasn’t going to chase him.

  “Mama and Papa tell you how long?” I said.

  “Traffic.” He shrugged. “If they lived in Brooklyn, they’d be here already.”

  It was Paris that had made me avoid him. Some people fall in love there—and some people out. Early one morning the previous November, shortly after he and Oksana had met, the escalator rose out of the Paris metro, my heart thudding with each stair that vanished into its mechanical mouth. We had landed at Charles de Gaulle two hours before. I’d made him take the underground—the number the (brown-bagged) guidebook quoted for a taxi would have upset him as badly as me. There was another reason: The guidebook said the station exit let out onto a view of the Eiffel Tower, near which our hotel stood. It was a surprise. I planned to emerge out of the metro and—wham. The Eiffel Tower. How do you like that? I’d researched the exits and hoped to God this was the one.

  It had been my idea. What would have been my grandmother’s birthday was approaching, then his own (she had been eleven days older). A distraction: a trip to Paris and Israel, with me as his mule. For a person like him, the name Paris concentrated every romance and luxury absent from Soviet life. And half his old Minsk friends had emigrated to Israel. He hadn’t seen them in nearly two decades. He wouldn’t go to New Jersey, but he could brag about Paris.

  The Eiffel was for him—I prided myself on avoiding this kind of kitsch. I did well—suddenly there it was, in its early-morning, unpeopled glory, only banks of flowers swaying in the wind. Triumphantly, I turned around to note his impression. But there was no one to impress. This option I hadn’t considered. I swiveled frantically—there was no down escalator, and I hadn’t researched how to get back underground and search for a lost grandfather. Then I saw him. He was at the window of a footwear boutique. “Look at these loafers!” he roared, banging the glass. A mustached street sweeper, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, looked up—the tongue of our nation was barbaric in all that quiet civility.

  “Look at this goddamn tower!” I stuck a finger out at the international marvel before us.

  “Oh!” he said, turning. “Ukh ty.” It was perfunctory wonder, embarrassingly obvious in its falsehood. Perhaps he felt he didn’t have to try hard to fool me. He shuffled over for a photo, his gold sig
net ring sparkling in the sun and his big round belly pushing out his two-toned sweater—fabric in the back, leather in the front. He’d groomed his mustache extra neat for the trip—it had the shape of the Atari logo. Better than the Hitler-like square to which he sometimes inexplicably shaved it down.

  On entering our bantam hotel room, the view from which caught a sliver of the tower (as I’d confirmed, in very bad French, via many calls to the hotel), he fluttered his lips in the way that meant And how about this shit. The bed nearly touched the wall, alongside which he squeezed himself like a victim. The shower was a coffin stood upright. I wanted to make him guess how much even this pleasure cost. But I had to choose what he was going to wear.

  “The blue sweater,” I proposed.

  He shrugged and folded his lips. “I don’t know . . .”

  I put him back in the two-tone. Lunch presented a problem—the holes-in-the-wall I wanted to try were beneath him, but the menu of every bourgeois restaurant the guidebook recommended listed prices that would make him turn white.

  “I didn’t realize I would be touring Paris on foot,” he said as I inspected our fifth menu.

  “Let’s just go in here,” I said.

  “What have they got?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t speak French. They have everything.”