Savage Feast Read online

  “Don’t worry about the food,” Oksana said, rising. “Just give me a minute.” She disappeared into the kitchen. The oven switched back to life.

  “Grab the cognac on your way back,” my grandfather called out.

  “God visited plagues on the Egyptians for having kept the Jews slaves,” I went on feebly. “He punished the—don’t you see the connection? We weren’t slaves, but . . . And we got out.”

  “Maybe if someone was actually punished for what we went through, I’d believe some of that crap,” my grandfather said.

  I slapped closed the book. “Forget it. You win.” The table fell into an ill-humored silence. Oksana’s return brought relief, as did the alcohol in her hands. She set down the cognac, then a cheap bottle of red wine. “My present to all of you on the holiday. I think you drink red wine on Passover. Because wine is joy.”

  “If wine is joy, cognac is ecstasy,” my father said.

  “Wait, wait,” Oksana said. She went to the kitchen and came back with five little plates. Each had a dollop of horseradish and a date. She also held a bowl with water and five spoons. “You spoon the horseradish, and then you sprinkle some of this water on top—it’s a little salty. And watch the horseradish! I just made it, it’s hot.” But everyone was already gasping and joking about Ukraine having gotten back its nuclear weapons. “Now chase with the date,” she said. “Arkady, careful, there’s pits.” She held out her palm, and he obediently tongued out a thready pit after he’d sucked off the meat. “We have dates?” he said, still chewing.

  Like children, they did what she said. You could not disrespect someone outside the family.

  “The horseradish in salt water is because it was bitter for Jews in Egypt,” she said. “And the date because then they got free and things became sweet. Let it be sweet for all of you always! Who wants cognac?” They all raised their hands.

  “See, if you’re eating at least, you can tolerate all this high philosophy,” my father said.

  “So let’s eat,” Oksana said. “Can I serve?” Everyone nodded, but she stood in place. I realized she was looking at me. She wouldn’t do it unless I gave my permission as well.

  “Of course,” I said, defeated.

  “God—he is good!” my father said in a needling voice, and everyone broke out in laughter, though Oksana only smiled politely.

  As she served, I stared at my father. I’d never known my father the romantic, the individualist, the strummer of guitars. It was as if the States—where there was too much of the responsibility and risk of which there’d been too little at home—had finished off what was left when the USSR was through with him. “He’s like a candle that’s been snuffed out, but it’s still smoking,” one of my friends said once. It was as if the hardest parts of both places—the Soviet disinclination to believe; the tyranny of American choice, and the high cost of miscalculation—had fused within him to make a man whose first word was no. His former country had said no to him, and now he would.

  “Oksana, but how in the world . . .” my mother said. The table had filled with . . . Jewish dishes. Jewish dishes we hadn’t seen in a decade, since my grandmother became too ill to cook. No one else really knew how to make them, not the same way. Tsimmes, matzoh babka, potato latkes, kasha varnishkes . . . Quietly, Oksana had been keeping it all warm while I went on with my sermon.

  “The Internet, how!” she said, and everyone laughed. “With adjustments.” For a reminder of home, she’d also made sorrel borshch, the Easter soup in Ukraine. In Russian, the word for Passover and Easter is the same.

  I couldn’t compare Oksana’s tsimmes to my grandmother’s—it had been so long since I’d had my grandmother’s tsimmes. And I couldn’t trust my mother’s exclamations over it—for her, politeness was more important than the truth. But Oksana’s tsimmes was so good I heaved it into my mouth by the spoonful, too quickly. The pleasure daze sent me to the cognac along with everyone else. A Russian food writer—technically, Jewish-Russian-Latvian-Ukrainian; things got complicated over there—once offered a guideline for moderation in alcohol: “Drink only while hungry.” But I couldn’t stop being hungry. If I could pause for ten minutes, perhaps my brain would catch up to my stomach, but I couldn’t manage to pause for that long.

  Oksana herself touched very little—she reloaded serving plates, switched out dirty napkins, ignored our protests and pleas to sit down. She managed to not ask how it all tasted, but she hardly needed to, and we couldn’t answer anyway—our mouths were distended with food.

  On the subway home, even my postprandial stupor didn’t conceal it: My grandfather had been speaking so openly about his past with Oksana because he trusted her. In a way he didn’t trust even me, even if he “loved” me more. Oksana was a citizen of the same country. Same heart country, stomach country, prostate country. It was hard to say she didn’t seem to deserve it. For the holiday, she had managed what I could not: only as much ritual as they could handle. I didn’t care about Egypt any more than they did; I just wanted to hurt them. The heretical table I’d just left was more like my girlfriend’s religion than me with my Haggadah: They were all picking and choosing. I was the fundamentalist. Uncommon achievement had always been expected of me, and you had to admit I had turned into something uncommon: a fundamentalist and nonbeliever at once.

  Oksana’s Kasha Varnishkes (v)

  Time: 20 minutes

  Serves: 6

  2/3 cup buckwheat groats

  1/4 cup vegetable oil (preferably sunflower)

  1 large onion, diced

  1/4 pound bowtie pasta

  4 cloves garlic, put through a garlic press

  Kosher salt, to taste

  Inspect the buckwheat for black groats and remove. They’re bitter.

  Dump the groats into a fine-mesh strainer and rinse with cold water, riffling through them with your fingers.

  In a pot, cover the groats with 11/3 cups of water, add salt, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until the buckwheat cooks fully, about 15 minutes. The buckwheat should be dry rather than soupy when finished.

  Meanwhile, heat the oil in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté, stirring occasionally, until golden brown, 10 minutes or so.

  Cook the pasta in a pot of salted water. Drain and transfer to a large bowl. Add the buckwheat, the sautéed onion, and the garlic and stir. Salt to taste. If the mixture feels a little dry, add more oil.

  Give the ingredients time to get to know one another. This is definitely a second-day dish.

  Potato Latkes with Dill, Garlic, and Farmer Cheese (v)

  Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

  Serves: 4–6

  Every housewife must decide when to flip.

  —Oksana

  3/4 pound farmer cheese

  1 bunch fresh dill, chopped

  6 garlic cloves, put through a garlic press and divided

  Kosher salt, to taste

  3 large Idaho potatoes, peeled and grated

  1/2 large onion, grated

  2 eggs

  1 tablespoon flour

  1 tablespoon ground coriander, or to taste

  1 tablespoon ground caraway, or to taste

  Vegetable oil, for cooking the latkes

  Mix the farmer cheese with the dill, half the garlic, and salt to taste. Set aside to let it warm up a bit while you prep the latkes. (This will make it easier to spoon out later in the recipe.)

  Squeeze out most of the liquid from the potatoes and combine them with the onion, eggs, flour, spices, and remaining garlic. Season with salt. The mixture will keep letting off liquid, but that’s fine: this will keep the latkes from being too dense.

  Heat 1/8 inch of oil in a large nonstick pan over medium heat. Drop a tablespoon’s worth of the potato-and-onion mixture onto the pan. Fill the pan with these proto-latkes, making sure to leave enough room between them to slide in a spatula and flip later.

  After a minute or so—the bottom of the latke should seem like it’s browning—c
arefully place a teaspoon of the farmer cheese mixture into the center of each latke and pat it down gently so it spreads, but not all the way to the edge of the latke. Running the spoon underwater or dipping it in a bit of oil beforehand will help the mixture move more easily. You can also use your hands to pat down the mixture while it’s on the spoon before transferring it to the pan. Now cover the farmer cheese layer with another tablespoon of potato-and-onion batter.

  The above two steps will take 2–3 minutes. When the bottom of each latke feels like it’s getting ruddy—about 3 minutes more—flip to the other side.

  Once the other side is equally brown (about 5 minutes), flip again, turn the heat down to its lowest setting, cover the pan, and cook for 2–3 minutes.

  Remove the latkes, pour new oil, and repeat. You should end up with 20–25 latkes.

  Serve with sour cream or mushroom gravy (see Cabbage Vareniki [Dumplings] with Wild Mushroom Gravy).

  Homemade Horseradish (v)

  Time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

  Serves: a very large and horseradish-happy party

  If I was grating this horseradish at home, you’d hear me weeping from across the house.

  —Oksana

  2 medium to large beets

  1 stalk horseradish, peeled

  9 percent white vinegar, to taste

  Sugar, to taste

  Kosher salt, to taste

  Cover the beets with water and bring to a boil in a pot with the lid mostly on. Boil until a small knife goes through easily. (About an hour—you may have to top up the water now and then.) After they have cooled, run them under cold water—the skin will come off in your hands.

  Grate the horseradish and beets as finely as possible. A fresh horseradish will “smoke” hard enough to make onion-crying seem pleasant by comparison, so proceed incrementally. The measurements above are just a guideline: They’re good for a horseradish with a kick. If you want your eyes to well up every time you taste it, cut down on the beet.

  Combine the horseradish and beets with vinegar, sugar, and salt. A typical Oksana ratio: 5 tablespoons of 9 percent vinegar, 3 teaspoons of sugar, and a pinch of salt. (“Salt will take away the flavor, so no more than a pinch.”)

  This should produce about 3 cups. Grated horseradish evaporates, so keep the lid on, and every time you have some, add a bit more freshly grated horseradish to keep up the concentration and flavor.

  Chapter 9

  2006

  What to cook for a sister you haven’t seen in a year

  What to put on the table when introducing a Ukrainian home attendant and an Albanian super

  What to make to get people to leave

  Intellectual things, learned things, ruin the appetite.

  —Chekhov, “The Siren”

  It looked like the Last Supper: a dozen bodies around two foldout tables stacked end-to-end in my grandfather’s living room. Everyone owned two foldout tables—if you had only one, must be people didn’t like coming over.

  I was surprised my grandfather didn’t have three tables, for show if nothing else, but I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen even the second in use. Our Minsk had gotten scattered all over the world. But even those who chose New York couldn’t re-create the frequency and revelry of their Soviet evenings. Work was different here—you had to get up early, because it took forever to get there; and you had to be there on time; and really work; and twice as long, so that by the time you hobbled home, you just wanted your bed. On the weekends, you tended to all the things that had been tended to for you in the USSR. This—private ownership, individual choice—was freedom. At least you made real money.

  But there were two tables in my grandfather’s living room now, and, around them, I recognized only three people: Oksana, my grandfather, and his neighbor Yasha, the one with the laundry quarters. Oksana brought me into the living room and waved down the noise. “This is Arkady’s grandson!” she said. “We know!” someone with a Georgian accent shouted from the far end of the table. “You’re all he talks about!”

  “I’d give my right arm for him,” my grandfather said solemnly from the king’s spot at the head of the table.

  “Better give him that silk on your head,” a man with a belly the shape of a microwave called out, raising his shot glass. I was taking after my father’s line—the hair was thick on my chest and thin on my head. Meanwhile, my grandfather’s cap of ash-colored hair was as soft and dense as a teenager’s, and his chest bare as a teenager’s, too.

  A week earlier, I had been sent home from the Passover table with babka and tsimmes that lasted a week. In Manhattan, I had to cook all the time—I couldn’t eat out on freelance journalism—and Oksana’s bundle had saved me many hours. But my fridge was empty again. My grandfather, my mother told me, was having Oksana “cover” a table and inviting people he knew because her sister was visiting from Albany. I could make him feel looked in on, and in doing so score another week’s worth of leftovers.

  “Sit!” someone yelled, and the table returned to its talk. Oksana went down the row: That was the man who had painted the demented portrait of my grandmother; that was his wife. That was Oksana’s best friend—also named Oksana—and that man in the wheelchair was her home-care ward, an “intellectual” from Moscow. Yasha the neighbor had a home aide of his own, sitting next to him.

  The man with the microwave belly lived upstairs with his wife and small boy. (From the back, ex-Soviet men like him seemed as slim as healthy people. Head-on, you encountered a rectangular escarpment that began at the sternum and ended at the waist, and refused gravity: It stayed aloft, tight as rock, not one inch of overhang.) Two weeks before, his wife was about to take the boy to school when her cell phone rang: Her elderly mother had to go to the ER. So Oksana and my grandfather walked him to school and—Brooklyn emergency-room wait times being what they are—picked him up, too. And if they picked him up, they had to feed him. He wanted cornflakes—that was what he got every day. No, Oksana would not give him cornflakes for lunch. She’d just finished boiling chicken soup and was simmering couscous. He got a cup of the soup—we always drank chicken soup out of cups—and a bowl of the couscous. He dug around it to show his resentment, but then he tried a small forkful, and then another, and eventually he ate it. That night, the escarpment man called and asked if Oksana and my grandfather would do that every day.

  “That’s quite a favor,” I said.

  “Who says it’s a favor?” Oksana said.

  “I see,” I said.

  “Where are they?” I said. Escarpment Man was flanked by no woman or child.

  “He’s making his own arrangement,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  She looked at my grandfather, who was going on to someone about how gifted the man who painted my grandmother’s portrait was. The painter wasn’t protesting.

  “My grandfather told you not to tell me,” I said.

  “No, no . . .” she said unconvincingly. Now she had to tell me. “He’s borrowing money. His wife doesn’t know.”

  “From whom?” I said stupidly.

  “From us, from whom. Your grandfather and I each put a little together.”

  “What percentage?” I said, trying to think of ways to sound less innocent.

  “We said ten, but he himself insisted on twenty.” She shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  She finished her tour: That was the guy who gave my grandfather free rides in his Medicaid ambulette. That was the guy from the pharmacy. That was one of Oksana’s friends—illegal. She was obsessed with immigration reform; during the day, she nannied two little girls; at night, she listened to Russian radio and wrote down what Dzhan Makeyn and Dzhordzh Boosh had said about the bills moving up and down Congress. This lawbreaker knew more about how American government worked than the rest of the room put together.

  That man was a friend of my grandfather’s—he was hale enough not to need a home aide, in fact hale enough for a mistress back in Ukraine. His wife kne
w, and let him go back to her every couple of months. And that was Oksana’s sister Nadia, down from Albany, where she was an au pair for another Soviet Jewish family. She cooked Jewish dishes all day, so Oksana had dug deep in the Ukrainian repertoire: salted fatback on garlic-rubbed rye, ground-liver pie, polenta with feta and wild mushrooms, cabbage dumplings in wild mushroom gravy, barley-and-pickle soup with pork shoulder, and wafer torte with condensed milk and rum extract for dessert.

  “It’s all men,” I said, gesturing at the pensioners.

  Oksana shrugged. “The husband gets ill, and the wife dies.”

  As always, Oksana sat closest to the kitchen; she was gone half the time, reheating, replating, re-serving. Her plate was nearly unused, just a smudge of “little blues”—roast eggplant, peppers, and carrots, named after the color of the eggplant, perhaps by someone who was color-blind. Escarpment Man had to go upstairs to get me a spare chair. If it was the Last Supper, I was Judas.

  I went to greet my grandfather. He rubbed his hands on the thick stubble on my cheeks.

  “There aren’t complaints?” he said.

  “From whom?” I said. “About what?”

  He lowered his voice. “The people at work.”

  I stared, baffled. Then I understood. In the USSR, unkempt people could be reported to work for disorderly living—in Minsk, every school day began with the vice principal checking the length of my nails and how neat the hairline was at the back of my neck. As an adult, you could be clean-shaven, and you could be bearded, as our fathers were—thickly but neatly—but not the five days I now had on my face. He knew I worked for myself—who could complain to whom? Perhaps every time I appeared before him, he hoped it would be as someone who’d wised up and become an employee of somebody else. Except that, in Minsk, he himself could stand to have superiors in name only. Maybe my grandfather thought working from home was unmanly. The poet Brodsky had been prosecuted for it in the USSR. My elders managed to venerate people like Brodsky while spurning the way of life that made them that way. I was so distracted by these thoughts I was looking right through him. Maybe these people drank so much because it softened the sound of each other’s bullshit.