Savage Feast Read online

  A sack of salami, black bread, hard-boiled eggs, thick-skinned tomatoes, peaches, and apples: lunch on the beach. One afternoon, I was so dazed from the sun that I drained the water in the cup the adults had left out before they headed down to the water. But Soviet people didn’t drink water with their meals—“It’ll just take up room in your stomach,” Faina had explained once—and I, smashed from the vodka, collapsed under the little table and was snoring like a hopeless drunk, sand in my mouth, when the big people returned.

  Otherwise, I wouldn’t let my father alone, sitting on his head or crawling across the great fur of his chest; it was the color of night and billowed off him in tumbleweeds. (A Soviet vacation lasted nearly six weeks, so he’d come along; it was altogether too much rest for my grandparents.) Sometimes it was Soviet life that wouldn’t let him be: “They’ve got potatoes at the store!” the call would go up and down the beach; my father would bolt to his feet and sprint off, shirtless, shocking the masses; haul two bags, the handles eating his skin, up to the Compound of the Red Star; then return for one more swim before dinner. Savage leisure.

  The women—my father’s older brother and his wife had come with us—left the beach first, to make food. At home, they usually discovered Victor’s wife frying tomatoes in sunflower oil; these went onto a hunk of garlic-rubbed rye. There was nothing at the store, but at Victor’s there was fresh pork, sun-fattened tomatoes, and sunflower oil that was like toasted seeds in your nose. In Russian, it was podsolnechnoye (“under the sun” oil) and, they said, “had the entire periodic table in it”—that is, every vitamin.

  Returning later, my father, uncle, and I always took the way past a row of houses with blackberry brambles so high and thick they swung out over their fences. After hours of sun, so many berries had dropped to the ground that it was smeared violet. Sometimes they fell on your head as you walked. Admonished to keep my fingers clear of the brambles, I was allowed to pick those that leaned into the street. For every two I put in my mouth, I fed one to my father and one to my uncle. As their mother’s children, they knew how to allow themselves a treat.

  When we reached home, hiding our violet tongues, we found the table set with food enough for a dozen. If anyone could work the odd mix at her disposal into sigh-worthy meals, it was my aunt. She had grown up in a village, and cooked like it. She pan-fried flour-dusted pike perch in sunflower oil until it gleamed like the cheeks of a teenage girl after a snowfall, or so Victor said, summoned by the scent. The bones and the tail were so sweet we sucked them between our fingers. The cabbage that the store could be counted on to have even after the apocalypse she transformed into salat provençal—shredded cabbage, sweet onion, grated carrot, vinegar, sunflower oil, salt, pepper, and a teaspoon of sugar. (These ingredients would seem to have nothing to do with an actual Provençal salad, but Provence sounded exotic, so why not.)

  Pan-Fried Pike Perch with Creamy Mashed Potatoes and Cabbage Salad

  Time: 30–45 minutes

  Serves: 4

  Note: Pike perch, or zander, is as ubiquitous in Europe as it isn’t in the States, so substitute another fish with meaty, flaky, sweet meat. Walleye comes closest (if you have a fishing rod and a lake, you’re in luck), but a branzino or porgy would work fine as well. Or do as I do, and throw yourself on the mercy of your local fishmonger.

  Salad

  1/4 cup diced red onion

  2 tablespoons white vinegar, plus additional to taste

  1 teaspoon sugar, plus additional to taste

  1/2 pound green cabbage (1/4 of a medium-size head), cut into small pieces (the size of a pinkie nail)

  1/2 carrot, grated

  Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

  Sunflower oil, for drizzling

  Potatoes

  11/2 pounds Idaho potatoes, peeled

  1/2 onion, chopped

  1 bay leaf

  Kosher salt, to taste

  2/3 cup milk

  1 tablespoon butter

  2 garlic cloves, put through a garlic press

  Fish

  2 medium-size whole fish (about 1 pound each), rinsed and patted dry

  Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

  1/2 cup flour

  Sunflower oil, for frying

  For the salad:

  In a small bowl, toss the onion with the vinegar and sugar.

  Ball and squeeze the cabbage as you move it from your cutting board to a salad bowl, so it starts to release juices and flavor. (A good, well-mauled cabbage has a peppery, horseradish-like bite.) Add the carrot, the onion mixture, and salt and pepper to taste. Taste for tang and sweetness and add more vinegar and/or sugar until you have the flavor balance you want. If you don’t mind a little bite, you can add up to 3 more tablespoons of vinegar. If a hint of sweetness doesn’t throw you off in salads, add up to 3 more teaspoons of sugar. Drizzle with a little sunflower oil, mix well, and let sit, so the flavors can exchange information.

  For the potatoes:

  In a medium pot or saucepan, place the potatoes, onion, and bay leaf and cover, by one inch, with well-salted water. Bring to a boil and cook until a knife goes through the potatoes smoothly, about 25 minutes.

  Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, warm the milk and butter over medium-low heat.

  Drain the potatoes and return them to the pot, leaving the onion and bay leaf in the strainer. Mash the potatoes while adding the warm milk mixture, a little at a time. Mix in the pressed garlic and season with salt. Cover to keep warm.

  For the fish:

  Snip any fins off the fish using scissors, but leave the tails and heads—they add flavor. Salt and pepper generously, both outside and inside the fish. Sprinkle the flour on a plate and dredge each fish, on both sides, until well coated; pat off any excess.

  In a large nonstick pan, heat a generous amount of sunflower oil over medium-high heat. When the oil has had several minutes to get very hot, add the fish—taking care not to get splattered by hot oil. Cook on each side for 3–4 minutes.

  Serve all together. For extra sinfulness, pour a spoonful of the oil in which the fish cooked over the mashed potatoes. The crisp, tart cabbage salad should complement and cut the creaminess of the potatoes and the richness of the fried fish. And the smell of fried fish, that staple of seaside places the world over, should give a hint of what it was like to walk into my aunt’s kitchen after a long day pickling in the Black Sea. (For the record, unlike most of the recipes in this book, the Black Sea is blissfully undersalted.)

  Periodically, some of the adults vanished outside for a smoke—they were on vacation, after all. Then a round of tea with the jams my aunt made from the blessing of peach, cherry, and grape outside. There would be jams again in the morning, with her bliny—crepes. Thinking of that, who wanted to fall asleep? But I had to—my uncle snored like thunder, so that if you weren’t asleep by the time the great bulk of him touched down on the other side of the cardboard wall, you were doomed for the night. (Science must study how my aunt managed to stay asleep with Krakatoa erupting by her a thousand times every night.) I was made to lie down immediately after the meal, so the fat could “cohere.” A skinny child wouldn’t do. At the beach, a new apple was jammed into my mouth as soon as I finished the previous one. I wouldn’t have the same fruit back north. But I was being insulated against more than a fruitless Minsk winter.

  One evening back home that fall, dusky and cold, I was playing in the sandbox with my classmate Sasha when two men approached to ask if we knew the way to the school. Sasha was smarter, but I’d never lied to anyone about anything, and agreed to show them. When we reached it, I turned around but saw only one of the two men behind me. The other was fifty meters away, by the back door of an idling yellow car, waving Come on. That was when my father rounded the corner, bursting in on us—he had come downstairs; it was dinnertime. There was no altercation; in a blur, he swept me up and we vanished. He carried me home in his arms, as if setting me down would make me a flight risk, and I wept into his sho
ulder.

  Curiously, neither of my parents remembers this episode, whereas I do, with painful clarity. Perhaps they don’t because they’d failed—the world they worked so hard to keep outside my fantasy shell had trespassed inside. I had never even been allowed to find out what my grandfather got up to—often, conversations fell silent as soon as I joined the dinner table. But the older I became, the more the real world wanted to flicker through, like the sun breaking the foliage of the chestnut trees in the massive yard of our apartment building.

  One night, unable to sleep, I tiptoed into the hallway and overheard my grandfather telling a table of acquaintances about the expensive Armenian cognac with which he had once plied the surgeon who was going to remove my grandmother’s gallbladder the next morning. They drank so much that the surgeon was still drunk when he picked up the scalpel. The table roared, though my grandmother did not.

  In that place, no fantasy shelter could hold. Bigger boys from another yard might come and demand last names to see who among us needed a whipping because he was Jewish. (My Russian Orthodox alias was Novikov—the New Man, or the Rookie, depending on how you translate it.) When, in second grade, older boys encircled flame-haired, perennially snot-nosed Eugene, his miserably ill-tailored school uniform on him like a sack, I broke in and shouted until they dispersed. Perhaps I did this because I had been misled by my family into believing that we lived in a country of justice and valor. Perhaps because I had somehow osmosed from my grandfather that they always dispersed if only you fought.

  Sometimes I was the one who attacked. One late-autumn day, standing in the big yard before my skinny friend Pavel—a too-thin nylon brown coat with a fur-lined hoodie; always-chapped lips; bright-white but uneven teeth; a stream of snot at his nose—I wound up and smashed my fist into his belly. No reason. No one else was around. Pavel doubled over but said nothing and did not defend himself, as if he understood such things as his fate.

  The following summer, Pavel drowned in the Black Sea. For months, I was sure it was because I had punched him. However, I hadn’t told anyone that I had, and neither had Pavel, and in this way I escaped justice.

  Chapter 3

  1988

  What to cook to win over a former countrywoman made good in the West

  How to eat when you’ve sold your stove because you’re emigrating halfway around the world

  What food to pack to get five mouths through one Iron Curtain

  “You won’t live like that at first,” the woman at our dining table said, gesturing toward the closet, where her fur coat hung. My grandfather had insisted on helping her out of it, ostensibly out of chivalry but really so he could paw it and see what you could get in America. Chinchilla, she’d said, but he knew what he knew: That was rabbit. It was a good copy, though—the coat light, the hair dense. He had held the coat closet wide open so she could notice the blue German lamb’s wool there, the minks, the French shearling knee-length. He was doing just fine without the wisdom of people like her.

  It was 1988—Soviet Jews were leaving in droves for America. (During this period, the word “leaving” came to refer to a single thing requiring no clarification.) That it was easier to leave didn’t mean it was easy—as always, only certain things worked at certain times for certain people. For instance, not only were letters from abroad getting through to us—opened and read, but with almost nothing crossed out—but the émigrés themselves were sometimes permitted to return and sit in former friends’ living rooms without ideological coaching, all while the authorities continued to menace and demoralize those trying to leave. But we had slipped through. On this go-around, my father and grandfather went into the visa office when called. We were leaving, and we wanted to know what to expect.

  My grandmother didn’t know how to set the table for our guest—would Soviet food seem paltry next to the glories to which this former countrywoman now surely had access in American supermarkets? My grandmother decided on the opposite of what she had served all those years ago to the safety instructor from my father’s technical college: In times of uncertainty among kinspeople, lean on the Jewish regimen. Dill-flecked chicken bouillon with kneidels (matzoh balls, from matzoh baked and delivered by secret couriers at night); a chicken stuffed with macaroni and fried gizzards; the neck skin of several chickens tied together and stuffed with caramelized onion, flour, and dill to make a sausage-like item called helzel. For excess, there was deconstructed, or “lazy,” stuffed cabbage—everything that would have stewed inside a cabbage leaf shredded and shaped into patties instead—and a chicken rulet: a deboned chicken layered with sautéed garlic, caramelized carrot, and hard-boiled egg, then rolled up and fastened for cooking with needle and thread. It had a noble pedigree: In 1941, with the Nazis beginning to starve Leningrad, the Soviets discovered two thousand tons of mutton guts in the seaport and made rulet out of them. As always, my grandmother made too much, but you had to show you didn’t lack for things.

  “You’ll have to eat a little shit to start with,” the woman went on, wiping her mouth; on sighting the food, she had forgotten her queenly hauteur. “But one of my friends owns a Hallmark franchise—greeting cards—and would you like to know what she hauls in in a day?” She allowed a pregnant pause to expire. “Two thousand dollars.” My mother, eager to show gratitude, gasped in wonder. My grandfather selflessly refrained from raising his hands in mock worship—he had the equivalent of that in his pocket right now. My father uncrossed the arms he liked to keep at his chest in a kind of preemptive objection. “But what about crime?” he said. “It’s all they show on television.”

  The woman swished around her bracelets. “I walk like this all the time,” she said. “Just don’t bring hats. Everyone has a car and drives everywhere, so you don’t need a hat. If you’re wearing one, that means you’re an immigrant. In fact, don’t bring anything. They have everything there. And it costs next to nothing.” Perhaps it was because my grandfather couldn’t tell this high-handed hag what he really thought that the first thing he stuffed into our luggage was the gray mink hat that sat on his head from September to April.

  It was like one of my father’s strange fairy tales: Little by little—for free, for favors, for pay—the apartment began disappearing. The vanishing of the television, taken by one of my mother’s co-workers, caused me special grief. When my grandfather and I weren’t “polishing” the cold concrete seats of the soccer stadium itself, it was where I watched Dinamo Minsk go up against Zenit Leningrad and Torpedo Moskva. The separation of twenty-two previously indistinguishable men into two adversarial uniforms, the pride of a city behind each, was a gnomic, primitive message from some other dimension in which, as the pig slaughterer whose summer cottage we rented had so essentially put it, “there will be you—and there will be them.” The television alone knew my guilt for rooting—the Russian word is bolet’, to be ill for—for the Finns instead of the Soviets in hockey. The Finns had such mellifluous names, vowel after vowel, like Arctic Hawaiians. And they were so clean and crisp in their white-and-blue jerseys, so calm against the tense red of ours. They looked like our players—tall, fair-haired, light-skinned—but without the roughness and disfigurement of our faces. Disfigured by hockey, but also by how we ate and drank, by the expressions into which our faces were fixed.

  My bookshelves were attached to the wall, so I believed they were safe, but one day they were gone, too. Then the Persian rug on which, on all fours, I read the sports pages. Then my bed. The kitchen went last. A friend of my mother’s hauled away everything in it. They agreed on a price, but the woman gave us no money; she had a relative in America, and since each emigrant could take the equivalent of only $90 in currency (and $250 in possessions), the woman’s relative would pay 50 percent of the agreed-upon price when we got to America—for us, a way of getting out more currency than was allowed. Our position was weak: Who knew if the phone number the woman scrawled on a piece of graph paper corresponded to an actual human. But if it did, that poor person had to she
ll out money on behalf of a Soviet relative for nothing in exchange. So 50 percent was the actuarial measure of the exposure and risk for all involved.

  You can sleep on the floor, but you can’t eat the air; how to survive without a stove or a fridge? For the first time in my life, I experienced the dread of not knowing from where the next meal would come. No one had explained that those relatives and friends who did not fear associating with us—“men would not come to our plague-stricken house, but sent their wives instead,” as Nadezhda Mandelstam, the condemned Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam’s wife, wrote in more severe circumstances—would come with everything from utensils to foldout tables. My aunt brought braised beef with cubed potatoes and marinated peppers; blintzes stuffed with ground beef and caramelized onion; and a chicken stuffed with crepes and more browned onion, then roasted. All this disappeared quickly. Departures like ours meant more helping hands, but also more mouths.

  Though my grandparents’ home never lacked guests, this was a different kind of assembly. The smartest people congregated in the kitchen, where the constant replenishment of the foldout table turned the day into a single, unbroken meal. But there were people standing—with glasses, or arms folded, or consoling hands atop grieving wrists—in every room, even mine. (Evidently, its emptiness had re-registered it as common property.) Periodically, these congregants would make a pilgrimage to the kitchen like steam bathers who’d spent too much time in the cold and down thimbles of cognac or vodka. Often, no one had to be anywhere in particular. There was nothing to do in the Soviet Union other than the obscene number of hours you spent queueing for food. You could go to the cinema, you could go for a walk in the park, you could watch a sporting event, and on a special occasion you could splurge in a café. Otherwise, you sat in people’s kitchens, ate, drank, and talked.