Into the Depths: A Guide to Russian Food, Part 3

Life in Russia, as you might have heard, can be hard. This is particularly true if you don’t live in Moscow, which has traditionally been regarded as almost a separate country. Living in Russia has, at various points in history, meant dealing with a harsh climate, unfriendly neighbors, friendly neighbors who didn’t want to be, like, too friendly, neutral neighbors who kind of objected to being conquered, invading armies of world superpowers, invading armies of your own government, laws designed to terrify, repress or extort but never to provide any kind of justice, habitual, institutionalized and inextricable corruption, really shitty movies, legendarily horrible roads, regularly scheduled month-long hot water outages, dreadful soccer, angry dogs and, of course, food shortages.

Food shortages, back when they were a major thing, were annoying and infuriating. I grew up in a place where the phrase “what kind of cheese” didn’t exist, because cheese, when available, was of only one kind: a yellow block of soap-like substance with little bits of plastic embedded into it for some reason. It was called “the Holland cheese” probably for no other reason than to insult the poor innocent Dutch. I grew up without knowing what a banana was. When I found out, I thought it was about two inches long, had an extremely sweet taste and was very chewy. It was from a packet of dried Vietnamese bananas my friend’s dad brought from abroad.

On the other hand, food shortages do tend to lead to the kinds of culinary innovations you just don’t see in well provided for communities. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that America’s finest cuisine comes from its poorest states. Nobody invents gumbo because they have a plentiful and varied food supply. It’s a dish born out of necessity to make something out of whatever you can find.

But not all culinary masterpieces created in strenuous circumstances can be universally appealing. Today, our focus is three Russian/Soviet/Ukrainian specialty foods that won’t be equally appreciated by all of you. This is the story of horrors that our creativity can bring forth, the character needed to tame them, and the intestinal fortitude that has helped to turn Russia into the world’s most resilient motherfucker of a nation.

Proceed at your own risk. Because not a single soul anywhere between Murmansk and Vladivostok is about to hold your damn hair back.

Herring Under the Fur Coat

There is a special kind of people who revel in extending their middle finger to social norms, established morals and the modern world in general. In some cultures they are called “assholes”, in others, “mavericks”, in Russia they are usually referred to as “us.” You don’t tell a Russian that wearing fur is unethical, because when it’s 40 below zero in Norilsk on what is considered a balmy autumn day, you will skin that precious Arctic fox with your own fucking teeth and be glad you did. Of course, you might say there is a long way between Norilsk and a Moscow lady with corpses of six or seven ermines draped around her as she is strolling out to the corner store for cigarettes in August, but most Russians won’t really know what you mean.

You might also tell a Russian that herring is disgusting, boiled beets are inedible, and mayonnaise should really be consumed in very measured dosages and very specific circumstances. To which Russians will respond by combining all these ingredients into one unfathomable, barely comprehensible, utterly amoral and absolutely unstoppable Uruk Hai of a dish and call it… what else? Herring Under a Fur Coat. Because fuck you, that’s why.

This dish’s origins go back, unsurprisingly, to the 1970s (known as The Stagnation Era) and to our New Year, the very same holiday that gave us the Olivier salad. This is what happens, folks, when you need festive-looking food in a country where the most delectable meat is usually canned fish. You take whatever you have lying around the kitchen, you turn off every moral impulse in your soul and you improvise.

Herring Under the Fur Coat is festive indeed, in the way that public witch burning was festive in the XVI century. It’s a layered salad of diced boiled beets, potatoes, carrots, eggs and onions, all smothered in generous portions of mayonnaise (those who have read the chapter on Olivier and vinegret linked above will detect a theme in our “festive” meals), with salted pieces of herring lying below, ready to ambush your senses like the horror from the deep that they are.

In fact, the whole structure of the salad is meant to be a spiritual allegory: it starts out with the sweetness of beets and carrots, descends into the pleasant mildness of eggs and the ambiguous starchness of the spud, reaches the sharpness of the onion and then… then, once you descend deep into the heart of Morgoth, there rests the herring, put there to test your resolve to live and follow the path of light. Helping you along in your descent is mayonnaise, which ensures that choice is but an illusion and the herring is as inevitable as the moral downfall and death of man.

In reality, of course, Herring Under the Fur Coat is the representation of the Russian soul in reverse as we view ourselves as all herring and onions on he outside, but beets, carrots and eggs in the bottom of our hearts. Similarly, this creation, which looks to most foreigners as the very depiction of Dante’s hell, is in reality delicious, desirable and perfectly balanced. Even if the pedestrian Westerners can never appreciate it.

The dichotomies and ambiguities of the moral underpinnings of our society are fascinating indeed. But there is nothing ambiguous about the next item…

Kholodets

There are many reasons why some of us may hate the foods we hate. The smell, the color, the particular way in which it behaves when cut or spooned. Or, maybe, some unpleasant childhood memories.

The reason kholodets makes my skin crawl has everything to do with auditory senses, as in the way my step-father slurps it while shoveling enormous portions into his mouth. He loves kholodets. Any kind of it, of which there are many. He loves it with and without beet-flavored horseradish sauce, he loves it on the holidays and on Thursdays, he loves it with or without carrots, he loves it solid and slicieable or mushy and runny, but most of all he loves it loud. The very act of writing this paragraph has triggered my gag reflex like three times. Give me a moment…

For foreigners, the great majority of whom have not met my step-father, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the Soviet Army, no auditory offenses are needed to be appalled by kholodets, also known as aspic, also known as meat Jell-O, also known as an unforgivable crime against nature itself. It’s perfectly capable to offend you via visual, olfactory, gustationary and aesthetic channels. Kholodets, to state my case in simple terms, is something that should not exist in a civil society dedicated to the betterment of human endeavor. The very fact that it does is meant to demonstrate us our shortcomings as a species.

Here is how you spawn (the word “make” somehow seems too neutral here) kholodets, whose name simply means “something cold” in Russian and could have satisfactorily referred to something much less harmful, such as frostbite, instead. It is little more than meat, fish or poultry broth which has been poisoned with gelatin and allowed to set in the fridge, creating a quivering mass with mushy, overcooked meat, fat and carrots encased in it like prehistoric malaria-carrying mosquitoes trapped in tree sap.

Russians don’t even attempt to hide the dish’s underlying evilness, as nobody ever uses good meat for kholodets. It is usually made with bones, cartilage and cuts not fit for consumption on their own merits. The type of fish used for kholodets is normally one that could not in good conscience be fried or baked. In Jewish cuisine, gefilte is often served in set aspic, creating a dish called fish yukh, or “fish juice” (you will hopefully notice how the Yiddish word is also cognate with “ukha“), which might be an underreported source of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.

“Red horseradish” (created by mixing horseradish with beets, because Russians, as previously reported, absolutely cannot abide with anything remotely spicy) is often used as a condiment for kholodets, which doesn’t in any way mitigate its worst qualities. There simply isn’t any way to explain, excuse or contextualize kholodets to make it in any way acceptable or even tolerable for modern-day humanity.

Yet a great portion of the Russian population loves it violently and will not dream of setting a holiday table without the squishy gelatinous mess of a poor animal’s wasted life. Is there any wonder that Stalin, who murdered millions of innocent people and led the country to easily the most disastrously Pyrrhic victory in the history of warfare, remains Russia’s most popular historical figure?

Salo

Every nation has its own quintessential, “for my mouth only” food. Something it holds near and dear to its heart but that would gross out anyone else on earth. Such is the tale of the Scandinavian lutefisk, for example, or the American peanut butter. Kholodets could be that food for Russians, though it is far too divisive and controversial in its own country to be a national dish.

But in Ukraine, there is no question about the country’s culinary symbol, its own esoteric and proprietary food essential for self-identity and sovereignty of the nation. In Ukraine, such food is salo. While borscht, (as discussed in Part 1), the king of Ukrainian foods, has been successfully appropriated by Russians, salo remains a nation-defining creation that draws as stark a contrast between Russians and Ukrainians as deference to authoritarian power.

Salo means so much more for Ukraine than merely a favorite snack or the best accompaniment to horylka (the country’s distilled alcoholic beverage of choice). In fact, it has become such a symbol of the country that Russians, who have previously thought nothing of incorporating salo into their own drinking ritual, have now relegated it to the realm of a guilty pleasure. Salo is one of the most nationalistic foods and the very act of consuming it can be considered a pointed political statement.

It is also an edible stereotype and a cultural stigma.

For Russians, resentful of Ukraine’s strive for independence and desire to become closer aligned with the West, salo is a symbol of the nation’s treachery, greediness and disdainful materialism. “Quiet is the Ukrainian night”, goes a Russian joke, quoting a poem by Alexander Pushkin before veering off into a slur: “But let’s hide the salo anyway!” To any Russian, this instantly conjures an image of a greedy, possessive, gluttonous Ukie, so unlike the self-imagined generous Russian soul.

What is salo? Salo is simply bacon without the inconvenience of actual meat. Or actual cooking. It is pure pork fat, salted or smoked, often spiced (Ukrainians, as noted before, do not share Russians’ incapacitating fear of spices) or stuffed with garlic. It’s often cut into slices and eaten with black bread as an open-faced sandwich or simply forked into one’s mouth on its own.

In the past, when portions of Ukraine were occupied by the Turks or Tatars, salo served as the source of national identity for the locals, the symbol of their refusal to adapt to the norms of the Muslims.

The World Health Organization lists salo among the foods it absolutely does not recommend for human consumption, stopping just short of shouting, “YOU ARE BASICALLY BOMBING YOUR SYSTEM WITH PURE CHOLESTEROL, PEOPLE! FUCKING STAAAAHP!”, but Ukrainians have several words for the human orifice into which they would like to see the WHO stick their opinion. Ironically, this very attitude is exactly what makes the ties between Ukraine and Russia so hard to break and Ukraine’s quest for Westernization so fraught with enormous difficulties.

Coming next time: Take a deep breath and plunge into the world of Russia’s drinking culture. Your stereotypes will not survive.