It is not a secret that Russia’s relationship with the rest of the world is… complicated. In fact, Russia struggles to explain its own place in it to this day. It definitely isn’t Europe, though it kind of wants to be liked by it. It probably isn’t Asia, though it goes about its business in a way not dissimilar to Asiatic empires of past and present. It claims to dismiss America but is utterly obsessed with it. It tends to simultaneously self-aggrandize and self-deprecate. Basically, Russia is a confused teenage girl who hates everyone and wants to be loved.
But, if there is one country that Russia would be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to, it’s undoubtedly France, the object of its two-and-a-half-centuries-long fascination. It’s all down to Catherine the Great, you see. You may know her as the crazy old lady who fucked a horse (she didn’t, nor did she need to, what with a veritable stable of human men at her disposal), but she was quite a fan of the Enlightenment in her younger days and famously was a correspondent of Voltaire. It was Catherine who had introduced the love of all things French to the Russian nobility, which not even the French Revolution or Napoleon’s invasion could sully.
High-society Russians viewed France as the epitome of civilization and tried to emulate it in any way they could. The ability to converse in Parisian French was absolutely essential for any Russian noble in the XIX century, sometimes to the virtual exclusion of their native language. In Pushkin’s masterpiece poem Eugene Onegin, one of the main characters, a well-bred young Russian lady, can barely speak Russian and isn’t able to read or write in it at all, only knowing how to properly communicate in the language of Voltaire. A portion of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is written in French, since the characters’ conversations in polite company would necessarily be had, at least in part, in that language.
Strangely, even the fall of the Romanovs and the advent of the Soviet Union weren’t able to totally excise the obsession with France from the Russian psyche. Alexandre Dumas was the Soviet children’s favorite author, French films and French movie stars were iconic in post-WWII Soviet Union, we even pronounced certain non-French names (such as Picasso, for instance) in the French style, with the accent on the last syllable, because it sounded more posh to us this way. We fucking loved France. It’s good France had no idea, because if it did, it would have probably surrendered.
The Mayo Empire
But nowhere did our love of France manifest itself more violently and senselessly than in our food. One can honestly say that while Emperor Napoleon utterly failed to conquer Russia, the later attempt by Marshal Mayonnaise was an unequivocal success. It was swift, ruthless and it swept the country from the Baltic to the Pacific, sparing nothing and leaving no survivors in its wake. Between its first introduction into the Soviet cuisine in the 1930s and the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the foods Soviet citizens did not add mayonnaise to would become a tiny, oppressed minority.
Actually, it’s more disturbing than you can possibly imagine. Listen to me, oh mortals. Listen and tremble. We put mayonnaise into our soup. No. Do not look away. Let our example be a warning to you all. Into our fucking soup. It happens. People do this*. If you need a moment, go ahead and take it. I will understand.
Ironically, though, Russians borrowed this most French of all sauces not from the French but from the Americans! It is commonly known that mayonnaise was introduced to the Soviets by Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin’s trade minister, after the former’s trip to the United States in the 1930s. Some think it was one of the most horrible crimes of Stalinism. Mikoyan, though, was merely doing his job. The wily minister was under orders to bring something from America that could be easily reproduced in the USSR and that could offer something new to the palates of the masses, communistically gnawing on turnips and black bread since the glorious triumph of the proletariat.
Mikoyan brought back several exotic American foods such as ice cream and hamburgers, and some of the innovations he borrowed had revolutionized the Soviet food industry, but nothing did it to such an extent as the sperm-like sauce of French origin. Mikoyan correctly saw that mayonnaise was cheap and easy to produce, could be made from ingredients readily available in Russia, would go well with root vegetables which at the time constituted about 100% of Russia’s non-bread-and-vodka diet, and had mild enough taste to not excite Comrade Stalin’s obedient subjects to a dangerous degree.
The innovation had spread faster than a brush fire, which may have had something to do with Mikoyan’s also introducing the purely American concept of mass advertising to the Soviet economy. It was he, for example, who came up with the slogan I have mentioned in Part 1, about ketchup being a “spicy American condiment.”
In the end, though, the American connection didn’t resonate with Russians. Anything and everything fancy had to be French. This is why the most popular brand of Soviet-made mayo was called “Provencal”, even though it had zero things to do with Provence and probably wouldn’t even be recognized as food there. We love, love, love giving our dishes French names. Thus, mashed potatoes are always referred to as “potato puree” in Russia and deep-fried potatoes as “potatoes in friteur” and French fries as “kartoshka-frites”, and non-potato dishes as “what the fuck is this?”
This is also why all three foods I will profile today have French names, and two of them prominently feature mayonnaise.
Olivier
One of the future Russia Explaining posts, not on the subject of food, must surely talk about the Russian tradition of celebrating the New Year, our only major national holiday that is literally holy to each and every person. Replacing the austere Orthodox Christmas, punctuated by fasting and church services, with the gluttonous, drunk, secular, unifying and outrageously joyful New Year was one of the things the Soviets had done right, and even the recent return of fundamentalist Christianity to Russia hasn’t been able to stamp the beloved tradition out.
And the lynchpin, the rock, the unbreakable foundation of the festivity is Olivier salad, France’s truly magnificent, endlessly generous gift to absolutely nobody. Because France has zero things to do with it.
Here is the deal about the Olivier (or “oliv’ye”, to use the proper Russian transliteration). It actually did exist in Czarist Russia, was invented by a Belgian chef (we are also not immune from misinterpreting Belgians as French) and was served, in multiple variants, in high-class restaurants. Upon visiting the Chelyabinsk history museum last year, I even saw a transcript of a XIX century recipe. It’s still my most vivid and scandalized memory of Chelyabinsk, a city which was recently struck by an actual goddamn meteor. Apparently, the Czarist Olivier contained grouse (fucking grouse!), sturgeon (what?!), veal tongue (motherfucking veal tongue!), crayfish tails (you gotta be shitting me!), smoked duck (for the love of Marx!) and a special sauce the ingredients of which were a closely guarded secret that died with the Romanovs. It was supposed to have contained vinegar, Provence olive oil and mustard.
Is there any doubt anymore that the Russian Empire was doomed to collapse? I mean, come on! That ingredients list reads like a perfectly articulated “fuck you” to 99% of the country.
Needless to say, the October Revolution had buried both the original Olivier and everyone who had ever tasted it. But not the memory of such a thing’s existing, however. If only that memory extended to little more than “I guess they used to take whatever shit they had lying around the pantry, chop it up and mix it with some kind of sour cream or something.” It’s little wonder nobody was in a hurry to recreate it. The introduction of industrially produced mayo to the Soviet cuisine changed the ballgame drastically.
The Soviet-style Olivier, dating to the 1950s, is an extremely proletarian creation. Even though literally any solid food can be found in one version or another, the most usual ingredients include potatoes, sausage, pickles, potatoes, carrots, canned peas, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes and potatoes. The inclusion of sausage (usually, “Doktorskaya”, the Soviet version of bologna) gave folks an excuse to occasionally refer to Olivier as “the meat salad”, though in many big-city families it was considered haute couture to replace it with shredded boiled chicken breast.
An enormous struggle exists to this day between two extremely adversarial factions in Russia: the proponents of using pickles in Olivier versus the schismatics who insist on fresh cucumbers. The Pickle Party constitutes a healthy majority (Bolsheviks, if you will) and counts yours truly amongst its faithful members. My former mother-in-law, an otherwise perfectly good cook, was a staunch defender of the Fresh Cucumber Heresy, which caused me no small amount of consternation back in the day. The truth is, fresh cucumbers, which taste like an existential void, add nothing to the Olivier symphony, while the delightfully briny Russian pickle (which certainly deserves its own post) bursts with the kind of no-nonsense flavor and vigorous crunch that just might make you think that Russia’s historical endeavor does have an ultimate point to it after all.
But what binds all of these strangely assembled ingredients together, what turns this Soviet communal apartment of a meal into a Soviet ballet company is mayonnaise. Specifically, the Soviet brand Provencal, with its yellowish color, acidic taste and not a trace of Provence olive oil (only the hardcore Soviet sunflower seed oil would do). It is mixed into the bowl in generous quantities, binding the desperate and befuddled potatoes, peas, carrots, eggs, pickles and the mistake of nature that is Doktorskaya to their common fate.
The point at which mayonnaise makes contact with the dish can be easily compared to the second coming. All sins are forgiven, all mistakes are hidden away. Even if you are one of those Russian wives who feloniously added chopped apples. Even if you are the iconoclast who decided to roll with imitation crabmeat. Hell, even your fresh cucumbers, the plagued orphans of food, will be grudgingly welcome. All are united in this celebration, this spiritual rebirth of a dish.
Olivier isn’t eaten exclusively on New Year’s eve. It can be eaten any time, on any occasion when you feel like reminding yourself that not everything about this world is fucked up. But New Year is legally not allowed to commence in Russia until at least one trough of Olivier per unit of guest-folk is consumed. And it never, ever fails to commence.
“French-Style” Meat
France might not be familiar with our Olivier, but if it were, it probably would have been amused at worst and receptive at best. “French-style meat”, however, could easily prompt a lawsuit for libel, which the Fifth Republic would have been certain to win.
“French-style meat” is one of the most telling symbols of what Russians dub with the Marxist term Lumpenproletariat, the ragged unwashed masses of the Soviet provinces, also known as “Homo Sovieticus” or by the derogatory “Sovok.” This is the ultimate hearty “coming home from the factory shift to have my well-earned half a liter of vodka before I commence with the wife-beating” meal. “French-style meat” would’ve been blue collar if Russian blue collar types actually wore collars of any kind.
Photo: Soviet film “The Gentlemen of Fortune”
In fact, the quality of “French-style meat”, as is its fitness to be consumed by fully evolved humans, wholly depends on the skill of the cook, and the dish’s main crime against humanity is its name. Had it been dubbed “Mordovian-style meat”, for instance, few people would have objected. But it is the fact that it brazenly appropriates the good name of French cuisine, with which it bears as much resemblance as with the Moon landing, that raises the ire of the educated types.
“French-style meat” is as uncomplicated and brutal as the Great Purge of 1937. Some kind of beef (whatever you have available, really), potatoes, onions, carrots and cheese are thrown into a baking pan and deluged in mayonnaise. The resulting mass grave is then put into the oven. The results are moodily consumed, ideally with generous helpings of vodka.
Not helping the FSM’s reputation is that it is normally prepared by people of limited means and non-existent sophistication who will often not think twice before throwing frozen, unthawed beef into the pan, resulting in a rubbery mess swimming in its own muck.
By far the worst addition to FSM is mayonnaise which is only there because the Lumpenproletariat doesn’t know any other sauces. Mayo, of course, was never meant to be baked. Once in the oven, it will usually excrete oily liquid and congregate beneath it into dardruffy gunk. Cheese is probably meant to mask this chemical process as it binds the mayo into an artery-clogging mess that in turn envelops the meat and potatoes. A cook with great natural skill can turn it into an edible dish, particularly by not overcooking meat and skipping on the mayo, but it will never be exonerated from its undeniable contribution to the current life expectancy numbers of the Russian males.
One is left to wonder whether mayonnaise, the culprit in the unfortunate naming of the dish, was ever meant to stand in for bechamel, but at this point in the tragedy, it is surely too late for such academic questions.
Vinegret
From the good and the bad, we move on to the ugly. Vinegret, Russia’s ultimate fallback salad, has two things working against it from the get-go: the name and the look.
The name is impossible to explain because it is incredibly random and utterly inappropriate, akin to naming your dog The Fifth Annual Dentists Convention of Tacoma, WA. It is the Russian pronunciation of vinaigrette, a French dressing made of olive oil and vinegar. Rest assured, neither olive oil nor vinegar ever come into even the approximate orbit of the Soviet vinegret. In fact, it is a salad with no dressing whatsoever, not even mayonnaise, which by now must surely seem like a bold move.
It is completely baffling why a French name had to be used for this violently un-French concoction, especially since the general idea for vinegret seems to have been borrowed from Scandinavia or the Baltics. In its essence, vinegret is what Olivier goes as on Halloween: a salad of boiled potatoes, carrots, canned peas, pickles and onions with the crucial additions of beets and sauerkraut. Sunflower seed oil is added in lieu of dressing, purely to make the beets slip down the gullet with greater ease.
Some Russian culinary history buffs insist that vinegar was indeed a part of the original recipe, but one would have been hard pressed to see the need for it, what with the pickles and sauerkraut already ruling the roost. Also, an occasional variation will see the addition of meat, sausage or even herring soaked in milk (please, take a moment if you need it), but a great majority of vinegrets consumed in the former USSR is strictly of a vegetarian variety. It is considered a great accompaniment to vodka, but then again, so is everything else, including the very fact of living in Russia.
The presence and dominant position of beets (which color all other ingredients in deep crimson and rule the taste bouquet with an iron Stalinist fist) serve to scare away even the hardiest of foreigners from this quintessential dish. Ex-Soviets, however, appreciate the sweet and briny taste and the garish appearance, in which they justifiably see the reflection of their very soul. The outwardly scary, fraught with internal controversies, utterly misunderstood but immensely deep, vinegret is a culinary force to be reckoned with.
All due apologies to France, however. If you think all of the above was offensive, just wait and see what the Soviet movie industry did to The Three Musketeers.
Coming next time: Mayonnaise and beets join forces, and gain a powerful new ally, as we delve into the depths. Your senses won’t be spared.
*Some people also add mayonnaise to their tea. It’s true. It’s called Delight Tea. There are people like this walking the Earth. Do you still believe in god, America?
You forgot ragu. My French teacher in high school was not impressed when I said that our version of the French “ragout” was completely vegetarian.
This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read, thank you.
What a stupid article.
The Russian fascination with all things French is well summed up in a line from Chekhov’s ‘Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town”: “..Oh how I’d love to be Sera Burnyard! … But what was strange Katya I speak excellent French but I didn’t get a word they were saying. Their French was funny.”