There is one question any Westerner who comes into a more than passing acquaintance with Russian food will invariably ask. That question is, of course, “Is there anything you guys won’t pickle?” The answer to that question is “No.” There is nothing a determined Russian connoisseur will not attempt to conserve in salty brine. Nothing at all. Zero things. Next question, hypothetical Westerner.
“No, seriously. I mean, there must be SOME things, right?”
“No. Not a damn thing. We pickle everything.”
“OK, I understand the hyperbole here…”
“No hyperbole. Literal truth.”
“But, come on! There are things such as fruit, you know!”
“We pickle fruit.”
“Fruit? Are you guys high?”
“We pickle fruit.”
“OK, that is disturbing. But, fine, there are things that simply aren’t meant to be pickled.”
“There are no such things.”
“I mean, potatoes and stuff…”
“We pickle potatoes.”
“Motherfucker, what kind of amoral beasts are you!”
“We also pickle beets.”
“Fuck, man, seriously? What are you gonna say next, that you pickle soup?”
“We pickle soup.”
“No, you don’t.”
“We eat soups made entirely out of pickled ingredients.”
“Do you people even cast shadows?”
The story of the Russian infatuation with pickling is simple and requires no delving into the sordid depths of our history and philosophy, like the previous entry on booze did. Winters are notoriously harsh and hungry in our vast emptiness, even in the modern days, and food preservation is a matter of survival, which is particularly true of vitamin-rich foods such as fruit and vegetables. Since spices do not grow in Russia, and terrify the locals besides (more on that in the next post), preserving foods in a salty brine was the only way to make sure Grandpa could still savor the magic taste of rutabaga before expiring of frostbite in December at the ancient age of 46.
Since our winters haven’t gotten any milder, and food shortages have persisted until very late in the XX century, pickling has never really gone out of fashion. In fact, it has become so ingrained in national cuisine, and national psyche, that pickled foods have acquired a veneer of state symbols. This is why the assertion that Russians pickle everything with no regard for decency is never disputed and readily embraced. We do. Or try to. And nobody can stop us.
Cucumber, His Briny Majesty
Americans are known to enjoy a pickled cucumber, too. In fact, they simply call it “the pickle”, implying that it’s the only food worth preserving in brine, which is incredible narrow-mindedness from where we sit. But we share their enthusiasm for the cuke, even if we think that the American conviction that it should be sliced thinly and put on sandwiches is rather adorable.
In fact, you will almost never see Russians putting pickles on their sandwiches. Russian sandwiches, which we might explore at a later time, save no place for any vegetation whatsoever: with the possible exception of green onions, they are purely the abode of fats and proteins. You can’t really say you know Russian culture until you have spread butter on your single slice of bread and topped it with cheese and smoked sausage.
As for the Russian pickle, when it’s not the star of a festive holiday salad, it is consumed as is, right out of the jar, by taking large, crunchy bites in between shots of vodka. In fact, the pickle’s function as a vodka chaser is so ubiquitous that it has become an inseparable attribute of every single Russian drinking stereotype. The consummate Russian binge must include a jar of pickles to have any pretension on civility.
It pains me to say this, but pickles have created yet another Russian culinary schism, which is just as bitter and partisan as the Olivier Wars (which, ironically, are also fought over the usage of pickles). The source of conflict here is between the Solyeny and the Malosolny parties. The latter defends the method of pickling (literally, “lightly salted”) that calls for a short marinating period, which results in a crunchy but entirely underwhelming product sporting a very mild, unconvincing taste with but a hint of brininess, stuck in sad, inadequate, watery limbo between pickled and fresh. It is apparently meant for those Russians who consider any suggestion of bold flavor a sinful indulgence and staunchly insist on their food’s being as bland as humanly possible, because life is suffering, joy is a Western corruption, and our way is martyrdom for the glory of the Motherland.
A sane human being will reject the Malosolny heresy with all the vehemence it deserves. It is the goblin of food, a tortured, perverted form of snack, meant to mock and disparage one’s senses and desires. The proper Russian pickle is without a doubt of the Solyeny variety: sharp, acidic, unapologetic, assertive. It invades your mouth and annexes your taste buds. It sets about building a new, better system on your palate, one subservient to the supreme will of the Pickle. It makes all foods equal. It makes vodka bearable, along with the weather, politics and the sad, premature deaths of everyone you have once loved. The Solyeny pickle is the ultimate, innermost idea of Russia itself.
Cabbage, Not Just For a Kraut Anymore
Where the cucumber reigns supreme over the brine world, Russians will readily and happily pickle any and all vegetables, making them an essential winter-time snack or side dish. Few pickled treats are as popular as cabbage, which Russians eat with just as much gusto as the Germans do sauerkraut. In fact, Russians are probably much more enthusiastic about it than any other European nation is, and more inventive with it, too. Germans might indeed love their kraut warm and piled over sausages, and Czechs will consume obscene amounts of it with roast pork and beer, but do either of them bake it into pies? Didn’t think so. Czech and mate, Europe!
Russia’s pickled cabbage is not really sauerkraut, since it consists of several ingredients. Cabbage is usually augmented with chopped carrots and onions, which give it a much more complex taste (cranberries, much prized for their acidity, are added in some Northern regions while the admissibility of apples is a subject of yet another Russian culinary controversy). Peppercorns are often added to the brine. The finished product is usually doused with vegetable oil and eaten as a side dish with meat, porridge or whatever else is on hand.
The very same pickled cabbage serves as a popular filling for pirozhki (small Russian pies), or varenyky (Ukrainian dumplings), as well as the main ingredient in schi (the famed Russian soup also made of sadness) and a variety of stews with meat and potatoes, some of which are not dissimilar to the Polish bigos.
The pickling of tomatoes (we will leave the argument of whether they are fruit or vegetable to the decadent Yanks) is a much more subtle art and thus isn’t nearly as widespread. Nevertheless, pickled tomatoes, when made properly, constitute perhaps the most sublime specimen of preserved food known to man and cannot be ignored in this article.
The uniqueness of the tomato is that it is, by necessity, a soft, squishy and very juicy and squirty pickle, which makes it trickier and messier to eat. It is also much harder to do the right way, as it normally requires a stronger brine, and the tomatoes themselves have to be picked carefully, with bruised or excessively mushy ones mercilessly eschewed.
My grandmother, who grew up in Southern Ukraine and was therefore quite enamored of using spices, had a recipe that was perfection itself. Unlike the squeamish Russian housewives, she would not only add herbs, bay leaf and garlic to the brine, but also copious amounts of green chili pepper, making the finished product the spiciest food I had ever had while living in the Soviet Union.
Eating a pickled tomato is an art in itself. When made properly spicy, it is a small, incandescent ball of acid that throbs and pulsates under the flimsy, semi-detached (and no longer edible) skin. One needs to be very careful when biting into it, as it is prone to squirt a stream of juice that, upon hitting an eye, will burn straight through the cornea. In fact, it might be the only Russian food with an officially calculated half-life.
Pickled beets is a favorite hors d’oeuvre in many Russian regions, and it’s not bad, provided one accepts that in pickled form, the beet tastes absolutely nothing like a beet should. Every hint of mild sweetness endemic to the root vegetable will be obliterated forever, and you will be left with a bright maroon, rubbery, salty snack that either sets up your palate perfectly for some delicious Georgian kebabs or sends you to the bathroom screaming for mouthwash.
My 10-year-old was brave enough to submit himself to the pickled beet challenge and the results were… predictable, considering he’s lived in America all his life.
Yes, We Pickle Fruit
You can argue about tomatoes’ being fruit until you are blue in the face, but it won’t make any difference to us, since we do not flinch at pickling fruit either. The results are controversial to say the least and rarely appreciated far beyond the alcoholic culture. Luckily, as the said culture encompasses a huge percentage of Russian males, it means that pickled fruits do enjoy a rather wide popularity. This is rather unfortunate, because the image below probably belongs in a museum of war crime.
Why would anyone do this to an innocent apple? I don’t know. Why would we have murderous maniacs rule us throughout our history? Russia is a difficult place to understand, man.
Apples, everyone should agree, are at their best when firm, fresh, crispy, bursting with a sweet and sour taste. They also do a commendable job while baked into pies. But anyone who’d think it’s a good idea to hold them in brine for a few months in order to “enjoy” them salty, shriveled and mushy must be one of those people who are best isolated from all living and vulnerable things for society’s safety.
Pickled apples are usually called mochenye yabloki, or “wet apples” but “urine apples” is just as valid a translation linguistically and much more valid philosophically. They are sought by people whose brain matter has been mostly replaced by vodka as a good accompaniment for their favorite activity.
For those of you who don’t want to actually taste it to find out for yourself, just imagine an apple injected with the piss of a demon who has been fed nothing but human misery for a month. It is what apples become in apple hell, where only the most sinful apples go after they die. It is only a marginally better way to eat an apple than digging its fragments out of the excrement of a pig. Yet don’t be surprised if you find Russian housewives who claim there is nothing better on a lazy winter afternoon than biting into the sickly, toxic flesh of the mutant apple.
I guess you need to live through a millennium of horror that is Russian history to understand…
But even this felony pales in comparison to the abomination that is pickled watermelon.
It truly isn’t worth it to even contemplate what lurks in the souls of monsters who have thought up this outrage, but it exists, and people must be warned. Watermelons are pickled in Russia either in slices or whole, in barrels, and it is best not to think about the context in which they might be consumed. Though, if one had to guess…
A Vodka-Driven Culture
As has been hinted throughout this post, Russia’s propensity for consuming unhealthy amounts of strong liquor is a major reason for the popularity of pickled foods, as they are a perfect zakuski (alcohol chasers), thought to prevent quick intoxication. Russians also believe in medicinal qualities of pickle brine and are known to drink it, by the glass, to cure hangover.
Getting rid of the aftereffects of a hard night’s partying is apparently a good enough reason to consume industrial amounts of sodium, but since you are already well on the way to kill your liver by the age of 50, why draw the line at kidneys, right?
In fairness, the brine isn’t the most popular hangover cure, as most Russians prefer to tackle the “morning issues” with, well, more alcohol. A quick shot is said to be the most effective medicine, as well as the fastest and most direct route to alcoholism. But liver failure is basically a ho-hum occurrence in a life of a Russian male, so no worries.
Likewise, several pickled foods, such as mushrooms, are specifically designed to be consumed with vodka and are scarcely imaginable in any other context. Russians, it must be said, are great connoisseurs of mushrooms and will tell you at the drop of an intoxicated carcass which kinds are best for pickling (can’t go wrong with milk-caps) and which must be dried, fried or marinated.
It is safe to say that if we took as scientific an approach to government or, say, road-building as we take to pickling and vodka consumption, Russia would have been a mega-sized Switzerland by now. But… priorities, man.
Coming next time, we explore the ways Russians deal with their culinary Kryptonite (anything remotely spicy) and their bizarre and unhealthy obsession with a certain herb.
My mother is 3rd generation Russian Canadian. She is 84. This year she put down 55 jars of pickles. Mostly cuqs but she doesn’t limit herself to them. There is always a gallon of pickled mushrooms in the fridge and a vat of pickled cabbage downstairs. My daughter in law recently reached out to Baba for some canning advice. Baba was more than happy to offer general canning tips but said “canning is one thing, but when you start pickling, now that’s when the fun begins!”