Purty plemeni. Part 1.

Dining on the train

Communism never proclaimed itself incompatible with fine dining, but the two never learnt to coexist peacefully. The Great October Revolution, the Civil War, Stalin's purges changed the environment to benefit lest gastronomically concerned citizens. The last Russian gourmet was seen in 1930s in a Siberia camp, savoring delicious vitamines-rich beverage made out of pine needles. WWII took care of what was left of the national cuisine. After four years of bread-and-water diet the population wasn’t too picky in its choices. One day I was on the train from California to Illinois escorting my girlfriend's mother, who didn't speak any English. Anna (the name is thoroughly changed to conceal identity) prepared for the trip as a well-traveled Russian, which is to say she packed a bag of Chinese noodles that would keep us stuffed all the way to Chicago. You only needed to add some broiled water to the stock. (Later we learnt that the full board was included in the tickets, but it was later.) Now she asked me to go in the lobby to get some kipyatok (the Russian word for broiling water.) Kipyatok is available for free on the Russian railroads since the Civil War, when it was considered the prime cure from typhus. I had some doubts regarding availability of kipyatok on American trains, because I never heard that typhus was widely available in the US either. I went to the lobby and of course, there was no tank with free kipyatok, only a tank with free coffee.

"Let's go to the dining car and ask for kipyatok" - suggested Anna. I painted a picture of us in the dining car pouring kipyatok into our cups with noodles... Dining car workers dying from laugh... Us making our way back through five or six wobbling cars... "Why don't we just use coffee?" -- I asked out of despair. She agreed momentarily and didn’t even smile. She was born in the year Hitler invaded Russia. I expected caffeinated noodles to be barely eatable, but they were pretty good. Perhaps railroad coffee doesn't have that much coffee in it.

Burda recipes

When in the prenatal stages of perestroika Burda, the woman magazine, penetrated impenetrable Soviet borders, we learnt that thousands of fruits, vegetables, species and other unclassified forms of food exist we never heard about. Burda's recipes were read like fairy tales. "National Geographic" in your kitchen they were. And they had wonderful pictures too! The only problem with these recipes was you couldn't find anything you could actually cook. There was a joke about how you prepare Burda's food. "Read the first line of the recipe. Now read the last line. Skip everything else." It worked all the time. "Broil one liter of water. ... Add some salt according to your taste."

In the same time the Soviet press started to publish more practical recipes of stchi made out of nettle, which plant, unlike cabbage, grown in abundance in any deserted urban park. That was when I started to suspect that social progress in my home country went a bit too far.

This topic shall be further explored in the "Purty plemeni. Part 3" entry.