Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (13 page)

Looking back, ever-dissident Mom wavers about the metro, one minute gushing, the next bashing it as vile propaganda.

But about the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition she is unequivocal.

“In September 1939, at six years of age,” she says, “I saw earthly paradise!”

On a crisp autumn morning in the northern part of Moscow, young Larisa and her family strolled into Eden through monumental entry arches crowned by Vera Mukhina’s triumphant sculpture
The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman
. They passed into a wide alley of dancing fountains and on toward an eighty-foot statue of Stalin. Stakhanovite growers told them tales of their achievements in the Sugarbeet Pavilion. At the marbled courtyard of the star-shaped Uzbekistan Pavilion, dark, round-faced women with myriad braids flowing from their embroidered skullcaps dispensed green tea and puffy round breads. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Tatars! Never had Mother suspected that such a riot of physiognomies and ethnic costumes existed.

Designed as a microcosm of the Soviet Empire’s glories, the Exhibition’s sprawling six hundred acres showcased exotic USSR republics and feats in practically every agricultural realm from dairy farming to rabbit breeding. The republics’ pavilions were fabulously decorated in “native” styles—“national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin, Father of All Nations, prescribed. Inside Armenia’s pink limestone edifice Mom rushed over to a giant aquarium where mountain trout nosed and flitted. At Georgia’s Orientalist headquarters, she and Yulia brazenly grabbed at tangerines on a low branch in a subtropical garden where persimmon trees flowered and palms swayed. Soon it all became one dazzling blur. Model socialist hen eggs. Pink prizewinning pigs. Everything more beautiful, more “real” than life. The mini-fields sprouted perfect rye, wheat, and barley. Mom recalled her bullying pal Ninka’s favorite song:
“We were born to turn fairy tale into reality.”
A very true song, thought Mom, tonguing the chocolate shell off her Eskimo pie as they toured the mini-kolkhoz replete with a culture club and a maternity ward.

My poor dissident mother: in moments of candor she admits to this day that her vision of ideal love is walking arm in arm amid the
splendiferous gardens of the Georgia Pavilion. But what inflamed her imagination the most was the food. If she closes her eyes, she claims to smell the musky striped
adjui
melons at the Uzbek Pavilion; taste the crunch of red Kazakh apples that were sometimes the size of those Uzbek melons—thank you, Grandpa Michurin, the Soviet miracle plant breeder whose motto was “We cannot wait for favors from Nature; our task is to take them from her.”

It was as if my mother had discovered a world beyond the universe of parades and blaring loudspeakers and institutional smells. The discovery sparked a fascination with food that has animated her all her life.

“Finish your bouillon. Have another kotleta.” Liza’s admonitions now sounded inviting, caressing. They whispered to Mom of a different, far more intimate happiness than Comrade Stalin’s collective ideals. And when Naum was at the table, life seemed particularly cheerful. With him there, Liza reached with special abandon into the box hung outside their window—Stalin-era refrigeration—for their
nomenklatura
food parcels wrapped in blue paper.

Out came a rosy bologna called Doctor’s Kolbasa. Or sosiski, Mom’s favorite frankfurters. Boiled taut, they squirted salty juice into your mouth when you bit into them, and they tasted particularly good with sweet gray-green peas from a can. Stores didn’t usually carry those cans. For them Mom and Liza had to trudge to an unmarked depot guarded by an unsmiling man. Naum was “attached” to such a depot store—as were many Moscow bigwigs. The babushka working the lift, on the other hand, wasn’t attached. Mom could tell this from her sad lunch of rotten-smelling boiled eggs sprinkled with salt she kept in little foldings of
Pravda
.

When visitors came, Liza made fish suspended in glistening aspic and canapes with frilly mayonnaise borders. The guests—men in dressy naval suits, women with bright red lips—brought with them the crisp fall air and candies with names like Happy Childhood and Soviet North Pole. A momentous event was the gift of a dinner service with golden borders around tiny pink flowers, replacing their mismatched chipped plates and cups. The same high-ranking naval officer who brought the service gave Liza a book.

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
was hefty, with a somber parsley-green cover. Opening it, Mom gasped at the trove of fantastical photos … of tables crowded with silver and crystal, of platters of beef decorated with tomato rosettes, of boxes of chocolates and wedges of frilly cake posed amid elaborate tea sets. The images roused the same euphoria Mom had felt at the agricultural exhibition. They conjured up
skatert’ samobranka
, an enchanted tablecloth from a Russian folk fairy tale that covered itself with food at the snap of a finger. Mom thought again about Ninka’s song. Liza could even turn this fairy tale into reality, it seemed. She said the book contained recipes, and the dinner sets pictured were identical to the new one they’d been given.

Fish. Juices.
Konservi
(conserves). One day Mom shocked Liza by announcing that she could now read the words in the book. And the book, and the labels of the packaged foods in their house—many of these delicious things often contained an exotic word:
Mi-ko-yan
. Was it a kind of sosiski? Or perhaps kotleti—not the uninspired homemade meat patties, but the trim store-bought ones that fried up to a fabulous greasy crunch. “Mi-ko-yan,” said Mom to herself when Liza was cooking a dinner for guests, and scrupulously comparing her table setting to the photographs in the parsley-green book. In those moments life seemed good to my mother. Yes, entirely good.

Mikoyan—first name Anastas, patronymic Ivanovich—was a petite Bolshevik from Armenia with a hawk nose angling over a mustache trimmer and more dapper than that of his fellow son of the Caucasus, Stalin. His gait was quick and determined, his gaze unsettlingly sharp. But petitioners in his office would on occasion be offered an orange. Fellow Kremlinites also knew that Anastas Ivanovich grew an exotic, some might say extravagant vegetable called asparagus at his dacha. Anastas Mikoyan was the
narkom
(people’s commissar) of the Soviet food industry. If writers were “engineers of the human soul” (per Comrade Stalin), then Mikoyan was the engineer of the Soviet palate and gullet.

Three years before Mom got hooked on sosiski made by the Mikoyan Meat Processing Plant and opened the green cookbook he’d sponsored, the
narkom
had his suitcases packed for a Crimean vacation. It was a holiday he’d long promised his wife, Ashkhen, and their five sons. He dropped by the Kremlin to say goodbye to his boss and old comrade, whom he addressed with ty, the familiar intimate form of “you.”

“Why don’t you go instead to America,” Stalin proposed unexpectedly. “It, too, will be a pleasant vacation; besides, we need to research the American food industry. The best of what you discover,” he declared, “we’ll transplant here.”

Mikoyan gauged the Supreme Leader’s mood: the proposal was impromptu but serious. Even so, he demurred: “I’ve promised Ashkhen a holiday.” Mikoyan was famously family-minded.

Stalin must have been in good spirits.

“Take Ashkhen with you,” he suggested.

Who knows how Soviet food would have tasted had Stalin not allowed the
narkom’s
wife to join her husband. Had the Mikoyans sunned themselves on the Black Sea instead.

One wonders too how the Armenian managed for so long to retain Stalin’s favor while other Politburo members were “liquidated” or saw their wives off to the gulags. “Anastas seems more interested in cheese varieties than in Marxism and Leninism,” Stalin would quip without reproach. Perhaps this escape into the world of sosiski, kolbasa, and condensed milk was Mikoyan’s secret of survival. Formerly ascetic in the old Bolshevik manner, Stalin by now was developing quite a palate himself.

Mikoyan and his foodie squad landed in New York on the SS
Normandie
on a sweltering August morning in 1936. In their stopover in Germany they had drawn giggles with their identical new “European-style” outfits. For two months the Soviet expedition covered 12,000 miles of America by car and train, coast to coast. They toured fish, ice cream, and frozen fruit plants. They inspected production of mayonnaise, beer, and “inflated seeds” (Mikoyan-speak for popcorn). They studied corrugated cardboard and metal jar lids. Wisconsin dairies, Chicago slaughterhouses, California fruit farms—not exactly the holiday
Ashkhen had been promised. They ate intently at self-service cafeterias. (“Here,” noted Mikoyan, “was a format born out of the bowels of capitalism but most suited to communism.”) They studied Macy’s display strategies—models for the trendsetting department stores that would emerge in Moscow by the end of the decade.

In Detroit, Henry Ford told Mikoyan not to waste time on meat production. “Meat’s bad for you,” he insisted. Soviet workers should eat vegetables, soy products, and fruit. The Armenian
narkom
found Ford most peculiar.

Urbane but unsmiling, Mikoyan could barely restrain himself in his rather dull late-life memoirs from gushing about the wonders of his American trip. Here was the efficient industrialized society for Stalinist Russia to emulate. Was it flash freezing or mechanized cow milking (take
that
, Stakhanovite milkmaids) that impressed him more? Maybe the fruit juices? True, Russia didn’t have enough oranges, but Mikoyan dreamed of turning tomato juice into a Soviet national drink. (Mission accomplished: in my school days I gagged on the red stuff.) The ever-practical
narkom
showed no ideological qualms about adopting techniques and mass standardization from the capitalist West. These were the internationalist Soviet thirties, before World War II unleashed Stalinist xenophobia. Unlike evil, devious Britain, the United States was considered a semifriendly competitor—though having American relatives could still land you in the gulag.

Perhaps what struck Mikoyan most was the American guy at a stainless-steel griddle who swiftly cooked a curious-looking kotleta, which he inserted into a split white bun, then flourished with pickles and dabs of red sauce. “For a busy man it is very convenient,” marveled Mikoyan. Didn’t Soviet workers deserve this efficient, cheap, filling snack on their parades, their outings to Parks of Culture and Relaxation?

Mikoyan plunked down Stalin-approved scarce hard currency for twenty-two American hamburger grills, with the capacity to turn out two million orders a day. Burger production launched in select major cities, to some acclaim. But World War II intervened; the bun got lost in the shuffle. Soviet food planning settled instead for a take-out kotleta, unsandwiched.

“So that’s it?” I gasped, reading Mikoyan’s memoirs.

“So that’s it?” gasped Mother when I passed her the book.

Our mythic all-Soviet store-bought kotleta—the lump-in-the-throat nostalgic treat from five generations of childhoods.
That’s
what it was? An ersatz burger that mislaid its bun? Mikoyan’s account of the origins of Soviet ice cream further wounded what was left of my food patriotism.
Morozhennoye
—our national pride? The hard-as-rock
plombir
with its seductive cream rosette I licked at thirty below zero? The Eskimos on a stick from Mom’s childhood outings? Yup, all the result of Yankee technology, imported by Mikoyan. The savvy Armenian even coveted Coca-Cola but couldn’t wangle the syrup recipe. As for sosiski and kolbasa, those other ur-Soviet food icons … they were German sausages that, in Mikoyan’s words, “changed their citizenship.” So much for our ideologically charged native madeleines.

Mikoyan returned from America loaded with samples, information, and brand-new wardrobes for himself and his wife. The Mickey Mouse pens he carried home for his sons were promptly stolen at the boys’ school for Politburo offspring.

Given Russia’s still rudimentary consumer conditions, the
narkom
was able to introduce a surprising number of American novelties—from mass-produced ice cream (hitherto made by hand) to
kornfleks
to the concept of prepackaged foods. A 1937 newspaper ad even urged Soviets to embrace a “spicy aromatic condiment” that “every American housewife keeps in her cupboard.” Ketchup! Occasionally Stalin objected. Russian winters were long, he said, and there was no need to produce the GE-style home fridges that Mikoyan wanted. What’s more, heavy-industry factories were preoccupied with defense orders. So until the end of the war Soviets made do with a box outside the window.

Stalin took great personal interest in Mikoyan’s business. The Leader took great personal interest in many things. When he wasn’t busy signing execution orders or censoring books or screening
Volga-Volga
, the Standardbearer of Communism opined on fish (“Why don’t we sell live fish like they did in the old days?”) or Soviet champagne. A fan of sweet bubbles, he wanted to ban brut production wholesale, but here Mikoyan held firm. Suds? Indeed. Mikoyan recalls how with his bloodthirsty
henchmen Molotov and Kaganovich, Stalin fingered, sniffed, and critiqued trial soap bars, deciding which should go into production. “Our comrade Stalin has a boundless resource of wisdom,” gushed Mikoyan of the soap venture. Clearly, the bathing habits of
Homo sovieticus
were a matter of great national concern.