Interview with an Expert

I interviewed Dr. Margaret Peacock, a professor of Russian history at The University of Alabama. She has studied Russia since the Soviet era, and she has visited the country multiple times. We sat down to chat in her office, which was tastefully lined on all sides with tomes of Russian history.

What was your first experience in Russia?

I went to St. Petersburg in the summer of 1992 when I was just finishing my freshman year of college. Back then, the Soviet Union had just collapsed six months earlier, and the place was in total chaos. There was no infrastructure. Even to this day, I’m not sure why my parents allowed me to go, because it was super dangerous.

What did Russian cuisine look like in 1992?

Back then, Russian cuisine was Russian shortage. It was all about making do with what you could get your hands on. Because of the cold climate and the short growing season, the process of getting food and getting enough in Russian history was something that was super all consuming. In some ways, Russian cuisine is similar to Southern cuisine. In America, Southern cuisine is the cuisine of poverty. So it was not a lot of meat, lots and lots of vegetables, particularly root vegetables, so they wouldn’t be affected by frost. Here in the US, of course we have two growing seasons. But here (in the South), it’s all about the meat and three. Lots of veg. It’s exactly the same in Russia except instead of corn–there is a funny Russian story about corn—it’s potatoes and cabbage and beets. Those are the main staple foods. And then its sort of whatever you can get your hands on as far as meats and green vegetables go.

That summer in 1992, there were no grocery stores. One store would sell each type of item. People would come in from the villages and bring food that they would sell out of a basket or a bag that they had brought in from the village and you would go to one person to buy carrots and another person to buy potatoes and another person to buy onions. There would be one meat store. You would stand in a long line up to the counter, and behind the counter, there would be a mountain of meat. Just meat, piled on in a mountain. You would say, “I want to look at that one.” They would show it to you and say “yeah that looks good,” then they would weigh it and write down on a sheet of paper the weight of the meat and the cost of the meat. Then you would take that sheet of paper and stand in another line to the cash register, and eventually you would get to the cash register–where they were still working on abacuses, and this was even in St. Petersburg, not up in the villages, and back then it was still called Leningrad– and then you’d pay.  You’d give them the money. And they’d give you a sheet of paper and the receipt. And then you’d get back in the line you were standing in in the beginning and you would wait in the line until you got to the front, and you’d give them the receipt, and they would hand you your piece of meat. Buying one piece of meat would be an hour process.

It’s all about eating foods that will grow in cold weather and that you can grow cheaply. Perhaps not surprisingly, as a consequence, Russians eat a lot of foods that can be preserved and pickled. You don’t drink a lot of milk. There is a lot of sour cream and a lot of kefir. We have started to drink kefir more in America now, but that has always been a staple food in Russia because it can last longer. It preserves longer. As far as spices go, it’s all dill and salt. They are not down for super hot food unless you go to the southern parts of Russia.

In northern European parts of Russia, it is all relatively plain food. The best parts I think of Russian food are in some ways the parts that are borrowed from the Ukraine or Georgia. Ukraine has stuffed cabbage leaves, chicken Kiev, and Georgia has hachipouri, stuffed cheese breads, eggplant with walnut and pomegranate paste, the brilliant wines from the Caucuses. If you are ever in Moscow, and ask me for a restaurant to eat in, its going to be a Georgian restaurant that I send you to.

Would you say, since there are so many other cuisines that have influenced Russian cuisine, that there is any dish that is 100% Russian?

Yeah, like Borsch? Borsch isn’t Ukrainian? Is it Ukrainian? I would still say that the Russians own borsch. They also can claim schci, a type of cabbage soup. Those two soups are the staples. And then the salads. Russians do salad differently. Russians hate lettuce. They totally don’t get lettuce. Which I understand because I don’t get lettuce either. All Russian salads have mayonnaise. I have a good Russian friend who said that the only two good things that America brought to the world are Jazz and mayonnaise. So salads will always have mayonnaise. It’s like our American egg salad and potato salad, but the mayonnaise is in every salad. If you order salad dressing in Russia, you just get mayonnaise.

You said there was a funny Russian corn story?

Yeah. So during the cold war, after Stalin died in march of 1953, there was a battle for power. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev was in power. He made the declaration that the Soviet Union was going to triple its production of meat and butter in a decade. The way to do that is to have more cows, and the way to feed them is to have more fodder. And the way to get more fodder is to grow corn. Up until then, the Russians only saw corn as something you only feed animals, not something people eat. There is an apocryphal story that the American ambassador in Moscow in 1956 had some Iowa corn transplanted from Iowa to the backyard of the American embassy in Moscow and had it planted so that it looked like there was a full crop of corn growing in his backyard. He then had a huge party. So Khrushchev was at this party and he was invited out back to look at the corn. Khrushchev had been told by agricultural experts for decades that there was no possibility of growing corn in Russia. The growing season and continental climate were not right. But he said, after seeing the corn in the embassy, that if the American embassy is doing it in Moscow, then Russia needs to be doing it. So it’s called the virgin lands program. He started this massive program of committing to cultivating land that had heretofore been left fallow. He dictated that Russians would grow corn in Kazakhstan. At first, the venture looked promising, but eventually, for agriculture infrastructure reasons and climate reasons, it totally failed. It ended up being a massive monetary loss for the Soviet Union. But a joke came out of this. The joke goes that Khrushchev put his entire legacy behind this idea that corn was going to save the Soviet Union. The Russians eventually started to call him the corn guy, a cucurusnik. Eventually, everyone called him the corn guy. Interestingly, now, Russian people love eating corn. Corn gets eaten all the time. Now, Russians love corn.

Are there any other foods that have funny stories or cultural significance?

Ice cream has political and cultural influence. Ice cream is another example of Khrushchev’s mark on Russian cuisine. When Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union, it was decided that a great sign if a country had made it and was prosperous and developed was if ice cream was for sale on every corner. And juice. All kinds of juices. Developed, productive, successful countries had ice cream and juice. So even to this day, there are ice cream stands all over the place. People will eat ice cream even when it is 30 degrees below freezing.

Now Moscow has cuisine from all over the world. It’s amazing. The Mexican food sucks though. They just need more Mexicans. They have Russians trying to do it. You need Mexicans to cook Mexican food, and they don’t have enough of them in Russia. And they don’t do Indian food very well either. They have world class French and Italian chefs and five star Michelin chefs. Now, there is a Starbucks on every corner. Now the cuisine of Russia doesn’t feel much different from Paris or London.

In terms of desserts in Russia, they don’t do moist cake. It’s more like a torte. It’s a lot drier. It’s a lot more flour than moisture. I don’t care for them. I prefer an Italian cake over a Russian torte.

They’ll do something similar to a Russian schnitzel with the pounded out meat and the breading and the frying. And they’ll do cutlets. Beef cutlets and pork cutlets and so on. They also eat a lot of pasta. They eat things like pelmeni. They eat a lot of pelmeni. That’s super common. You eat pelmeni. That is Soviet food, but also pre-soviet. The Russians have been eating pelmeni for ages.

And they eat these things called Sloiki, which is a pastry with meat or fruit inside. Its like a kolache. That’s a fast food. When I lived in Moscow for a year as a Fulbright scholar back in 2005 and 2006, they had these tunnels under the massive 8-lane highways for pedestrians. These tunnels were lined with kiosks on either side. And back in the day, there would be clothing kiosks, music, shoes, clothes, anything you could think of, and sloiki. It would be nice, because you’d realize you were in the middle of going somewhere and realize you hadn’t eaten dinner and you pay the equivalent of 50 cents to get this beautiful hot pastry, and you’s eat that. The lemon ones are the best. But interestingly when I was there last November, you didn’t see them. The tunnels had all been emptied out and sterilized and made clean and empty. The clean tunnels are sort of a product of globalization. Now the tunnels are clean and empty like the ones in Florence.

If someone didn’t know anything about Russian cuisine, is there anything you would tell them to describe it to them?

Russian cuisine is much like Southern cuisine. The beauty of it is in the simplicity of it. You just have to sit in someone’s kitchen and watch them to learn how it’s done. Also just go make a pot of borsch, and then go from there. But I love all of it. I love the way Russians cook carrots. Oh the other thing about Russian food is that, largely because they don’t have such a robust infrastructure for food importation, the foods that you get tend to be way fresher. The chicken doesn’t have that weird traveled smell that chicken has here. Although, when I lived there, there was a lady who sold vegetables from her kiosk, and I bought carrots and onions and potatoes from her in a bag. And when I pulled one of the carrots out, it was the size of my forearm. The nanny that we had hired laughed and said, “that’s a good Chernobyl carrot.” So we laughed and said it was a funny joke, about the eating of the Chernobyl carrot. And we thought it was hilarious and ate the carrot anyway. But I told that story to a friend of mine who was an expert of the history of Chernobyl, and she did not laugh. She was like, “Yeah, you know how many rads you and your children got eating that carrot?”