Encouraged by the response I got to my previous blog on wines, today I decided to expand the topic to a no-less-important component of our daily existence – food. This decision was partially triggered by two seemingly insignificant in terms of climate change and global politics, yet extremely important in terms of my daily existence, events: visiting the Dacha Russian food shop in Muswell Hill and attending a one-day Cordon Bleu cookery course in Indian cuisine. Yet the weightiest argument in favour of the food topic came from the V&A Museum and its ongoing exhibition, ‘Inside the FOOD: Bigger than the Plate’ (I particularly liked the ‘bigger than the plate’ bit, which immediately reminded me of the Vienna Schnitzels served in some Austrian pubs and restaurants). Actually, not so much by the exhibition itself as by the fact that the first 200 visitors had been promised special ‘edible tickets’ made from icing sugar!

Now, I have heard about edible plates, cutlery, even edible dinner tables (not to mention numerous edible erotic items), but never of edible tickets. As a passionate collector of tickets of all kinds, I was keen to get a couple of those for my collection (before they all got eaten), so I hurried to the V&A only to find that all edible tickets had been issued (and probably gobbled up too), with the last one claimed (and, no doubt, consumed on the spot) five minutes prior to my arrival. It was like a hugely belated greeting from the USSR of my youth: from all those endless food queues I had to stand in from early childhood and the countless times when the very last coveted items in stock (be they sausages, butter or deep-frozen chicken drumsticks, imported from the USA and nicknamed Ronald Reagan’s legs) were grabbed by a ferocious, pushy and utterly genderless (have you noticed that queues make people sex-less?) queuer right in front of me.

So, if the aim of that exhibition, according to the ‘Go London’ Newsletter, was to take the “exhibition-goers (sic – VV) through the food cycle from growing to eating”, they have succeeded only partially, having omitted such an essential in some places part of that cycle as queuing for food and not getting it in the end… “We are what we eat,” or so they say in the West. My life in the USSR, however, taught me that at times it is not what you eat but what you DO NOT eat that defines you and shapes your character. 

Here I have to say that in my nearly 30 years in the West, I have progressed from regarding food just as a means of subsistence, in the best of scenarios, and purely as a chaser for strong alcoholic drinks, in an even better one. The Soviet system was very good in maintaining the shaky balance between people’s needs and desires, knowing only too well that keeping the citizens slightly hungry (not starving, for that could inadvertently provoke a riot) was the best guarantee against organised dissent. When already in the West, I came up with the following formula which helped the USSR rulers keep “the population” under control: “Freedom of sausage comes first, freedom of speech follows”. 

It is highly ironic, therefore, that, having escaped from the all-permeating tyranny of the Soviet Union, I almost immediately started feeling pangs of withdrawal and powerful cravings for the starchy and calorie-ridden comfort foods of my childhood, many of which I used to hate while still living there: buckwheat, semolina, black rye bread (particularly when dipped in cod liver oil – considered to be a kind of magic cure all Soviet children were meant to regularly swallow – until both the bread and the oil vanished never to be seen again), Olivier (Russian) Salad, poor man’s (aubergine) caviar, dill-pickled cucumbers, herring, and so on. Occasionally, this craving becomes so powerful that I feel ready to walk (or better to drive) to the end of the Earth to lay my hands (and teeth) on some of the above ‘delikatesi’.

As a popular Russian saying (invented by me) goes: “Taste buds die last: years after nostalgia and a couple of weeks after hope itself.”

Of late, however, one does not have to travel very far to find a decent East European food shop in the UK, particularly in London, even if most of the Russian staples they sell have been produced in … Germany. My latest discovery is Dacha – a small Russian supermarket on the Highgate/Muswell Hill borders in North London. I visited it recently and stocked up on many of my favourite comfort foods, including Napoleon Cake (made in Lithuania) and a large plastic bottle of Kvass.

The latter – a fermented low-alcohol drink made of yeast, water and black Russian bread – was one of my main childhood delights (with alcohol content lower that 1 per cent, it was ok for children to drink, or so we were told). It was one of very few staples which were more or less readily available in the Soviet Union – but only in summer! I remember peeping out of a school window tentatively during a near-fatally boring geometry class on a sunny late-spring morning, hoping to spot a familiar yellow barrel on wheels parked on the street corner. When the barrel would arrive, the whole school population would flock around it during the ‘long’ 20-minute interval. But only those at the front of the queue had any hope to be served by a buxom and burly woman in once-white plastic apron. The barrel had a tap and a primitive glass washer (everyone had to drink from the same four or five glasses, carelessly rinsed between uses), which the woman rarely bothered to involve. The Kvass she was dispensing was so heavily mixed with water that its colour was urine-like yellow, rather than proper dark-brown (no simile suggested), but, for us Soviet school kids, who had never tried Pepsi, Coke or Fanta and had never even heard of absinthe, it was still the most delicious and the most refreshing drink in the world.

Once, in the middle of a particularly hot summer day, the cart with the barrel was hit by a stray lorry (luckily it was during the lesson, so there were no kids queuing). I could see very clearly from the window how the barrel fell to the ground and cracked open on impact, waves of yellow Kvass, with countless fat white worms wriggling in them, flooding the street. But even that was not enough to put us off our favourite drink.

Of course, many of us tried to recreate it at home. The technology of Kvass-making was simple (there was even an opinion that it was discovered by some hapless chap who accidentally drank a several-days-old warm mixture of bread and water and liked the taste). The trickiest task was to use the correct proportions of the components –bread, yeast, water and some aromatic herbs – before leaving the mixture to brew inside the pot-bellied 3-litre glass vessels, in which pickled cucumbers (another product that was rarely in short supply) were sold. The vessels were then covered (not sealed) and left somewhere warm for several days. I would check the progress of Kvass-making several times a day, admiring the bubbles and the soft guttural sounds made by the concoction. I also kept checking fairly frequently if the mixture was ready to drink, to the point that when it finally was (more or less) drinkable there was only half of it left and I was in bed with excruciating stomach ache.

On one occasion, however, I must have overdone it with yeast… as a result, I (and everyone else in our five-storey block of flats) was woken up in the middle of the night by a series of very loud explosions in the area of our tiny kitchen where I kept the bottles with the fermenting Kvass, which were now exploding methodically, one after another. I must have covered them too tightly. Luckily there were only three of them, and, what my grandparents and some other tenants of our block of flats had initially mistook for either an American imperialists’ or a Chinese revisionists’ armed invasion, did not last too long and caused no casualties, if not to count some sleepy kitchen cockroaches engulfed by the brown mini-flood.

Sorry, I seem to have involuntarily switched over to drinks again, so back to foods. I bought the Kvass in the above-mentioned Dacha supermarket with the goal of making one of Russian high-cuisine’s signature dishes – a cold summer soup called okroshka, which I had been craving since leaving Moscow nearly 30 years ago and haven’t tried once.

The technology of okroshka-making is fairly straightforward. You chop any herbs (but mostly fresh dill) and veggies at hand, mix them up and toss into a large bowl, to which you then add meat or sausage, or in case you are a vegetarian – nothing. Top it all off with a large dollop of Smetana (an East-European euphemism for sour cream, often confused with an eponymous Czech composer), add a tablespoon of mustard (English mustard would do very well), flood whatever you’ve got in the bowl so far with Kvass (and I mean flood it!), stir well, season generously, stick in the fridge for several hours to cool down  – and Bob, or rather Boris, is your uncle! And, possibly, your future Prime Minister too, but that is irrelevant…

Sadly, as it often happens with food, or rather with my own complicated relationships with food, by the time I had my okroshka ready and ice-cold, the openly schizophrenic English weather turned back to winter (in June!), and my okroshka had largely lost its attraction: in cold weather you have to eat boiling borscht instead! So it was only natural that I decided to cook something hot and spicy and, with that in mind, joined the one-day ‘Taste of Asia: India’ cooking course at the famous Cordon Bleu culinary academy in Bloomsbury, London.

Well, if you thought that Le Cordon Bleu only stands for the French cuisine, with all its yummy snails and frogs’ legs, you were wrong, because in that respected gourmet academy they run multiple courses in other world cuisines, including Indian (not sure about Soviet cuisine, however – a potentially super-short course that could be reduced to just one word “konchilos!” (“finished!”).

Early on a Saturday morning I joined a group of a dozen or so students, determined to prepare from scratch (or rather from the ingredients provided) a chicken tandoori, a lamb madras, pilau rice, naan bread and (if still hungry) a mint and coriander chutney – all under the expert supervision and guidance of teaching chef Reginald Ioos, who first introduced us to the famous Indian spices, which all had to be toasted to enhance the aroma, and to a peculiar kind of clarified butter, Ghee, which we were to use while cooking.

Among the techniques to be learned was “cooking in a tandoori oven”, of which they had a rather nice specimen at the school. Until then, I had never seen a tandoori oven, let alone cooked in it. The tandoor was just a cylindrical clay pot tapering towards the bottom, where a heat source (charcoal or wood) was placed. To my surprise, naan bread had to be baked on the inside walls of the oven, and when it was the turn of  the tandoori chicken, the chicken – cut neatly into pieces in accordance with another special Cordon Bleu technique – had to be first impaled on a huge skewer, which was then planted into the oven and left there until cooked.

To be honest, I found the above technology a tad too complicated and opted for cooking my chicken (as well as my lamb madras) in the oven of a slightly more familiar state-of-the-art induction cooker, of  which the kitchen we were in had plenty.

In short, it was an inspiring all-day experience, greatly enhanced by the fact that were we allowed (and encouraged) to take everything we cooked home in the specially provided plastic containers. The same evening, we had an Indian feast at the Vitaliev household, with two of my children, helped by my wife and myself, quickly devouring the fruits of my frantic cooking efforts.

The hot and spicy Indian dishes made us all crave some sort of a palate balance, at which point I recalled my once-coveted okroshka in the fridge. The ice-cold Kvass-based soup went down swimmingly after the curries. “Like children to school,” as we used to say in Russia, after downing a particularly smooth shot of vodka…

Encouraged by the response I got to my previous blog on wines, today I decided to expand the topic to a no-less-important component of our daily existence – food. This decision was partially triggered by two seemingly insignificant in terms of climate change and global politics, yet extremely important in terms of my daily existence, events: visiting the Dacha Russian food shop in Muswell Hill and attending a one-day Cordon Bleu cookery course in Indian cuisine. Yet the weightiest argument in favour of the food topic came from the V&A Museum and its ongoing exhibition, ‘Inside the FOOD: Bigger than the Plate’ (I particularly liked the ‘bigger than the plate’ bit, which immediately reminded me of the Vienna Schnitzels served in some Austrian pubs and restaurants). Actually, not so much by the exhibition itself as by the fact that the first 200 visitors had been promised special ‘edible tickets’ made from icing sugar!

Now, I have heard about edible plates, cutlery, even edible dinner tables (not to mention numerous edible erotic items), but never of edible tickets. As a passionate collector of tickets of all kinds, I was keen to get a couple of those for my collection (before they all got eaten), so I hurried to the V&A only to find that all edible tickets had been issued (and probably gobbled up too), with the last one claimed (and, no doubt, consumed on the spot) five minutes prior to my arrival. It was like a hugely belated greeting from the USSR of my youth: from all those endless food queues I had to stand in from early childhood and the countless times when the very last coveted items in stock (be they sausages, butter or deep-frozen chicken drumsticks, imported from the USA and nicknamed Ronald Reagan’s legs) were grabbed by a ferocious, pushy and utterly genderless (have you noticed that queues make people sex-less?) queuer right in front of me.

So, if the aim of that exhibition, according to the ‘Go London’ Newsletter, was to take the “exhibition-goers (sic – VV) through the food cycle from growing to eating”, they have succeeded only partially, having omitted such an essential in some places part of that cycle as queuing for food and not getting it in the end… “We are what we eat,” or so they say in the West. My life in the USSR, however, taught me that at times it is not what you eat but what you DO NOT eat that defines you and shapes your character. 

Here I have to say that in my nearly 30 years in the West, I have progressed from regarding food just as a means of subsistence, in the best of scenarios, and purely as a chaser for strong alcoholic drinks, in an even better one. The Soviet system was very good in maintaining the shaky balance between people’s needs and desires, knowing only too well that keeping the citizens slightly hungry (not starving, for that could inadvertently provoke a riot) was the best guarantee against organised dissent. When already in the West, I came up with the following formula which helped the USSR rulers keep “the population” under control: “Freedom of sausage comes first, freedom of speech follows”. 

It is highly ironic, therefore, that, having escaped from the all-permeating tyranny of the Soviet Union, I almost immediately started feeling pangs of withdrawal and powerful cravings for the starchy and calorie-ridden comfort foods of my childhood, many of which I used to hate while still living there: buckwheat, semolina, black rye bread (particularly when dipped in cod liver oil – considered to be a kind of magic cure all Soviet children were meant to regularly swallow – until both the bread and the oil vanished never to be seen again), Olivier (Russian) Salad, poor man’s (aubergine) caviar, dill-pickled cucumbers, herring, and so on. Occasionally, this craving becomes so powerful that I feel ready to walk (or better to drive) to the end of the Earth to lay my hands (and teeth) on some of the above ‘delikatesi’.

As a popular Russian saying (invented by me) goes: “Taste buds die last: years after nostalgia and a couple of weeks after hope itself.”

Of late, however, one does not have to travel very far to find a decent East European food shop in the UK, particularly in London, even if most of the Russian staples they sell have been produced in … Germany. My latest discovery is Dacha – a small Russian supermarket on the Highgate/Muswell Hill borders in North London. I visited it recently and stocked up on many of my favourite comfort foods, including Napoleon Cake (made in Lithuania) and a large plastic bottle of Kvass.

The latter – a fermented low-alcohol drink made of yeast, water and black Russian bread – was one of my main childhood delights (with alcohol content lower that 1 per cent, it was ok for children to drink, or so we were told). It was one of very few staples which were more or less readily available in the Soviet Union – but only in summer! I remember peeping out of a school window tentatively during a near-fatally boring geometry class on a sunny late-spring morning, hoping to spot a familiar yellow barrel on wheels parked on the street corner. When the barrel would arrive, the whole school population would flock around it during the ‘long’ 20-minute interval. But only those at the front of the queue had any hope to be served by a buxom and burly woman in once-white plastic apron. The barrel had a tap and a primitive glass washer (everyone had to drink from the same four or five glasses, carelessly rinsed between uses), which the woman rarely bothered to involve. The Kvass she was dispensing was so heavily mixed with water that its colour was urine-like yellow, rather than proper dark-brown (no simile suggested), but, for us Soviet school kids, who had never tried Pepsi, Coke or Fanta and had never even heard of absinthe, it was still the most delicious and the most refreshing drink in the world.

Once, in the middle of a particularly hot summer day, the cart with the barrel was hit by a stray lorry (luckily it was during the lesson, so there were no kids queuing). I could see very clearly from the window how the barrel fell to the ground and cracked open on impact, waves of yellow Kvass, with countless fat white worms wriggling in them, flooding the street. But even that was not enough to put us off our favourite drink.

Of course, many of us tried to recreate it at home. The technology of Kvass-making was simple (there was even an opinion that it was discovered by some hapless chap who accidentally drank a several-days-old warm mixture of bread and water and liked the taste). The trickiest task was to use the correct proportions of the components –bread, yeast, water and some aromatic herbs – before leaving the mixture to brew inside the pot-bellied 3-litre glass vessels, in which pickled cucumbers (another product that was rarely in short supply) were sold. The vessels were then covered (not sealed) and left somewhere warm for several days. I would check the progress of Kvass-making several times a day, admiring the bubbles and the soft guttural sounds made by the concoction. I also kept checking fairly frequently if the mixture was ready to drink, to the point that when it finally was (more or less) drinkable there was only half of it left and I was in bed with excruciating stomach ache.

On one occasion, however, I must have overdone it with yeast… as a result, I (and everyone else in our five-storey block of flats) was woken up in the middle of the night by a series of very loud explosions in the area of our tiny kitchen where I kept the bottles with the fermenting Kvass, which were now exploding methodically, one after another. I must have covered them too tightly. Luckily there were only three of them, and, what my grandparents and some other tenants of our block of flats had initially mistook for either an American imperialists’ or a Chinese revisionists’ armed invasion, did not last too long and caused no casualties, if not to count some sleepy kitchen cockroaches engulfed by the brown mini-flood.

Sorry, I seem to have involuntarily switched over to drinks again, so back to foods. I bought the Kvass in the above-mentioned Dacha supermarket with the goal of making one of Russian high-cuisine’s signature dishes – a cold summer soup called okroshka, which I had been craving since leaving Moscow nearly 30 years ago and haven’t tried once.

The technology of okroshka-making is fairly straightforward. You chop any herbs (but mostly fresh dill) and veggies at hand, mix them up and toss into a large bowl, to which you then add meat or sausage, or in case you are a vegetarian – nothing. Top it all off with a large dollop of Smetana (an East-European euphemism for sour cream, often confused with an eponymous Czech composer), add a tablespoon of mustard (English mustard would do very well), flood whatever you’ve got in the bowl so far with Kvass (and I mean flood it!), stir well, season generously, stick in the fridge for several hours to cool down  – and Bob, or rather Boris, is your uncle! And, possibly, your future Prime Minister too, but that is irrelevant…

Sadly, as it often happens with food, or rather with my own complicated relationships with food, by the time I had my okroshka ready and ice-cold, the openly schizophrenic English weather turned back to winter (in June!), and my okroshka had largely lost its attraction: in cold weather you have to eat boiling borscht instead! So it was only natural that I decided to cook something hot and spicy and, with that in mind, joined the one-day ‘Taste of Asia: India’ cooking course at the famous Cordon Bleu culinary academy in Bloomsbury, London.

Well, if you thought that Le Cordon Bleu only stands for the French cuisine, with all its yummy snails and frogs’ legs, you were wrong, because in that respected gourmet academy they run multiple courses in other world cuisines, including Indian (not sure about Soviet cuisine, however – a potentially super-short course that could be reduced to just one word “konchilos!” (“finished!”).

Early on a Saturday morning I joined a group of a dozen or so students, determined to prepare from scratch (or rather from the ingredients provided) a chicken tandoori, a lamb madras, pilau rice, naan bread and (if still hungry) a mint and coriander chutney – all under the expert supervision and guidance of teaching chef Reginald Ioos, who first introduced us to the famous Indian spices, which all had to be toasted to enhance the aroma, and to a peculiar kind of clarified butter, Ghee, which we were to use while cooking.

Among the techniques to be learned was “cooking in a tandoori oven”, of which they had a rather nice specimen at the school. Until then, I had never seen a tandoori oven, let alone cooked in it. The tandoor was just a cylindrical clay pot tapering towards the bottom, where a heat source (charcoal or wood) was placed. To my surprise, naan bread had to be baked on the inside walls of the oven, and when it was the turn of  the tandoori chicken, the chicken – cut neatly into pieces in accordance with another special Cordon Bleu technique – had to be first impaled on a huge skewer, which was then planted into the oven and left there until cooked.

To be honest, I found the above technology a tad too complicated and opted for cooking my chicken (as well as my lamb madras) in the oven of a slightly more familiar state-of-the-art induction cooker, of  which the kitchen we were in had plenty.

In short, it was an inspiring all-day experience, greatly enhanced by the fact that were we allowed (and encouraged) to take everything we cooked home in the specially provided plastic containers. The same evening, we had an Indian feast at the Vitaliev household, with two of my children, helped by my wife and myself, quickly devouring the fruits of my frantic cooking efforts.

The hot and spicy Indian dishes made us all crave some sort of a palate balance, at which point I recalled my once-coveted okroshka in the fridge. The ice-cold Kvass-based soup went down swimmingly after the curries. “Like children to school,” as we used to say in Russia, after downing a particularly smooth shot of vodka…