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August 30, 2005
Priatnogo Appetita
(Click to enlarge.)
The Russian Food Pyramid, courtesy of the Southeastern Michigan Dietetic Association.
The longer I live in New York, the more I miss Russian food. There I could eat a three-course biznes lanch and still feel less bloated and pickled than I do after two-thirds of a deli sandwich. Over-seasoning is ruining my life. New York food of any "nationality" is too salty, too sweet, too much. I miss the soothing blandness and innocent garnishes found in Petersburg cafes. I miss chicken bouillon and lapsha and dull white pap. I miss vinegar's starring role. I've been making hot broths and plain vanilla cupcakes: original, unevolved foods for an exhausted palate.
The Russian Food Pyramid makes me laugh. Why aren't Russians allowed fresh fruit, but condemned to dried? It's as though someone in Michigan researched his pyramid in 19th-century Russian literature (except for the artichokes and the Brussels sprouts, which I am not convinced are available even now). An examination of their English Food Pyramid convinces me, by apparent consistency of research methods, that this is so. I also like that vodka is so much a part of the Russian "diet" that it's included in the pyramid, though neither the English nor the Irish have a beer allowance. The rest of the Russian info was apparently gleaned from Polish sources: pierogies and holubkys?
This week's New Yorker (the Food Issue, yay!) has a nice little reminiscence from one Anya von Bremzen, of toddler days in 1960s Moscow, where connections secured her an unlikely place at the writing desks and dining tables of an exclusive little kindergarten for Central Committee children. (Not available online, I'm afraid.)
"Fish-fat time!" the teacher announced when her charges awakened. I thought she meant fish oil, which was administered daily at all kindergartens. Instead, I was approached by an elephantine nanny with a heaping spoonful of black caviar. It was my first encounter with sevruga eggs. They smelled metallic, like a rusty doorknob."Open wide...a spoonful, for Lenin," the nanny implored. "For Motherland, for the Party!" she said, pushing the caviar toward my locked lips. I started to gag.
"Don't you dare throw up!" she bellowed. "Or I'll make you eat every drop of your puke!"
My alienation intensified with every meal: veal scallops, poached sturgeon - this food, I knew, would horrify Mother.
Russians, Russianists, tell me what you ate and what you eat.
Posted by michele at 3:59 PM | Comments (6)
August 29, 2005
Faux Cyrillic Lettering - Worst Offender EVER
My eyes cry tears of blood.
Posted by michele at 3:25 PM | Comments (6)
August 26, 2005
Where is the garland of garlic?
Here I am, aged six or seven, preparing (unwittingly) for a lifelong career as a russophile.
Posted by michele at 12:05 PM | Comments (2)
August 24, 2005
The best way to travel, anywhere.
It's astonishing how much the Pyongyang metro system resembles Petersburg's (or Moscow's, I imagine, though I don't know it). I concede that, historically, there is nothing at all astonishing about it, but it still takes one aback!
This unofficial Pyongyang metro site is maintained by the great Simon Bone, who has been rocking very hard in an online way for some years now. Check out the official metro guidebook for foreigners and its somewhat Biblical tone. There are also samples of the pop-aganda pumped out of station speakers, including the Kim Jong Il theme tune, No Motherland Without You.
I started getting excited about metro systems from around the world, which led me to Subway Stations as Art. Really beautiful. Azerbaijan must have some of the most stunning Soviet-style station designs.
Posted by michele at 1:32 AM | Comments (2)
Hot on the trail of...dill
So I'm going out with this amazing Boy, right? And he's, like, so amazing that I'll brave this dumb, dried-up swamp in New Jersey because he wants to see birds and turtles, when we only really end up seeing the Great American Chigger. (Great: "Itching may persist for up to two weeks".) I'll sit through three games of Mancala, one each of War and Spit, and three of Uno with his eleven-year-old sister, followed by an insanely multinational meal (sushi, borsch and BBQ, anyone?) eaten in between my pretending to speak and understand Russian.
Ok, the point I am getting to in a roundabout but pleasurable-to-me way is that this knee-tremblingly amazing, Americanised Boy whom I am seeing has the nose of a Russian culinary bloodhound. "What did you have for dinner?" he asks, his face close to mine.
"Hm?"
"Did it have dill in it?"
"I had cold soba and gazpacho... There was a tiny bit of dill in the gazpacho, I guess."
"I smelled it."
"But I brushed my teeth."
"I smelled it on this part" - he points to the left-hand side of the skin above my lip.
Did you see what I did there? Under the guise of writing about the Russian sixth sense for the essentially faint herb that is dill, what I actually did was make an announcement to the effect of, "There is this handsome and tremendous Boy who has been known to kiss me, and it is just about relevant to this blog because he is from Russia."
Oh!
Posted by michele at 1:04 AM | Comments (2)
August 15, 2005
The Ex-Soviet, Developing, but above all Fictional Nation of Molvania
I would prefer not to have to link to this website, because I don't feel it does the book it promotes much justice. I'm also here to promote the book Molvania: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry, a Jetlag travel guide. It's a book-length parody, in full Lonely Planet format, of former-Soviet tourism outside of Petersburg and Moscow.
From the section on Language:
Molvanian is a difficult language to speak, let alone master. There are four genders: male, female, neutral, and the collective noun for cheeses, which occupies a nominative sub-section of its very own.
(Ha.)
Remember, too, that the syntactical structure of written Molvanian can be rather complex, with writers routinely using the triple negative. Hence, 'Can I drink the water?' becomes 'Erkjo ne szlepp statsik ne var ne vladrobzko ne' (literally, 'is it not that the water is not not undrinkable?')
(Hahaha.)
Posted by michele at 6:29 PM | Comments (2)
August 11, 2005
Toilets of the Revolution
From Toilets of the World: Leon Trotsky's.
One toilet the site's proprietor resolutely won't show:
However, the flat-out scariest toilet I've ever seen, a vision of Hell to give Dante the heebie-jeebies, was an underground public toilet in a park near Novodevichy Convent in Moscow. The "toilets" were knee-high stubs of culvert drainage pipes. The floor was covered in about an inch of liquified filth continuously replenished by a couple of "toilets" in reverse ooze mode. The atmosphere had an ammonia content about equal to that of Venus. Plus, this being Russia, one had to pay a fistful of Rubles for the privilege of visiting.
Posted by michele at 6:10 PM | Comments (4)
August 9, 2005
Art Lebedev is very clever.
(Cross-linked in the daily isolato:)
Art Lebedev debunks the old theory that the distribution of letters on a QWERTY keyboard was intended to slow down the typing process (spare the typing, spoil the machine), and then traces the subsequent development of the cyrillic keyboard. Fascinating nugget: the first keyboards were missing the numerals 0, 1 and 3, to be replaced by the cyrillic letters for O, I (now defunct) and Z respectively. So thrifty!
Posted by michele at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)
Which Dead Russian Composer Are You?
Damnit, I'm Pyotr Tchaikovsky. I retook the test a few times but still kept ending up as Tchaikovsky. Except the time I answered every question with "vodka" - which resulted in me being poor old Modest Mussorgsky. Your turn.
Posted by michele at 1:43 PM | Comments (0)
Olga Karlovna's Exhilarating Family Tree
Hi! My name is Olga Karlovna! Vat's yours?I live in Magnitogorsk, a very lovely town in Russia. I enjoy dressing pretty, the dancing, cooking, washing dishes, beating waiters, sewing, shooting, cleaning, parachuting, wrestling, mining, and shopping. In mine free time I love to be reading the French existential fashion magazines.
(Here is my family album.)
Posted by michele at 12:23 PM | Comments (1)
August 5, 2005
Everybody drink Mishka Vodka!
It's nice to see that somebody has finally bought a bottle of Mishka, which I rashly and frivolously ordered a case of for the store on my first day on the job, largely (ok, entirely) so I could buy a bottle at cost for then-Boy's birthday later that week (it's his namesake). I blame its failure to take off on being hidden away among the kosher wines (it's Israeli). It's really a very decent vodka.
Speaking of vodka, here is the most wanton, needless use of the word "zakuski" I have yet seen by an institution that should know better. What is it about Russian cliches and people's willingness to repetitively misappropriate them? (From Russia with Herpes, and so on.) Other than the collection being disjointed and meagre, what is really zakuski-like about the items on display?
Posted by michele at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)
Don't drink Moldovan wine
I'm going to this tonight, are you?
I'm experiencing the painfullest Russian nostalgia. I'm entering a Moldovan Cab/Merlot into the system right now and around the neck of this elegant, barrel-shaped bottle (ah, the former Soviets and their novelty packaging) hangs a four-page leaflet (also barrel-shaped, for stylistic continuity) extolling the virtues of this inevitably dire wine...in Russian! So starved am I for the Slavic that this invokes in me an almost sexual excitement.
Posted by michele at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)