Tatiana's Table: Tatiana and Alexander's Life of Food and Love Read online

  Then, even dried stale bread toasted in the oven was a luxury. The Metanovs called them toast points, and ate them without caviar, without butter, without oil.

  Fade, fade. Little by little they all faded.

  Only one small Metanova girl remained, carrying in her soul the soups and salads, the blueberry pancakes and cabbage pies; carrying them with her to distant continents far away from the white-night canals and the troubadours, oceans carrying them away from the four-story pastel-green building built in the 1800s with the plumbing to prove it. Away from the Luftwaffe bombs. Through frozen Karelian marshes and iced-over Bothnian gulfs, through Scandinavian ports and across the North Sea she came, crawling on her belly to another world, carrying the old world within her.

  Continents and oceans took long to traverse, but what separated Tatiana from the place where she once lived with her family and the place she lived now, was the blink of an eye. Blink, and there they are. As if there is just a swinging door between them. She can hear the arguing and yelling, hear the boisterous clean-up, the fiery discussions around a small table, glass falling, and laughter. The difference was: she lived. And as it turned out, that made all the difference.

  The boy they had made in the old world came with her into the new, carrying on his little shoulders the weight of generations of Metanovs and Barringtons. The recipes came with her. And something else too: the inextinguishable love she felt for one man.

  Together out of the ashes of despair, Tatiana and Alexander’s son clawed out a new life, tried to build another family of just two where once there had been twenty. And in this life, in time, the old recipes were supplanted by the new. Tatiana carried Russia inside her, but other immigrants carried Italy, Indochina, and India. Thus, next to meat pirozhki in her repertoire appeared a risotto and curry, and later sauces from Naples and challah bread from Germany.

  The poetry came with her, too, words painted like rivers by Osip Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova. I’ve come back to my city, wrote Mandelshtam, eight years before he was silenced for good. These are my own old tears, my own little veins, the swollen glands of my childhood …

  And Akhmatova, Leningrad’s poet laureate, prayed in verse: O Lord, help me to live through this night—I’m in terror for my life, your slave: To live in Petersburg is to sleep in a grave.

  Bread

  The bread of life. Flour, water, salt, sugar; milk, eggs, yeast, butter. A complete food, bread.

  “Darling, what can I make you?”

  “I’m full, Tania.”

  “You haven’t eaten since lunch. You must be hungry.”

  “Lunch was barely two hours ago, and we’ve had a kilo of blueberries since then.”

  “Maybe some tomatoes with bread?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I have some cold potatoes from yesterday. I can make salad Olivier—well, salad Olivier without the eggs. Or the kolbasa. Or pickles. Or peas. Just a little potato salad with onion—and a piece of bread?”

  “Funny, but no, thank you.”

  “Some blueberry jam with bread?”

  “I’m sick to death of blueberries.”

  “I have salted fish. Would you like some fish between two hunks of bread?”

  “Tatia …”

  “Some cucumbers with tomatoes and onions and salt? With black bread?”

  “Come here.”

  She came.

  He draped his big arms around her, pulling her down on his lap. “I will have,” Alexander said, “a big hunk of black bread, dipped in sunflower oil and rubbed with salt.” He didn’t let her jump up. “I will get it. Okay? You sit, you jumping bean. I’ll be right back.”

  Tatiana sat and waited for him on the bench, a moment, two. Then got up and went inside the hut after him. The door closed behind her.

  The bread of life. Oat flour, linseed oil. Water, glue, cardboard. A complete food, bread. Take, eat.

  She tried to scrape off the ice with her nail so she could see out the window, it was noon and there was a bit of sunshine now. If only she could scrape off the ice, some of the hour-long daylight would filter through the pane. Her nail broke as she tried. Not just the top of her nail, no, her whole nail slid off her finger as if it were nothing but a piece of loose skin. There wasn’t even blood in its place. She studied it in the dim light. My body is falling off me, she thought. There will be nothing left for him when he comes back next. If he comes back next.

  She reminisced of the years before, the late thirties, when there was flour, milk, and yeast, all taken for granted as she lived, went to school and ran around in Luga. They ate bread and never thought about it, almost like breathing, and suddenly here they were, thinking about something so fundamental as bread. They made all sorts of deals with themselves as people in despair do. Please, if you give me bread now, I promise I’ll never take it for granted again. I’ll never leave a crumb of food on my plate, I’ll never take more than I can eat, I’ll treasure bread, every hunk of it, just … give me some now. Please. I’m hungry. Feed me. Please.

  Who were they praying to in the blizzard days of 1941? Who were they hoping would intercede on their behalf? Many of them never prayed. This just goes to show you, they said. This is what we always believed, and this just proves it. We are all alone, as we suspected. Look what’s happening to us in this godless world.

  Still they dreamed of a better life where they could make bread and rejoice in it. Please, o Lord, feed me.

  “Dasha,” Tatiana said. “Why is there something so comforting about bread?”

  “This bread?” Dasha couldn’t believe it. “This isn’t bread.”

  “No, not this bread. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “So what are you talking about?” Dasha was in no mood to discuss the various merits and demerits. She was soundlessly counting down from a hundred, three times in a row, before she allowed herself to give in and have the last piece of her sawdust bread at five o’clock in the evening, instead of at seven.

  Tatiana stopped talking. There was something about bread that transcended cultures and values and time. This became clear only when the bread was gone. From bagels and brioches, crumpets and croissants, from sourdough bread and French baguettes, to won-tons and dumplings—not to mention sweet pastries, pies and pancakes.

  To go without was unthinkable.

  And yet, here they were. Without.

  “Let’s eat the bread, Dasha,” said Tatiana.

  “It’s not even five.”

  “I know. I’ll get more tomorrow morning. Or maybe Alexander will come back late tonight, bring us something. Let’s eat.”

  She broke the cube of bread, the size of half a deck of cards, broke it in half, then in quarters, and bowed her head. A complete food, bread. Flour, water, salt, sugar; milk, eggs, yeast, butter. A complete food, bread.

  Yeast Dough for Crusty White Bread:

  Butter, for greasing

  3 teaspoons dried yeast

  7 teaspoons sugar

  3 tablespoons warm water

  4 cups (500g) all-purpose (plain) flour, sifted or 3¾ cups (450g) bread flour, sifted, about a pound of flour

  1 teaspoon salt

  1¼ cups (275ml) milk, boiled and cooled to warm

  2 eggs

  ⅓ cup (75g) unsalted butter, melted and cooled to warm

  Glaze:

  1 egg yolk

  1 tablespoon melted butter

  Butter a mixing bowl.

  Prove the yeast: stir it with ½ teaspoon sugar and 3 tablespoons warm water in a small cup and place under heat lamp for 10 minutes, or let stand in bowl of warm water for 10–15 minutes.

  Meanwhile, in the bowl of an electric mixer, combine the flour, salt, and remaining sugar, then add the risen yeast and the warm milk, and beat with the standard beater attachment for 1–2 minutes on low. Add the eggs and beat for 1 minute more. Add the butter and continue to beat for another minute on low, then change the attachment to a dough hook and beat on medium for 10 minute
s until the dough is smooth and comes off the beater as soon as you turn it off. Remove from the bowl and knead by hand 3–4 times. If it peels easily off your hands, it’s ready to rise. If it’s still sticky, put back in the bowl, and beat for 2 minutes more, or knead by hand for 3–4 minutes, and test again.

  Roll the dough in the buttered dish so that it’s coated with butter on all sides. Cover with a clean dish towel (tea towel), and let rise in a dark, warm place (80°F/27°C) for an hour until doubled in size. Lift the dough 1 foot out of the bowl and let it fall. Repeat. Then re-cover and let rise again for a half hour in the same place, until doubled in size.

  On a floured board, roll out the dough with your hands to elongate it. Cut into thirds. Roll each piece with your hands until it resembles a rope about 15–18 in (37.5–45cm) long. Attach the three strands of dough at the top by twisting them slightly, then braid the rest, and twist-tie the bottom the same way as the top. Cover and let rise another hour. Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C). Grease a cookie sheet.

  Prepare a glaze: 1 egg yolk, a tablespoon of melted butter, a tablespoon of water. Mix well.

  Uncover the bread, place on prepared cookie sheet, brush with glaze, let stand a couple of minutes, and bake for 40 minutes until the bread is rich golden in color. Let cool for 30 minutes before slicing.

  That is what Tatiana dreamed of in darkness. But this is what she made:

  Toast Points:

  She took the scraps from stale bread and toasted them for two hours in a 250°F (120°C) oven until the bread was all dried out. When it cooled, she transferred the toast into canvas bags, tied them and kept them in a safe place, allowing her family to take one or two scraps from the bag after all the other bread was gone and all the rye flour was gone.

  Soon the toast points were gone, too.

  Other bread products she dreamed about while down on the floor breathing in the heady fumes of dried toast: pie crusts, pirozhki pastry, shortbread pastry. Others: pancakes, thin, thick, buttermilk. Dumplings: bread filled with meat and boiled. And still others: cookies, Napoleons. Then the king of them all: bread pudding—just bread, bread, and more bread covered with butter and milk, sugar and eggs. The antithesis to the blockade, to the siege, to war, to toast points. Too much of all the good things. But mostly, bread.

  Cabbage Pie

  When making this, prepare the dough with one hand while holding a copy of Aleksandr Pushkin’s book of poetry in the other. The pie just won’t taste the same without Pushkin’s conflicted contemplations on sacrifice and civilization in his epic poem, “The Bronze Horseman”.

  The first time Tatiana made cabbage pie, in August 1941, she made it without a copy of Pushkin’s book. She was too busy trying to add enough onion to the meat to fill one pie to feed her hungry family. There wasn’t enough. She had to barter with the woman next door, a suspicious sort who always thought Tatiana was up to no good. But she managed to convince Zhanna to give her a cabbage, for which Tatiana would give her a quarter of the finished pie. So, that evening she made her meat pie mostly with cabbage. Cabbage, onions, and a little meat. It was good. It was all gone. What they didn’t know then: that was the last meat and the last cabbage the Metanovs would lay their eyes on.

  In the dead of winter, saved by a diminished but unvanquished Alexander, Tatiana had managed to claw her way out of Leningrad, out to the Ural Mountains. And under unrestrained bombing, spring came to a diminished but unvanquished Leningrad. It was too late for the Metanovs, but this time, the other Leningraders prepared for the worst. What if the blockade wasn’t broken by next winter? Onions, potatoes, turnips, cabbage were hearty things that grew with ease in the earth. The citizens planted them in the shallow squares and gardens in the middle of their city, and along their canals and rivers and next winter, when the blockade was still not broken, they had more food.

  And in Lazarevo, their place in the sun, there was cabbage, and marriage, and Alexander was content to eat the pie his young wife made him, teasingly lamenting her lack of interest in fishing. He would have preferred stuffed cabbage, the unlazy brother of lazy cabbage, but stuffed cabbage required it be stuffed with something like meat, and there was none. Or rice. So instead they ate Tatiana’s cabbage pie by the banks of the Kama River, quoted Pushkin to each other, argued about his not-so-hidden meanings, and privately dreamt of an impossible future, where perhaps cabbage with meat might be possible.

  Little did they know that the impossible future indeed would come, in another life, but with two people so changed, that though he ate meat, he could never touch cabbage again despite being given a second chance at life, and she, though she ate everything, could not stop trudging to a hospital fifty hours a week to heal the unhealed, to save the unsaved.

  Pie Crust 1

  This is an all-purpose pie crust, good for places where there is refrigeration. So if you live in a place where there’s refrigeration, this one’s for you.

  The key is cold butter, cold shortening, cold egg, ice water. Because we have creature comforts like Ziploc bags, you can chill the flour mixed with the salt in a Ziploc bag. To make the butter as cold as possible, cube it and put it in the freezer for an hour before adding to the flour.

  During the coldest Leningrad winters, Tatiana’s grandmother made this recipe by hand without a refrigerator. She put the butter and the flour on the windowsill to freeze. And, as she had no Ziploc bags, she used wax paper.

  This will be enough for two round 9-in (23cm) pie crusts.

  3 cups (400g) all-purpose (plain) flour plus extra for dusting

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ½ teaspoon baking powder

  2 sticks (225g) unsalted butter, frozen, plus extra, unfrozen, for greasing

  2 tablespoons shortening, chilled

  1 egg, cold ( you can omit the egg if you wish. The Russians like the egg.)

  ½ cup (125ml) ice water

  3 teaspoons cider vinegar

  Place flour and salt inside bowl of food processor. Take the butter out of the freezer and shortening out of the fridge, slice with a sharp knife, add to the flour, and pulse for 10–20 seconds, until the butter mixes with the flour and looks like small ground peas or coarse oatmeal. Beat the cold egg and add to the mix. Add ¼ cup (55ml) ice water and pulse again for a few seconds, until mixture becomes more like pastry, and forms a solid ball. Add the rest of the ice water and the vinegar, and pulse for a few seconds more until all the water and egg is absorbed and the dough holds together. Don’t overpulse, you’ll toughen the dough. On a cool, lightly floured surface, divide the dough in two and form two flat cakes, like thick plates or shot putter discs. Cover each with plastic wrap (clingfilm) and refrigerate at least 2 hours.

  Pie Crust 2

  Though there was no ice water or Western-style shortening, this is the one Tatiana made in Lazarevo when she made cabbage pie for Alexander. She used lard. She placed flour into a bowl, made a cavity in the center, dropped the lard inside, and chopped it with two knives. When the dough was crumbly, she added cold water from the river, mixed, and then formed the dough into two balls, wrapped them and placed on a window sill in the early morning when it was cold. The food processor and a freezer takes out the guesswork, and shortening greatly improves the quality of the pastry, but the point is, you can make it by hand too, if you live in a remote summer village with no refrigeration and want your beloved to be your friend.

  2 cups (250g) all-purpose (plain) flour

  2 sticks (225g) shortening, chilled

  ½ cup (125ml) ice water

  Pulse flour and margarine in a food processor until just crumbly. Place this mixture in a large bowl, add ice water and use a pastry blender to form a dough. Don’t use your hands, they’ll warm the dough. When the ice water has been blended through, form into a ball, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate as long as possible, preferably overnight.

  Cabbage Pie Filling:

  4–5 tablespoons butter, plus extra for greasing

  1 onion, finely chopped
/>   1 cabbage, shredded

  salt and pepper, to taste

  1 cup (165g) cooked white rice if you have it.

  By all means, if you have meat, include 1 cup cooked and salted ground sirloin. And it goes without saying, if you have bacon, add crisp-fried and chopped-up bacon.

  Melt butter in a large heavy-bottom frying pan. Add onion, cook on medium till golden. Add cabbage, turn up heat to medium-high, cook until cabbage softens. Reduce heat, continue sautéing for 10–15 minutes, stirring frequently, until cabbage is fried golden and soft. Add rice, meat or bacon if you’re using it, mix, cook for a few minutes, turn off the heat.

  For the pie:

  butter, for greasing

  flour, for dusting

  Glaze:

  1 egg yolk

  1 tablespoon melted butter