I used not to know how to cook. Grandmother ruled the kitchen. She cooked borscht, baked pies, salted cabbage. She tolerated no one beside her in her kitchen kingdom. The most I was allowed to do was turn the handle of the old kitchen meat grinder when minced meat was needed for cutlets or a meat filling for pies. Sometimes pies with viziga were baked too.
The meat grinder did not like viziga; it was capricious, refused to turn, and one had to coax it, and sometimes use force. I wonder who that meat grinder, darkened with age, imagined itself to be?
So all my skills and knowledge in the field of cooking were limited to looking, sometimes quite attentively, through the big green Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.
The time of my childhood coincided with empty store shelves and universal shortages. But when you opened the book, you entered the kingdom of meat and fish delicacies, black and red caviar, tongues, and so on, and so forth...
This magic book earned my special love on the terrible day when our class — either fourth or fifth — was examined and treated by the dentist. How does Spike Milligan have it: Revenge, revenge on dental doctors, and no forgiveness for them in the world...
Our class was large, pupils were called in one by one, and I ended up among the last.
I left school without a tooth and with a strict prohibition: no eating or drinking for three hours.
My classmate Borka had his teeth treated at the same time, and so we decided to wait out those long hungry three hours together. We wanted to eat unbearably. And this despite the fact that my appetite was terrible, and often absent altogether — but then...
It seemed one could sell one’s soul for a thin slice of bread.
Borka’s twin brother, who had managed to get to the doctor first, was a harmful and sarcastic person. Every ten minutes he appeared in the room now with a sandwich bearing a thick slice of pink “Lyubitelskaya” sausage, now with a huge red apple, now with a mug of delightful milk, and ate it before our eyes, squinting and rolling his eyes with pleasure. The starving ones watched the villain without blinking, like rabbits watching a boa constrictor, but then we grew angry and drove him away, promising to beat him up.
That was when Borka remembered his mother’s cookbook.
We sat down on the sofa, placed an alarm clock before us — its hands mocked us no less than Borka’s brother — and opened the book...
The second time I experienced a similar shock from a cookbook was when I was already studying at the institute.
My friend Olya had two treasures: her grandfather, once a big boss, who in retirement had been inflamed by a passionate love for refined cooking, and an old pre-revolutionary book about how to feed guests deliciously and economically should they suddenly arrive.
That book was read as if it were sung. For example:
Take hazel grouse and truffles and soak them in a bucket of champagne...
And so on...
Olya’s grandfather, evidently inspired by that folio, boiled, baked and fried absolutely implausible dishes, such as beef-and-rabbit fricassee, yellow cherry jam with walnuts and lemon, chicken stewed in red wine. In no restaurant have I ever eaten as deliciously as in Olya’s kitchen.
Gradually I too began to cook. First soup from packets and pasta, then pancakes and fried potatoes. But not all at once!
The further influence on my culinary exercises came from my classmate’s grandmother, who gave me the recipe for my first pie, and from the director of a creativity center in a small Dutch town. His name was Alphons. The director, I mean, of course. He was sociable, friendly, easygoing and very fond of cooking, collecting various recipes during his frequent travels. Alphons’s friends supported these interests, organizing an improvised culinary club where everyone tried to surprise the others with skill and an unexpected recipe.
I brought the recipe for “Alphons’s soup” from a business trip to the Netherlands: pour into a saucepan one third strong broth, one third tomato juice, and one third dry white wine...
It did, in fact, turn out very tasty.
Since then, having received the rudiments of culinary knowledge and the vivid life impressions described above, I decided to prepare a dish more beautiful than which... no, that has already been somewhere, you remember.
But how, how can one surpass grandmothers and chefs in skill? What to cook, what potion to brew? What has not yet been described in books about tasty healthy and not very healthy food? What have Jerome K. Jerome, Wilhelm Hauff and Darya Dontsova not yet told us?!
But a person must have a dream, and so I experiment endlessly, mixing spices and seasonings, rubbing butter with flour and honey, baking fish and vegetables.
And suddenly, suddenly I may succeed in cooking something special, something that melts in the mouth and smells so delightful that Grandmother, looking down upon the earth from heaven, will say: Well done, granddaughter! I was right to trust you with the handle of my meat grinder!
