"Please to the Table"

Following up my reading of Anya von Bremzen's wonderful memoir titled Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (link to blog post here) I decided to buy her 1990 cookbook, Please to the Table, in which she explored the varied cuisines from the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. She wrote it just in time -- the Soviet Union soon after broke up into a chaos of separate political entities, and as we well know, the chaos is far from finished.

Please to the Table is beautifully laid out and illustrated, with sidebars full of background material (such as the section below titled "Ah, Odessa") and quotes about food from many Russian authors such as Gogol, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and more, as well as from travel writers. The distinctions between similar dishes from various places are quite intriguing. Von Bremzen and her co-author John Welchman appear to have done an amazing piece of research, both interviewing people, traveling throughout the area, and searching old materials in a variety of archives.

Sample page from Please to the Table. 

I really haven't yet done much more than browse, though at some point I hope to at least try some of the recipes and definitely read more of the historic material. So much to learn about fifteen different Soviet republics! I really could never have named them, could you? Here's the list as given in the book: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia , Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Russia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan.

A movie and dinner

"Arrival" is a recently-released sci-fi movie about the great success of heroine Louise Banks, a linguist who has to help the army fight against an invasion of "heptapods" who land worldwide in sleek black flying saucers. We saw it this afternoon and quite enjoyed it. As you can kind of see in the above screen shot from the trailer (on Youtube here), the alien invaders are octopus-like, or to be more exact, they seem to resemble Cthulhu, the terrifying monster from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The resemblance is only physical, though -- but no more spoilers here.

I wanted to see "Arrival" because of rather unusual interest from the writers at the blog Language Log; linguist Ben Zimmer wrote there: "I'd heartily recommend it to all Language Log readers. The film, despite its science-fiction trappings, does a remarkably good job of depicting how a linguist goes about her work." (link here)

After the movie we went to dinner at Metzger's German restaurant. It's exactly like we remember it throughout all the years we've been in Ann Arbor, and probably has changed little since its founding in 1928. The owner and chef belong to the third and fourth generation of the founding family. Only difference: it moved from downtown to a shopping center out near the movie theater, where we seldom go. Metzger's serve Swabian food including real veal bratwurst, German potato salad, German meat patties, schnitzel, Zwiebel Kuchen (described as "onion pie -- a heaping serving of baked sweet onions with spices and eggs, cream cheese, and a puffed pastry crust"), and so on -- I ordered German chicken livers with German potato salad and red cabbage. Lots of beer steins on the bar and other kitschy decorations everywhere.

Badly lit photo of my dessert: Metzger's apple strudel with ice cream.

"Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Last night at my culinary reading group we discussed Anya von Bremzen's delightful book Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. I originally read the book when it was new, and wrote a fairly complete review here: "Cuisine without Food." And an addendum here: "Cuisine without Food: Addendum" about the Soviet cookbook titled Book of Tasty and Healthy Food by Anastas Mikoyan.

Our leader Gene remarked that even
the dust jacket was exceptional!
That's a real Soviet tank, he said.

I loved the book. My friends in last night's discussion also loved it. Consensus is rare in this group, and as one of our members said, this book is well-written, has several great subjects including historic background, personal/family history, food, recipes, and humor. Since my previous reviews were pretty complete, I'm just going to add a few topics that were the subject of some of our discussions last night.

We enjoyed Von Bremzen's descriptions of how food became political, and how there was a pretense of having a variety available -- especially in the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food when actually there were shortages and famines.  We enjoyed reading about a number of dishes, such as the elaborate foods that she and her mother prepared to recall the czarist era, such as how they once in New York tasted coulibiac, the elaborate filled pastry, that was made with the original ingredient, sturgeon spine, found in Chinatown by a czarist-era emmigré --

"Dried sturgeon spine? Who were we kidding? Whether we liked it or not, we were Soviets, not Russians. In place of the sturgeon, defrosted cod would do just fine." (p. 25)

We especially savored the description of Russian salad, a.k.a. Salad Olivier, and its essential mayonnaise. All of us have eaten some version of Salad Olivier, made in many lands. Von Bremsen explains its history:

"The salad gained a second life in the mid-1930s when Olivier’s old apprentice, a chef known as Comrade Ivanov, revived it at the Stalin-era Moskva Hotel. Revived it in Soviet form. Chicken replaced the class-enemy grouse, proletarian carrots stood in for the original pink of the crayfish, and potatoes and canned peas took center stage— the whole drenched in our own tangy, mass-produced Provansal mayo. Meanwhile, variations of the salad traveled the world with White Russian émigrés." (p. 316)

We were amused at several words in Russian that can be expressed only by a longer phrase in English, for example, the word for "hangover breath"!

"I loved everything about shopping at Praga. Loved skipping over the surges of brown melted snow and sawdust that comrade janitors gleefully swept right over the customers’ feet. Loved inhaling the signature scent of stale pork fat, peregar (hangover breath), and the sickly sweet top notes of Red Moscow perfume." (p. 16)

About drunkenness and drink in the Soviet Union, which maybe made this word necessary, we remarked on the extreme destructiveness of alcohol, especially to men, reflected in the book. We compared it to social observations and political implications from a book we read about an earlier era, The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire by Linda Himelstein. As in the czarist era, Von Bremzen points out that the government condoned and even encouraged drinking because it brought so much revenue to the state. She sets the bar high in her definition of alcoholism:

"Like all Russian families, mine has its own entanglements with the green serpent, though by the Russian definition of alcoholism— trembling hands, missed workdays, full-blown delirium, untimely death— only my uncle Sashka truly qualified." (p. 229-230)

In sum, it's a terrific book which we feel is one of the best we have read in the years we've been meeting. I've ordered Von Bremzen's earlier cookbook, which I plan to write about soon.

Strangely Styled Food

Olive Atomic Snack (2000)
"Three-dimensional tapas, in the shape of atomic models."

Looking for strange new ideas in the combination of art and food, I found out about a Catalan designer named Martí Guixé, who is "known for his imaginative food inventions." For more see: "Martí Guixé's food designs: hands-free lollipops and edible pie graphs – in pictures" in the Guardian, and "Marti Guixe, 16 years Food Design, 1997-2013" at this website on food design.

Martí Guixé is a new and fascinating artist for me, and I've continued to explore websites with images of his food-related art work. He's also created designs for the Italian design firm Alessi, whose products I quite like -- website here.

Guixé's alessi designs in use.

Backstage at the Kabuki Theater

Today we spent quite a bit of time enjoying the exhibit
"Japanese Prints of Kabuki Theater from the Collection of the University of Michigan Museum of Art."
As always, I was interested in the few prints that depicted food.

The print in which this image appears is titled "Backstage Celebrations of a Full-House Hit at the Ichimura Theater."
In this detail, a delicious-looking whole fish was prepared for the actors presumably waiting to go onstage.
The artist is Utagawa Kunisada, the date of the print is 1811-14.

An actor, holding his small child, is also having some tea.

In another panel of three-part print, these men are serving tea or soup in covered dishes.

The large number of displayed prints include close-up portraits of actors, scenes with stage settings and dramatized moments from famous Kabuki plays, and imagined meetings between actors. Also in the exhibit is a short video with scenes from Kabuki drama as still presented in Tokyo, and a beautiful red kimono that was once worn onstage. 

I learned a great deal about the popularity of this drama in the 18th and 19th century. Some of the prints were handed out as advertisements for the plays; others were sold to be collected by loyal fans of particular actors. Though now valuable museum-pieces the prints were originally very cheap or even given away for free. A few even contain ads for other products and businesses. 

All parts in Kabuki plays were played by male actors who specialized in either male or female roles. Interestingly, the actors who played women's parts were often influential in setting fashion for actual women of the time.

Pear Salad

First-course salad: lettuce, nice autumn pears, toasted walnuts, dried cranberries, vinaigrette dressing with cherry-flavored balsamic and olive oil. Served with a wedge of Saint Andre cheese. A classic.

Ras el Hanout and other flavors

Dinner tonight: I tried using Moroccan spices to flavor turkey breast, squash, and broccoli. The broccoli is not to
my knowledge Moroccan at all. But it's kind of an experiment. Served with wine and Zingerman's cranberry bread.

The turkey breast was cooked with preserved lemon, sage leaves, crushed garlic,
melted butter, lemon and lime juice, a chopped jalapeño pepper,
and a Moroccan spice blend called ras el hanout. The squash was baked and
then mashed with butter, ginger, and a bit of the turkey seasoning.

Garnish: a slightly altered version of Charmoula, another Moroccan blend.

My charmoula contained chopped parsley and cilantro, oil, lemon juice, cumin, and paprika. I omitted the garlic that is characteristic of this blend because there was a lot of garlic in the meat preparation. I'm not really very experienced in Moroccan cuisine, but I find their combinations of spices to be very pleasing, so I'm trying to learn how to use them. I based my choices on several recipes that I found on the web. Eventually I'll try some of the recipes from my cookbooks.

Wordless Wednesday

It's Almost Over!

No, I didn't take my selfie in the voting booth!

Line to enter the polling area at our local Middle School.

The line took around an hour for us, and appeared to be getting longer while we were waiting. The bottleneck was the slow rate at which the clerks could look up the voter registration info, compare it to the voter's filled-out request to vote, and then record the ballot number in two places. Many of the voting booths, as shown, were unused most of the time, because voting took less time than getting a ballot. I have no idea what if anything the authorities could do to improve this situation.

Glorious Weather Continues

The bike path from downtown Dexter to Huron-Clinton Metropark was the start of our day yesterday.
Three of us biked, two walked, and one drove the car up to the park. Again the beautiful weather allowed us
to eat a picnic lunch. Keeping our minds off the fear of what may happen tomorrow.

A noisy eater in a tree.

A stop at Dairy Queen in Ann Arbor, which hasn't quite yet closed for winter.  

Dinner was at the famous ZIngerman's Roadhouse. I decided not to bring a camera.

Dexter Outdoors

Another glorious fall day, warm enough for a picnic by the river. Amazing for this late in Michigan! We worked
out a schedule to avoid the traffic at the Michigan-Maryland football game.

Some trees have lost all their leaves, some are still vivid yellow, red, or orange.

After walking around the park, we continued to the Dexter Cider Mill
for cider, donuts, and ginger cookies.

  

Update: Miriam's great Snapchat shot.

No Thai

At the restaurant No Thai!, the cooking area is behind a counter where you wait for your plate of delicious Thai food.
I love watching the flames rise as they stir-fry, and watching them plate noodles or rice with meat and vegetables.

No Thai! is a small chain; we ate in the restaurant near Kerrytown, in
a pleasant district of small shops and the Farmers' Market.

Len had Pad Thai, and I had potato curry in which the potatoes were perfectly crisp and delicious.

Dreaming of Cake

What you get if you just google the word "cake." 

Evidently the default cake has chocolate and strawberries, mainly.

And this, if you google "lemon layer cake." Wish I had a piece of cake!

Food and Local Color in "Hideous Kinky"

In the film "Hideous Kinky" (1998) Kate Winslet plays Julia, an English hippie with two small daughters. With them, she travels around Morocco in a random, hippie way picking up sympathetic men, worrying/not worrying about money, being interested in everything. It's totally of the past, a time when a young woman might actually go ahead with such razor-edged dangerous adventures, and never really feel threatened, or not much. 

Towards the beginning Julia feeds "truffle paste -- it's a delicacy, actually" to the little girls, who wrinkle up their faces, say it tastes like mud, and ask when they'll again have rice pudding. But Julia is waiting for money from their father. ("Father Christmas, actually" one says.) It's interesting how food shows up throughout Morocco during their adventures. Here are a few more screen shots from the film that I find intriguing.

I'm a fan of  Esther Freud, author of the original novel Hideous Kinky, which was published in 1992. Because I am thinking about Moroccan food, I thought I'd look up how food appeared in a few movies set in Morocco that I once enjoyed. I don't recall if Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman ate anything in the course of "Casablanca." Or if any food appeared in "The Man Who Knew Too Much." Or "The Adventures of Tintin." To be researched!