I enter the steamy fragrance of Nadezhda's Siberian kitchen, leaving my heavy boots and parka neatly hung in the dark hall with the rest of the family's winter gear.
Nadezhda has made cabbage and potato soup for me, to chase the cold from my bones after an afternoon at Lake Baikal. She plugs in the kettle for tea, and insists I drink it the Russian way, with a spoonful of homemade jam after each sip. The jam is made from cranberries she picked that summer in the taiga and has a wild tartness to it.
Nadezhda is a small rounded woman with deeply shadowed dark brown eyes. She spends much of her time in the kitchen, a high-ceilinged, narrow room that is the heart of her home. The tall double-paned windows are curtained with lace and the deep sills bear the green plants that remind Siberians of spring. Here Nadezhda bakes and boils, preserves and pickles, serves and clears, and finally sits to share tea and put her feet up on a chair near the warm oven.
We sip our tea from delicate gold-rimmed china cups and spoon soup from wide shallow bowls. We gossip about our countries as if they are unstable relatives whom we love even though they drive us crazy. We talk about kids today, the good ones like her niece, Aliona, and the other ones who get into trouble with drugs and the law. Looking for common ground, we find it under our feet.
I get the same feeling in Moscow at the home of Yosef Wolfson, who cooks most of the dinners for his family of four plus anyone else who might be staying for a day or two. We all somehow fit around the kitchen table, passing each other the rye bread and the water carafe, and trying not to bump elbows too hard. Yosef is very efficient; from his place at the table he can retrieve a pan of fried chicken from the stove, or swing around and search the fridge for pickles as he orchestrates not only our dinner, but the conversation. He advises me on the best place to look for fur hats, which I develop a sudden craving for after envying the chic Moscow women hurrying down the boulevards oblivious to the swirling wind and the wet snow.
He tells the story of his “daddy”, a published geologist blacklisted by the KGB after receiving a letter from a long-lost aunt in America. He asks each of us about our day, and recounts an anecdote from his own. He makes sure that the limited number of big, old-fashioned front-door keys are distributed so that no one will be left in the dim hallway on the cold side of the padded steel apartment door. We can all find a refuge from the snowy Moscow afternoon in Yosef's kitchen. He is the perfect host.
Again, in Ulan Ude, as far east as I will go on this trip, I am sitting on a warm bench in Babushka Vera's kitchen. A babushka is a Russian grandma, and a Russian grandma is not like an American grandma. A babushka can scold the surliest young thug, and he will apologize quickly and shuffle off shamefacedly. A babushka's job is to scold and criticize, thus insuring that the country doesn't go to hell.
Babushka Vera is not like this. She is very kind. She is half Buryat, which is kind of like a Mongolian Native American. She cooks and bakes for her daughter's family. She makes intricate rolled cookies, and drinks tea in the Buryat fashion, with a little milk. When she runs out of her jar of tea, she brings out a hard block of Chinese green tea leaves, and expertly, holding it against her hip, chips chunks off with a curved hunting knife until the jar is full again.
Babushka Vera tells me stories of when she was a little girl living in the forest, riding sleighs into town to get supplies. Her Buryat family had a fish camp on the river and dried the fish on racks. Now she stays at home as much as she can, because her knees pain her. She walks with a rolling gait, like a sailor, and sits with a sigh when she finishes a task. She does not rest for long, though. There is always something to be done. One afternoon she makes pel'menie, Siberian tortellini, because her granddaughter, Little Vera, convinces her that I would like some. Little Vera is very early for dinner that night
Siberian people used to gather the whole family to make pel'menie, stuffing the dough with mixtures of pork and potatoes and rolling it up around their fingers. They would freeze as much as they could in wooden boxes outside the windows and have fast food all winter.
Babushka knows how to make pozie, too. Pozie are Buryat dumplings, like round ravioli as big as eggs, filled with tasty ground meat and steamed in salted water. You pick them up and bite them, and drink the soup-like liquid inside before you finish them off. They will warm anyone up.
When someone is making pel'menie or pozie in the kitchen, even back in the U.S., the air gets steamy and makes your mouth water. All that's missing is good Russian rye bread, Buryat green tea with milk, and a long conversation to make you feel as warm and cozy as a Russian kitchen in winter.
