A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [45]
I had been led to believe that Russia was all bread lines, shortages, empty shelves, produce rotting in the train yards, oranges only a rumor. And surely that must have been the case elsewhere. The country, as we are constantly reminded by panicky anchormen, is in financial shambles. The army hasn’t been paid. Most people live on about a dollar a day. Gangsters roam at will, bombing, assassinating. Saint Petersburg itself is the contract-killing capital of Russia – which is perhaps why so many flatheads are able to find steady employment as bodyguards. Mail arrives – or it doesn’t. Farms lie fallow, factories molder. So why, in a not at all well-to-do neighborhood, is there a public market that could give Dean & Deluca or Zabar’s a run for their money? In front of me lay counter after counter of pristine-looking vegetables: yellow peppers, melons, fresh herbs, bananas, pineapples, tubers, root veggies, lettuces. Butchers broke down on site whole sides of beef, lamb, pork, whacking away with heavy cleavers against deeply bowed and scarred chopping blocks. Beautiful free-range chickens, head and feet still attached, were arranged in orderly and attractive rows over deli counters. Little of it was refrigerated – but it was cold in there and the stuff was moving fast. There was a customer for every steak, hoof, scrap, bone, foot, and jowl. Women in heavy coats and babushkas considered single squares of pork fat as if shopping for a new car. People didn’t so much haggle as argue, delivering impassioned rants about the virtues and deficiencies of a slab of bacon, which almost always ended in a sale.
What the Kupchina market lacks in foreign specialties and produce, it makes up for in homegrown exotica: yard after yard of brightly colored homemade pickled vegetables; every variety of absolutely gorgeous-looking smoked fish – sturgeon, sable, salmon, sprats, chubs, sterlet (a cousin to the sturgeon), herring – heaped one on top of the other inside glass display cases; tubs of caviar and fish roe; a dairy section where white-uniformed, white-kerchiefed women offer varieties of fresh and aged farmer cheese, yogurt, sour cream, hand-churned butter, curds, and sweet condensed milk.
Sonya, however, was not impressed. She did not look around. She knew what she wanted. She finally found some potatoes she liked and loaded them into the growing cargo of plastic shopping bags under her arms, then clomped across a few feet of concrete floor to lift a bunch of carrots with a skeptical pinkie finger.
‘You call this a carrot?’ she challenged. A few moments later, she was bullying an old woman over a bunch of fresh dill. Having given another butcher a few moments to reflect on her requirements, she veered back in his direction, settling – after more bitterly fought negotiations – on a slab of pork belly, some lightly cured bacon, and a fat beef shank. She counted out each ruble as if giving away nuclear codes.
I was in love. If I could ever fall for a woman who reminded me of Broderick Crawford, it would be Sonya. She’s a fabulously imposing, nonstop talker, a great cook, a survivor, an artist, a hard drinker – a force of nature. There’s a whiff of Janis Joplin about her. Unflappable, been around the block, she’s a woman of surprising dimension and abilities. Her shopping list nearly complete, she stepped out into the cold, picked her way across a thick layer of soot-covered ice, and bought half a handful of fresh garlic from one of the impoverished-looking