A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [46]
‘I live this way,’ she barked, in heavily accented English, beckoning with her head.
I followed obediently.
Sonya lives with a roommate in a walk-up apartment, which she reaches by climbing up a flight of unlit concrete stairs. The kitchen is cramped but homey, with cracked linoleum floors and a Sputnik-era TV set, small gas stove, sink, refrigerator, and a little round table that doubles as a prep bench and serving area. The common areas are filled with the accumulated possessions of many years: shoes, boots, knickknacks, photographs, weathered furniture, a Commie-period poster of a kerchiefed female factory worker with her finger to her lips, the Cyrillic admonition clearly stating something like ‘Loose lips sink ships.’ One thing you get plenty of in Russia, no matter what your economic circumstances, is irony.
Sonya takes photographs in her spare time. The walls are decorated with her work – severe yet strangely beautiful studies of a now nearly invisible feature of Russian urban landscape: the air vents and entryways to Cold War bomb shelters. They sprout like toadstools from vacant lots, poke up through the weeds of public parks, and in the crumbling corners of Stalin-age housing developments. She has self-published a calendar, each month represented by a mushroom-shaped cylinder of concrete and metal grillwork.
‘I like Texas,’ she said as we stood in her kitchen. ‘You like Texas?’ She had recently traveled across America on a Greyhound bus, visiting friends. ‘Also I like Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, and Miami. Miami is very nice.’ She had seen far more of my country than I had, I told her.
‘This is a lot of work,’ she said. She’d been rolling out dough for pelmeni, meat-filled dumplings – a distant relative of the wonton, a legacy of one of the long-ago Mongol incursions – and would like it very much if Mr. Famous Traveling Chef Author Guy – or somebody, anybody – would pitch in. I stepped in, helping her to spoon dots of the meat into the dough on an octagonal cutter. Sonya laid on a top layer of dough, clamped down on the cutter, and about sixteen pelmeni at a time dropped through the other side. I tamped them closed, pinched and shaped, then placed them on cookie sheets in neat rows. She kept up a steady stream of patter in Russian and English, bopping back and forth between the two languages, making use of whichever was most comfortable at the time. Zamir sat next to me, filling in the blanks in her English, offering explanations when needed. Alexej sat across from me, looking morose. Outside the kitchen door, Igor, a hired cameraman from Moscow, hovered, filming – or not – according to his own mysterious agenda.
When the pelmeni were assembled, Sonya swung her attention over to the borscht simmering on her stovetop. I had been looking forward to this. In Russia, as my old friend Dimitri memorably pointed out to me, borscht is barely a soup; it’s damn near an entrée: a chunky hot stew of meat, onions, carrot, cabbage, beets, and potatoes, a rib-sticking dark red concoction perfect for filling the belly cheaply on an icy winter night. The cold, watery bright pink puree you might have seen in the States is barely related. Sonya had made a stock from selected cuts of meat in a pressure cooker, a piece of kitchen equipment, by the way, that, while rarely seen in America, is viewed as a godsend by much of the rest of the world. Then she began sautéeing onions, carrots, and bay leaf, added the stock, threw in the meat and potatoes, then the cabbage, and finally, so as not to discolor or overcook it, grated in the peeled beet at the last minute. I saw some caraway seeds and a few other herbs go in, but when I asked her what they were, she pretended not to understand me. Cooks. The same everywhere.
‘A drink,’ Sonya said pointedly, ‘for the workers,’ casting a skeptical eye at the inactive Russian contingent in her kitchen. Soon we were all toasting with tall shot glasses of her homemade cranberry vodka, and readying ourselves to eat. Sonya dropped table settings and condiments around