with a band for dance music, usually featuring a female singer, in tight, sequined attire, bleached, teased hair, and lots of makeup.
Restaurant dinners at mid-day or evening often included the range of traditional courses. First a soup—cabbage, beet, sour grass, or potato, sometimes fish or meat; followed by an optional 100 grams of sour cream set in a stainless steel stemware cup, and topped with a sugar sprinkling. For the main course, “bifstek,” a rendering of “beefsteak,” a small beef fillet, was most popular; but I always headed for the sturgeon with mushrooms baked in sour cream sauce, a sort of sturgeon Stroganoff, when it was available. The side dish was frequently, and not unexpectedly, potatoes— commonly pan- fried. Then there was “salat” (cold potatoes, cooked peas and carrots mixed with mayonnaise)—a course I passed up; and for dessert, stewed dried fruit or vanilla ice cream. Fresh fruits and vegetables ranged from rarely seen to nonexistent; oranges or apples occasionally appeared at a restaurant or food stand.
The restaurants’ printed menus aroused immediate hope of rich variety and plenty. Well-worn menus listed dozens of hot and cold salads, appetizers, soups, entrees, and desserts, pages of apparent choices far more extensive than any fare the establishment offered. But when one tried to order, the waitress peremptorily informed the hopeful eater: “We have beefsteak or Chicken Kiev.” Then, more impatiently, “What’d’ya’ want?” I couldn’t figure out then or since why anyone thought that highlighting so large a gap between potential plenty and actual scarcity, falling so visibly short of a professed goal, seemed desirable propaganda for the success of the regime. But most likely the two bureaucracies, the one that created and printed menus, and the one that stocked restaurants, never met. Or perhaps the missing food items could be accounted for in some other way. Rumor had it then, as later, that desirable foods went missing en route, off the farm, dropped from the truck, from the warehouse, or out the back door of the kitchen.
About one hundred years earlier, I later learned, Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice Underground, Alice in Wonderland, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, had journeyed to Russia in the midst of writing his Alice books. In his visit to a hotel restaurant in 1867, he noted that it was some consolation to find that during dinner,
we furnished a subject of the liveliest interest to our six or seven waiters …who ranged themselves in a row & gazed in a quite absorbed way at the collection of strange animals that were feeding before them... Now & then a twinge of conscience would seize them, that they were after all not fulfilling the great object of life as waiters & on these occasions they would all hurry to the end of the room, & refer to a great drawer, which seemed to contain nothing but spoons & forks. When we asked for anything, they first looked at each other in an alarmed way—then, when they had ascertained which understood the order best, they all followed his example, which always was to refer to the big drawer… (The Russian Journal of Lewis Carroll, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1935)
We ate in restaurants only every few weeks, but as foreign graduate students, we were also allowed the privilege of the professors’ dining room. Unlike the student cafeteria in the sub- basement, this somewhat nicer establishment was set higher in the dormitory, and had small tables rather than refectory seating. The food fell short of hotel or tourist quality (not itself terrific), but like some faculty clubs, pegged itself a few notches above student fare.
Food was a serious preoccupation for Russians even in the 1960s. Sufficient food supplies still spelled survival, especially for those who endured the starvation or profound hunger of the World War II years and afterwards. As late as 1947 a major famine killed a great number of people through starvation and disease, and took a toll on the health of survivors.
Although the War had ended about twenty years before we arrived, its ghosts still haunted the streets of Russia. There was a conspicuous shortage of men over forty (compared to women); and those that remained bore heavy evidence of injury, suffering severe handicaps. Beside the eight to ten million soldiers lost in the War, another 15 million Soviet citizens died from starvation and cold, illness, prison, and labor camps. (I try to picture the entire population of New York State, all of it gone.) Another 25 million were left homeless. Famine remained a real and not unfounded fear. A bulging tote bag signified successful foraging and ensured that life would go on. Almost impossible to imagine, I found it to be, to picture what it actually felt like to know there is no food at all—not just this type of food, not just in this shop, not just today, but all food, gone. How would I live my days with that haunting vision?
Sustenance apart, meals and tea in Russia traditionally held greater meaning. They served (and serve today) as occasions for expressing friendship; as symbols of sharing; signs of success; shows of hospitality and prosperity in displays of generosity and extravagance.
People gathered to break bread together; newcomers were (and are) greeted with the traditional ceremonial offering of bread and salt (pull a piece of bread from the loaf, salt it, and eat it while your hosts wait expectantly); holidays were celebrated with feasts; friendships were cemented with shared home-cooked preserves or pastries. It is hard to imagine business that didn’t begin over drinking tea together, or an evening with friends not set around an oilcloth-covered kitchen table topped with tea glasses in ornate filigreed holders, sugar cubes, fruit preserves, chocolates, simple white cookies or rich French-style cream pastries. So central to the culture was (and is) gathering around a table to eat and drink— for business, pleasure, family gathering, or friendship—that the Russian language has a single word for this “at-the-table” phenomenon (zastolye), a word without easy translation.
For us, in settings from homes to restaurants, dorm kitchens to food shops, procuring, preparing, and sharing meals were to play a role during every period of our returns to Russia. From the 1960s through the turn of the 21st century, it was hosting and being hosted, from gatherings of friends or neighbors around a kitchen table to state dinners toasting summit meetings of presidents of the United States with their Soviet or Russian counterparts—sharing a meal or tea, an enduring activity.
For a foreigner, venturing beyond Moscow was not easy during Soviet times. Today’s freedom of travel was unimaginable: travel was restricted and monitored; permission was required, and often denied; logistics undependable. Our trips in the 1960s were the most affecting, since they allowed us to cross the threshold into the enduring, yet untouristed realms of rural Russia.
When we headed out of Moscow on a railroad train or rented bus, we left a world of paved streets, high-rise buildings, indoor plumbing, and central heat for the life of the villages and small towns that had survived intact for centuries. Entering each village or town was like stepping into a movie set for an 18th- or 19th-century story. Muddy or frozen rutted dirt roads wended along lanes edged by low wooden picket fences. Within each enclosure sat a sagging, tilted log cabin, usually decorated like a gingerbread house with elaborately carved wood-framed windows and doors.
Like a Chagall painting, the rooflines of cabins perched and pitched at random angles, making the artist’s depictions seem less whimsical than photographic. Smoke from charcoal or wood stoves spiraled out of chimneys. Inside, in contrast to the bleak, tumbling- down village around, potted plants thrived on windowsills, and colorful curtains, carpets, and pillows provided cozy warmth that belied the colorlessness outdoors. Children and adults walked to and from the village pump at the well, carrying buckets of water home for washing, cooking, and bathing. Toilets were outside, in outhouses: hot and pungent in summer; icy cold in winter. Around the cabins, geese and chickens wandered erratically, pausing at the well, then squawked off out of the way of a woman with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, a water bucket suspended from each side. I saw a very resigned old horse dining on weeds, while his master, a bearded old peasant on his sled, waited patiently with his milk cans for their afternoon journey.
Riding past villages that flourished during medieval and early modern times, we could tell the seasons from the horse-drawn carts: during spring, summer, and fall, they had wheels; in winter, sled blades. The design of these
