Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives
704
Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253212108 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/22/1998 |
| Series: | Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies |
| Edition description: | Annotated |
| Pages: | 704 |
| Sales rank: | 936,648 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.80(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
Classic Russian Cooking
Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives
By Joyce Toomre
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1992 Joyce ToomreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21210-8
INTRODUCTION
All cookbooks start as manuals of instruction, but some develop an extra richness as they age. In such books, it is the asides or the glimpses of another culture that come to captivate us as much as their antiquated directions for frying an egg or roasting a pig. Embedded in the language of every recipe are assumptions about the reader and his or her milieu, skills, and resources. A collection of recipes is even more informative, both for what it includes and for what it omits. Recipes are rooted in time and space; essentially static, they function as snapshots of a culture. Like translations, they usually serve the needs of a parties lar group of people in a particular locale. With rare exceptions, they do not move easily from place to place or from one generation to another.
A Gift to Young Housewives is one of those exceptions. For more than half a century, from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 to the onset of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Elena Molokhovets oversaw the successive editions of her book. Her volume was a treasured asset in many families where it was handed down from one generation to another and even carried into exile. Her name (pronounced Ma4a-hah-VYETS) became a household word and passed into the culture of the period. Chekhov parodied her menus in one of his early humorous sketches, "Kalendar' Budil'nika" [Alarm-clock's Calendar], by offering a series of absurd daily menus. One of them, for journalists, consisted of eight courses: (1) a glass of vodka, (2) daily shchi with yesterday's kasha, (3) 2 glasses of vodka, (4) suckling pig with horseradish, (5) 3 glasses of vodka, (6) horseradish, cayenne pepper, and soy sauce, (7) 4 glasses of vodka, and (8) 7 bottles of beer. Another spoof of Molokhovets, this time of her Easter table, was published by the Russian writer and poet Nadezhda Teffi in 1912. By Soviet times, Molokhovets and her recipes were no longer a laughing matter. She became a symbol of bourgeois decadence to Communist ideologues and the object of envy in a time of food shortages in a poem by the Soviet poet Arsenij Tarkovskij who, to quote Alan Davidson, "devised for her a fate worthy of Dante's Inferno." Instead of preparing crayfish bordelaise or imperial aspics, she sits under an icy rock face reciting her culinary "Testament" while in one hand she holds an insatiable worm and in the other — her skull mumbling in a colander ("tvoj cherep mjamlit v durkhshlage").
After the revolution, the Soviets never reprinted the book in its entirety, but within several months after the collapse of the Soviet Union new reprints of the full text of A Gift to Young Housewives were being hawked on the streets of Moscow. In the late 1980s articles about Molokhovets accompanied by some of her recipes appeared in the Moscow newspaper Vechernjaja Moskva [Evening Moscow]. Two small collections from A Gift to Young Housewives were published in Moscow in 1989. One booklet contains recipes for sweet dishes such as waffles, sweet pies, ice creams, tortes, and mazurkas. Recipes in the other booklet are limited to fast day dishes and to kuliches and paskhas, which are an integral part of the traditional Easter table. This odd selection showing the extremes of austerity and lavishness of the Russian kitchen seems to be tied to the resurgence of religious activity in the Soviet Union.
Molokhovets' cookbook is encyclopedic; it describes a cuisine and culture that have now vanished and for that reason alone it deserves to be more widely available. She was writing for inexperienced housewives at a time when Russian cuisine was at its zenith. Her culinary standards were high, but she knew the value of a kopeck. I hope this translation will introduce readers to Russian cuisine in all its simplicity and in all its glory. Like the original, it is meant to be used in the kitchen. Readers with a Slavic background will find in these pages many dishes that they have heard about from their grandmothers. Aside from practicing cooks, the book should also interest Slavists, social historians, and culinary historians.
This Introduction is intended to help the reader understand the cultural significance of the dishes. It is not a history of Russian cookery per se, but rather an impressionistic reconstruction of household conditions based on anecdotes and scraps of evidence taken from a wide variety of sources. The systematic documentation of these issues must be left to others. My aim throughout has been to provide enough background information for the text to be appreciated by one group of readers while not belaboring the obvious for another. The Introduction also synthesizes Molokhovets' views on household management. These cover a wide range of topics — everything from her opinions on feeding the servants and entertaining guests to her detailed instructions for growing mushrooms in the cellar, constructing a bed for the cook in the kitchen, and preserving grapes in one of the second floor rooms.
Since beginning work on this book, my views of Russian culinary history have changed dramatically. I began by regarding the kitchen activities in Tsarist Russia as quaint and backward, but with time I realized that the Russians shared many domestic and culinary problems with other rural preindustrial societies and solved them in similar ways. Thus, wherever possible, I have pointed out analogies with English, Western European, and American practices. In the Introduction I have been lavish in the use of notes, partly because my audience is so diverse and partly to provide guidance for further research. All books mentioned in the notes are listed in the bibliography. I have appended notes to individual recipes only when I wanted to bring some particular issue to the reader's attention or to explain some point that might not be immediately obvious. I have provided introductory commentary for just a few of the separate chapters, inasmuch as the basic information about Russian dishes is available elsewhere and to expound on it further would require another volume. My essay only suggests some of the main topics in Russian culinary history; I hope it will inspire other scholars to carry the research forward.
The first edition of Molokhovets I read was the twentieth (published in 1897), since it was the only one available at the Harvard University Library. Several years later, the library staff at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign obtained a microfilm of the first edition, published in 1861, which allowed me to follow the growth and development of Molokhovets' work. (The differences between the early and late editions are discussed later in this Introduction.) After comparing different editions of Molokhovets' book, I found that there are distinct advantages to working with a later edition of a cookbook. As Elizabeth David, the preeminent modern English writer on cookery, has noted, "first editions ... wouldn't be anything like as interesting to serious students of cookery as later ones, in which the authors themselves have made revisions, corrected errors, added new recipes, brought cooking methods up to date, and incorporated recently introduced ingredients."
The twentieth edition of A Gift to Young Housewives consists of approximately 800 pages of very small type. Except for a few diagrams, there are no illustrations. The present translation includes about a quarter of the original recipes, each of which is numbered according to the 1897 edition. Although some colleagues have objected to my abridging the text on the grounds of intellectual integrity, the repetitive nature of many of the recipes made it feasible, if not entirely desirable, to do so. With jams or syrups, for instance, Molokhovets often repeated the same recipe, changing only the kind of fruit. She similarly repeated herself in most of the fast day recipes. Chapter 40 — Fast Day Ices, Compotes, and Kissels — is no more than a list of numbered recipe titles referring the reader back to the appropriate recipe in Chapter 14 with the admonition to substitute fish glue for gelatin.
I began by roughly translating the entire text. Although I knew which recipes had to be included because of special culinary or cultural considerations, it was not easy to assure a balanced selection. My goal was to put together a group of recipes that seemed interesting from a contemporary American viewpoint, but at the same time demonstrated the full range of Russian ingredients and techniques. I also tried to keep the same proportion of recipes that had been carried over from the first edition. Molokhovets' habit of following a longish basic recipe with several derivations considerably eased the process of deciding what to include and what to omit. Nevertheless, each chapter had its agonizing moments. (A full list of recipes appears at the end of the book.) Once the recipes were selected, I settled down to turning them into something approaching idiomatic English. Along the way, I checked out puzzling terms with native Russian speakers and obscure culinary processes with cooks and historians.
Like humans, cookbooks tend to expand with age. Often the first edition of a cookbook is quite slender while successive editions grow ever larger. Elena Molokhovets' cookbook fits that pattern. The first edition began with fifteen hundred recipes, the twentieth edition of 1897 (upon which the present translation is based) had grown to thirty-two hundred and eighteen, while the last Russian edition of the book, published in Berlin in the 1920s, finished by adding another thousand recipes.
A Gift to Young Housewives reflects the basic division of Russian cuisine by providing recipes for both meat days and fast days. In later editions, Molokhovets reformulated the main chapters for soups, sauces, vegetables, fish, desserts, etc., into parallel chapters with recipes for fast days. Preserving stores for winter was an important feature of Russian household management, and Molokhovets included several chapters on making wine, jams, vinegars, and kvass. In addition, she described various cuts of meat and gave hints for cooking, prices, and measurements. She suggested menus for grand occasions, daily menus for three levels of income, fast day menus, and menus for servants and for children. She provided sample floor plans for summer homes and apartments as well as suggestions for arranging the kitchen. She also listed equipment and utensils useful in the kitchen and dining room and gave directions for setting the table for dinner or for tea.
Development of Cookbooks in Russia
Cookbooks, as such, became common in Russia only in the 1840s. The best early source for establishing the history of Russian cuisine comes not from a cookbook, but from a manual of domestic literature. The Domostroj [Domestic management], which dates from the mid sixteenth century, is a prescriptive book with a very conservative ideology that outlines proper behavior toward the church and state as well as toward family and servants. It includes religious, moral, and domestic precepts for almost all facets of life — everything from how to behave in church (stand up straight without wriggling or shifting from one foot to another) to how to brew beer. The Domostroj belongs to that common European genre of manuals of which the fourteenth century French text Le ménagier de Paris is one of the best known examples. Domestic manuals became popular in Russia in the late seventeenth century and continued to be published through the eighteenth century. Early works of this type were based upon Polish translations of Greek and Latin originals. Later, translations from German texts appeared, such as Florinus' Ekonomiia {Agricultural and household management}, which was published in 1738.
Household manuals were another source for cookbooks. These differed from the domestic manuals in that the emphasis was not on religious and moral themes but on the practical problems of managing one's estate or farm. Cooking, for the writers of these manuals, was a task like any other and did not receive much special attention. Kitchen chores simply blended into the daily and seasonal press of activity common to all preindustrial rural households. In such circumstances, a chapter or two of recipes was sufficient; just as important were the instructions on tending the orchard, keeping bees, and handling the livestock. Manuals of this type were published right through the nineteenth century and were available up to the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917. A good example is the Nastol'naja kniga [Manual], which was distributed as a free supplement to the magazine Zhivopisnoe obozrenie {Pictorial review} in 1895. In addition to a chapter devoted to recipes and another to preserves, the editors included a list of male and female Orthodox names as well as a list of saint's days according to the Old Style and New Style Calendars; instructions for managing fields, meadows, and forests; veterinary advice for cattle, birds, and dogs; and directions for building a house and installing one's own telegraph system. Even Molokhovets expanded her cookbook in 1880 to include sections on personal health and hygiene, the care of sick adults and children, and the care, feeding, and diseases of domestic birds and animals. This new material, however, seems never to have been as popular as her recipes and was not reprinted with later editions of her cookbook.
Cookbooks began to be published in Russia in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Sergej Drukovtsev's book Povarennye zapiski {Cooking notes}, which was published in Moscow in 1779, probably deserves to be considered the first although it contains only very limited descriptions of Russian peasant dishes and Russian national dishes. With directions so minimal that they verge on the enigmatic, it is hard to envision the dishes, much less recreate them. Another problem is that Drukovtsev only numbered his recipes without giving them names, which would have been much more useful for the historian.
During the 1780s and 1790s several German and French cookery books were translated into Russian. Most of these translations were rather free-form, omitting large sections of the original work and adding new material that was considered more suitable for Russian conditions. Among the most important of the books translated was Menon's La cuisiniére bourgeoise, first published in Paris in 1746. This was translated by Nikolaj Jatsenkov and was published in Russia in 1790-91 as Novejshaja i polnaja povarennaja kniga [The newest complete cookery book]. Several original collections of recipes were published in the 1790s as well. Nikolaj Petrovich Osipov (1751-1799), for instance, published the Starinnaja russkaja khozjajka, kljuchnitsa i strjapukha [Old-time Russian mistress of the household, housekeeper, and cook] in 1790 and Novyj i polnyj rossijskoj khozjajstvennoj vinokur {The new and complete Russian domestic vintner} in 1796. The Old-time Russian Mistress of the Household, Housekeeper, and Cook is a miscellany of household hints and recipes, all arranged alphabetically. By beginning with directions for cleaning diamond objects and then explaining how to distinguish true diamonds from false, Osipov gave an unexpectedly vivid glimpse of his intended audience, which clearly was wealthy and educated. Only later did he turn to more prosaic matters like the making of barberry jam or the bleaching of linen. In 1795-1797, Vasilij Alekseevich Levshin (1746-1826) published an important culinary dictionary; in 1800, Pankrat Sumarokov (1765-1814), the nephew of the well-known author, published another.
Aside from these various antiquarian considerations, the first author of really popular cookbooks in Russia was Katerina Alekseevna Avdeeva (1789-1865), the elder sister of the well-known journalist and man of letters Nikolaj Alekseevich Polevoj (1796-1846). The cookbooks of this prolific author were well reviewed and went through numerous editions. The cost of this popularity was that she was beset by imitators and plagiarizers. In 1851 she published a declaration acknowledging authorship of only the following four cookbooks: Ruchnaja kniga russkoj opytnoj khozjajki {Handbook of an experienced Russian mistress of the household} (1842); Karmannaja povarennaja kniga {The pocket cookbook} (1846); Rukovodstvo dlja khozjaek, kljuchnits, ekonomok i kukharok {Handbook for the mistress of the household, the housekeeper, steward, and cook} (1846); and Ekonomicheskij leksikon {Steward's lexicon}, written with her son and published in 1848. Her books remained popular after her death and imitations continued to be published until well into the 1870s when her name and works were finally eclipsed by the success of Molokhovets' cookbook.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Classic Russian Cooking by Joyce Toomre. Copyright © 1992 Joyce Toomre. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction by Joyce Toomre Development of Cookbooks in Russia Biography of Elena Ivanova Molokhovets Influence of the Russian Orthodox Church Eastern Influence on Russian Cuisine French Influence on Russian Cuisine Mealtimes and Menus Table Service and Settings Image of a Russian Household Water Stoves and Ovens Food Preservation and Storage Containers and Utensils Servants Health Markets Ingredients Cooking Techniques Comparison between First and Twentieth Editions Issues of Translation Measurements and Conversions Advice to Modern Cooks NotesAppendix A Ingredient by CategoryAppendix B Weights and MeasuresAppendix C GlossaryElena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives Author's Introduction to the Twentieth Edition Evening Tea Arrangement of the Kitchen 1. Soups 2. Soup Accompaniments 3. Sauces 4. Vegetables, Greens, and Garnishes 5. Beef, Veal, Mutton, and Pork 6. Domestic and Wild Birds and Salad Accompaniments 7. Fish and Crayfish 8. Pirogs and Pates 9. Aspics and Other Cold Dishes 10. Puddings 11. Crepes, Pancakes for Butter Week, Sippets, and Eggs 12. Filled Dumplings, Macaroni, and Kasha 13. Waffles, Wafers, Doughnuts, and Fritters 14. Ice Creams, Mousses, Kissels, and Compotes 15. Tortes 16. Mazurkas and Other Small Pastries 17. Babas, Buns, Rusks, and Small Baked Goods etc. through chapter 42.Complete List of Recipes in the Twentieth EditionBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Classic Russian Cooking is a book that I highly recommend. Joyce Toomre has done a marvelous job of translating this valuable and fascinating source book. It's the Fanny Farmer and Isabella Beeton of Russia's 19th century.