Beyond the North Wind | Darra Goldstein
Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore
By Darra Goldstein
INTRO: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.
Darra Goldstein: I'm Darra Goldstein, and my latest book is Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore.
Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with this show.
Suzy Chase: The first time you traveled to Russia was in your imagination at five years old when you discovered a small wooden cup in your parents' closet. What was it about that cup?
Darra Goldstein: I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it was so different from anything else I had ever seen. It was wooden and engraved with woodcuts and painted, and the scene was of onion domes. So, Russian Orthodox churches although I obviously at age five couldn't say that it was a Russian Orthodox church. But I sensed that it was something very exotic, and then I was told that it had been my grandmother's, and she came from Russia. And so I created this whole narrative, this whole story about it. A couple years later, my beloved little brother did a chemistry experiment right in that cup and destroyed it.
Suzy Chase: No.
Darra Goldstein: Yes. I was devastated because the cup somehow represented everything that my grandmother would never tell me about her life in the old country. And when I was putting together the burnt pieces of this cup, I saw on the bottom that there was a stamp that said Made in USSR, and I realized that I had just created a fiction. That it wasn't from the old country. She hadn't brought it from her childhood to the United States. It was a souvenir that somehow had ended up in my parents' closet.
Suzy Chase: So let's fast forward to 1972. Can you describe what it was like to immerse yourself in Soviet Russia?
Darra Goldstein: Yeah, it was kind of frightening but at the same time exhilarating. I had tried to go there to study. It was in the depths of the Cold War, and as a young American it was quite difficult to get there. And I was accepted in the one program that would have allowed for a semester of study there.
Darra Goldstein: So I went to University of Helsinki instead to study Russia and went on a weekend jaunt with a group of Fins to Leningrad. They liked to go there because the alcohol was cheaper in the Soviet Union. My first impression after crossing the border, and the bus was very thoroughly checked by Soviet guards going into a building in what had been part of Finland but was now Soviet Union called Vyborg. And just smelling cabbage and onions.
Darra Goldstein: So my first experience was one that was perhaps not so pleasant. Cabbage and onions smell fantastic but only when they're well cooked, and this smelled old. The world seemed gray on the other side of the border, and people seemed closed up. But there was also something intriguing. I met a group of young disaffected Russians, and they took me under their wing. And I saw a completely different side. One of joyousness and hilarity and also delicious food.
Darra Goldstein: There were wonderful hot donuts. This was in November, so it was already cold and snowy. And there were fresh donuts coming right out of these big vats in little kiosks by the railroad station. There were Crimean meat pies called chebureki that also were fried, and quite luscious, and just exploded with flavor in my mouth. There were little shops that sold the Siberian dumplings known pelmeni. Where you could go in and get a steaming bowl. I really had flavors I had never encountered before.
Suzy Chase: And wasn't this around the time that it was dangerous for Russians to interact with Americans?
Darra Goldstein: Yes. They wouldn't have been arrested, but they were often called in and harassed and made to feel very uncomfortable. So the people who did open their homes to me were taking certain risk. But there's this hospitality that people are warm, the tables are filled with all kinds of food that you wouldn't necessarily have seen in the stores during the Soviet years because they wanted to do whatever they could to honor guests.
Darra Goldstein: That generosity of spirit is something that I think is deeply Russian and that I have wanted to convey to Americans. Especially now when things are once again so fraught with Russia.
Suzy Chase: So this cookbook is filled with your stories of Russian culture and spectacular recipes from obscure to well known. Would you say Russian cuisine is defined by geography?
Darra Goldstein: I think originally it was. Again, today the world is very different and you can go there and find food and produce from many parts of the world. And so it's not as limited as it once was. What I wanted to do with this book was try to go back to discover the elemental flavors, the foods that people have been cooking for a good ... Well, in terms of Russian history, Russia accepted Christianity in 988. So that is sort of the beginning of Russian history. So 1,000 years.
Darra Goldstein: And these are foods and ingredients that now we consider very healthful. There's a lot of fermentation, a lot of whole grains, a lot of cultured dairy products, root vegetables. All of these things were what they had to work with because of the cold climate. And beautiful, beautiful fish.
Suzy Chase: According to you, what's the true heart of Russian food?
Darra Goldstein: I would say that it has to do with a taste for the sour. A tanginess that you get from fermentation, from culturing, from curing. There is a lot of salted fish. There's smoked fish. There are pickles that are done through lacto-fermentation where you just layer them with salt and you get these wonderful probiotics. Russian style pickles don't use vinegar. Mushrooms are salted. A lot of the vegetables are very slow cooked. One of the distinctive things about traditional Russian cooking is that they had big masonry stoves. There was a lot of wood. That was one thing that was in abundance in the Russian north, and so people didn't have to spare fuel as they did in other parts of the world.
Darra Goldstein: These stoves were heated to very high temperatures at which point Russia's wonderful pies could be baked to get beautifully browned crusts. You could bake bread. And then as the temperature fell, you would put in slow cooked stews or vegetable dishes. One of the revelations for me was just taking turnips, which I think in the States turnips aren't a go-to vegetable the way say broccoli might be. And you just layer these turnips in a casserole and cook them very slowly with a little bit of water and a bit of sunflower oil. They turn out melting in your mouth and are really delicious.
Suzy Chase: As I've said many times on this podcast, my favorite types of cookbooks are ones that are part travel log and part recipes. In Beyond the North Wind, the photographs make us feel like we're meandering around the countryside. Tell us a little bit about the photos.
Darra Goldstein: The photos are extraordinary. I wanted the photographer to be the same photographer who had shot the pictures for my previous cookbook, Fire and Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking. His name is Stefan Wettainen, and he's a Swede of Finnish background. He just captured the landscape photography so beautifully in Fire and Ice as well as the food shots that I knew he was the one I wanted.
Darra Goldstein: But when I first asked him if he would participate in this book, he hesitated. He had grown up with his mother's stories of really severe hardship and loss during the so-called Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union 1939, 1940. And he had heard this phrase in his childhood, "Never trust a Russian even if he's been fried in butter."
Suzy Chase: Oh, wow.
Darra Goldstein: And so even though Stefan knew that was just a phrase, it had resonance for people who had experienced very difficult time, he still had some hesitation. He'd never been to Russia. But he agreed to do it, and he was really the one I wanted for another reason, too. He had been in the equivalent of what was the Swedish Navy SEALs. So he's this very hardy, strong, intrepid person, and I feel like he's the only photographer I know who would have gone 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in February to stand on the edge of the Barents Sea for over two hours at midnight in I don't remember what it was, probably -20, -30 plus wind chill factor to catch the Northern Lights, and that photograph appears in the book. So he was a wonderful travel companion.
Suzy Chase: I'm interested to hear about the allure of the Arctic for you.
Darra Goldstein: I was just there last week. There was a wonderful festival in Kirkenes, Norway, just across the border from Russian that is called the Barents Spektakel. It's a yearly arts festival that celebrates the return of the sun to these far northern places, and I presented my book there. And once again, I was struck by the quality of the light.
Darra Goldstein: So there's the sea, and there is snow. In the summer there is the midnight sun. So even though we think of Russia and the far north as a dark place, a perhaps grim place where not a lot of vegetables or other things might grow, it is incredibly beautiful in a very austere kind of crystalline way. The flavors that you get because of the nature of the soil, and then in the summer the short growing season but constant sun, means that the flavors are quite intense. Everything just feels magnified to me there. You feel as though you are on the edge of the world, and that to me is quite thrilling.
Suzy Chase: The photos to me look like it's quiet. It looks very silent.
Darra Goldstein: Yes. That was another thing I was just reminded of. We went out after midnight to chase the Northern Lights, and I live in a pretty quiet part of the country here in The Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, but there's always a little bit of residual noise from a highway that's actually across the border in Vermont, but you get sound. And there, unless you're right by the sea and of course you hear the sound of waves, but if you're away from it, it is absolute stillness. And you feel that there's still wilderness in the world. You can go to places where you don't see human trace.
Suzy Chase: My all-time favorite episode of Parts Unknown was when Anthony Bourdain and Zamir Gotta drank lots and lots of vodka. In the book you wrote about Russians' love of vodka, can you talk a little bit about that?
Darra Goldstein: It is in the summer very refreshing. You drink it ice cold right out of the freezer, and so it chills and cools. In the winter when you're cold, that initial taste is chilling, but then as it slides down your throat and gets into your body, it warms you up. So it's a very functional drink in that regard. It also is really wonderful with salty things like caviar or different kinds of smoked fish, salted pickles. It is a perfect accompaniment to the appetizers that Russians call Zakuski which are these small bites that you have to whet the appetite before the meal proper.
Darra Goldstein: What I like to do is take plain vodka and infuse it with different flavorings. My favorite is probably horseradish. That's another stereotype about Russian food, that it's very bland. They really love horseradish and strong mustard. So it is not a palette cuisine. You add some horseradish to vodka, let it infuse for 24-48 hours, and it has this beautiful kick, or you can make pepper vodka. Another one I like that is quite subtle is you smash some cherry hits and let those infuse. It is a pale, pink vodka that is quite delicate and lovely.
Darra Goldstein: You always have to toast when you drink vodka. You're never supposed to just drink it, and you toast to your friends, you toast to peace, you toast to people's accomplishments. You toast to people who are no longer with us. It is a real art to be poetic with the toasts that you give.
Suzy Chase: So on the other hand, I don't think of honey when I think of Russia, but early travelers wrote of great pools and lakes of honey in Russia's forest. It became one of Russia's most valuable exports. Over the weekend, I made your recipe for sour cream honey cake on page 260. Now sour cream and honey, those are two flavors I wouldn't ever think about putting together.
Darra Goldstein: That, to me, is a wonderfully Russian combination. Because the honey, the Russians do have a sweet tooth, and they always used honey until sugar became more widely available and less expensive in the late 19th century. So that isn't really that long ago. Sour cream mitigates the plain sweetness of honey and gives it that tiny bit of tang that the Russians really like. So you put the two together, and I think it's a pretty brilliant combination. That cake is so ... Did you enjoy it?
Suzy Chase: Yeah, it's so light and lovely and so different.
Darra Goldstein: The chef who gave me the recipe came from Murmansk to demonstrate this cake for the audience, and it was every bit as good as I remembered it in her hands.
Suzy Chase: Now, did she make it square?
Darra Goldstein: No, she made it round.
Suzy Chase: Okay. Because in the cookbook it says to make it in a square, but I couldn't do a square so I did round.
Darra Goldstein: Yeah. You can do it square, round. The reason I did it square was so that I could do these freeform shapes on a baking sheet, but you could make the rounds using a tart ring or a cake pan. The main thing is to have the honey cake layers with the sour cream in between that you allow to soften the honey cake layers, and then the whole thing becomes one delectable whole.
Suzy Chase: Yesterday, I made your recipe for classic cabbage soup. Can you describe this recipe?
Darra Goldstein: This recipe is really awesome. You know how I said at the beginning of our conversation that my first smell of the Soviet Union was of cabbage and onions, and it wasn't good?
Suzy Chase: Yep.
Darra Goldstein: I discovered old recipes for what is known as 24 hour soup. So it's not a quickly made cabbage soup where you just sautée some onions and garlic and then perhaps you would have a beef broth, and then you would add the cabbage, and you cook it, and there's your cabbage soup. The classic Russian soup is made with sauerkraut, and again it is that taste for the sour that differentiates the Russian cabbage soup from others, and the brilliant thing about the 24 hour one is that you take the sauerkraut and you bake it in the oven. That caramelizes the sugars that are in the cabbage, and so you get this really ... I'm actually starting to salivate as I think about it. You get this really wonderfully richly flavored sauerkraut that you then freeze.
Darra Goldstein: Of course, in old Russian in the winter you just stuck the pot outdoors and it froze. Now I take it and put it in the freezer. And from that previously frozen sauerkraut which also mellows the flavor of it so that it's not so sharp, you make this cabbage soup. It is really beautiful, and it completely upended my ideas about what cabbage soup is. And now I love it.
Suzy Chase: It was so multilayered, and you're right. I think the roasting of the sauerkraut mellowed out the sour part.
Darra Goldstein: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: It's so good.
Darra Goldstein: So it has a bit of a sweet edge, but it's not cloying.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called My Favorite Cookbook, aside from this cookbook what is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?
Darra Goldstein: If there's one cookbook that I keep going back to and still discovering new recipes from, it's Richard Sax's classic home desserts, and it's a compendium of a baking and other kinds of desserts with some historical recipes with copious headnotes, but the main thing is that all of his recipes work beautifully, and one of my favorites that I make all the time is chocolate cloud cake. It's a flourless chocolate cake that sort of sinks like a crater in the middle, and then you fill that crater with whipped cream, and it just melts in your mouth.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Darra Goldstein: So my website is DarraGoldstein, that's one word, DarraGoldstein.com. Instagram which I love is Darra.Goldstein. Twitter is Darra_Goldstein.
Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Well thanks, Darra, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Darra Goldstein: Thanks so much for your interest, Suzy, and enjoy your cabbage soup tonight.
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