Oak Brook food consultant Jane Armstrong traveled with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra`s tour of Moscow and Leningrad in November to help arrange meals. Her culinary adventures follow.
Many musicians in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had heard the horror stories of bad food, no food, food swimming in fat and food loaded with salt in the Soviet Union. So before their tour began in November I was asked to help by meeting with chefs to plan menus, checking out the kitchens, supervising cooking procedures and overseeing the service. Sometimes that even meant shopping the farmers` markets to get fresh fruits and vegetables.
Several orchestra members also had dietary restrictions: There were some vegetarians and others on low-sodium and low-fat/cholesterol diets.
Such concerns, I learned later, were foreign in the Soviet Union, where the No. 1 dietary problem is getting enough calories.
In Leningrad water was a huge problem: It could cause severe illness. Bottled water from France, dispensed daily to the 200 musicians, families and staff and the 100 trustees and patrons on the tour, was only a partial solution. Attention to how fruits and vegetables were washed and how beverages were made also became priorities.
Even milk for the morning porridge so many grew to love had to be made by reconstituting dry milk with the bottled water.
Upon arrival in the Soviet Union, the group was greeted by a moist, heavy snow and another atmospheric phenomenon that was to be with us for the next 2 1/2 weeks: the pungent odor of cigarette smoke. Practically everyone in the Soviet Union smokes, including cooks, dishwashers and waiters.
Some meals for patrons were planned at several cooperative restaurants, part of the government`s limited bow to private enterprise, but these proud independent entrepreneurs have a difficult time making a profit after shopping at the expensive open markets, which is the only place to get the ingredients they need.
Planning menus for more than one or two days ahead was next to impossible because there is no way of knowing what foods will be available.
At the cooperative restaurant Aragui, which specializes in the food of Georgia, one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, I asked for an eggplant dish with walnuts, a Georgian specialty, but was told they couldn`t be sure of getting eggplant. They also weren`t sure if they could get Georgian red wine, but could promise, of course, vodka and domestic champagne.
A market in Leningrad
To check out produce in Leningrad, I visited the Vasilevski market, which turned out to be very primitive, with fruits limited to apples, pears, tangerines, pomegranates and persimmons.
Root vegetables and cabbage in every form predominated. Pickled heads of garlic, spicy peppers, stuffed eggplant and shredded cabbage were among the Russian version of ”convenience foods.” Pork, rabbit, some fish, a little fresh cheese and walnuts made up the protein offerings.
Few can afford meat, however. With an average monthly wage of 250 to 300 rubles, what laborer can spend 15 rubles a pound for pork?
On our first night, the executive chef, Elena Denisova at the hotel in Leningrad couldn`t have been more willing to please, saying a creamed vegetable soup was no problem. But plain roast breast of chicken was unheard- of. Chicken was fried, Kiev-style, baked in sour cream or stewed. It was never cooked unadorned.
But I gave Denisova some food magazines and vegetable recipes, including one for a pate. That evening she surprised me-and I think the tour members as well-with perfect roast chicken, and a few days later with vegetable pate.
At the invitation of two young entrepreneurs, I visited Restaurant Nevsky to hear a proposal for a Thanksgiving dinner to be served to the orchestra patrons. Eugene Birman and Ivan Salmaxov, in a joint venture with an American in New York, were trying to build a special-interest and incentive travel business. They had convinced the leading restaurant in Leningrad to offer the first American-Soviet Thanksgiving dinner.
In a meeting with the restaurant director, her executive chef, who had won first place in the Soviet chef`s competition, and a ”doctor of hygiene,” we discussed everything on the menu, including each of the 16 zakuski,
(Russian hors d`oeuvres), but nothing in more detail than how the turkeys would be cooked. The fresh turkeys were bought from farmers on the outskirts of Leningrad.
Arriving Thanksgiving afternoon, there were greetings of ”Happy Thanksgiving!” along with glasses of champagne. Tables of carved fruits and vegetables adorned the dining room. During the zakuski and first courses of ramekin of sturgeon and caviar and blini, I slipped into the kitchen to test the turkey with my instant-read meat thermometer. The birds had been cooked to the right temperature and proved very tasty.
We had cranberries, a delicious nutty rice pilaf, apple fritters and what were called mashed potatoes but looked more like potato pancakes.
Because turkey was not available to the hotel, I requested chicken Kiev for the orchestra before their concert and journey to Moscow.
A market in Moscow
Moscow`s Central Market is drastically different from the Vasilevski in Leningrad. Housed in a large, domed building, it has more vendors and customers, as well as more food and greater variety.
Dairy products included a lot of fresh cheese-feta, ricotta, farmers` and cream-butter and heavy cream. Beef was prominent along with pork and some game. Cabbage again appeared in many forms, but the most activity was along the pickled produce aisle.
Two of the best meals in Moscow came from cooperative restaurants.
At Razgulai, a restaurant that could seat only 60 in three cozy rooms, blue linens matched the costumes of the waitresses. Each table was filled with an array of zakuski: smoked salmon, crab salad, pickled wild mushrooms, liver pate, chicken and nut terrine and tomatoes and cucumbers. A sort of watered-down Kool-Aid was served in clay jugs, but vodka was the preferred drink.
Salmon caviar and blini (two large crepes folded in quarters) were offered as a separate course before the main dish of pelmeni, filling but flavorful meat-filled dumplings served in a buttery broth with diced ham and mushrooms and topped with sour cream and dill. The pelmeni are native to Siberia, where rib-sticking, calorie-laden food is necessary for warmth. A pleasant, light Bulgarian red wine accompanied them.
A simple dessert of cassaba melon and ice cream was a refreshing ending.
(The Russians love ice cream; it is not uncommon to see them eating it from cones while walking in the snow.)
Spicy Georgian cuisine
Parismani restaurant, serving the food of Georgia, was the most organized of the eateries we visited. Service was efficient; food was hot and very fresh. Because produce is plentiful in this southern republic, it is an important part of its cuisine.
Georgian cooking is much more complex, spicy and aromatic than most other Soviet food. Walnuts, garlic, hot peppers, pomegranates, lemons, vinegar, yogurt, cilantro, dill, mint and sour fruits are used a lot.
Served family-style, the dishes seemed to keep coming. No sooner did we think we had sampled everything than another four would appear.
There were khechapuri, a cheese-stuffed hot bread; ajapsandali, a savory vegetable stew; badrijani nigvzit, eggplant stuffed with a spicy walnut-garlic sauce; khinkali, very moist, delicate dumplings filled with ground beef and pork served with broth; a noodle-cheese dish resembling kugel; a spicy beef-vegetable stew seasoned with turmeric, cumin, cilantro, onion and garlic;
chicken in a yogurt sauce reminiscent of Indian tandoori chicken; turmeric-spiced lentils also like an Indian dal; beets in a creamy walnut sauce; and a spicy meat dish that we thought was mutton.
Baskets of country bread and platters of sliced radishes, flat-leaf parsley, feta and farmers` cheese were counterpoints to the explosive flavors. Hotel meals
In contrast to the creativity found in the cooperative restaurants, meals at the hotel were disappointing, mostly because of bureaucracy. In spite of an army of waiters and a kitchen full of workers, long waits in the dining room were not uncommon. The service could have been simplified, of course, but the staff was set in its ways. For instance, there was no such thing as one waiter pitching in to help another.
The best meal of the day generally was breakfast. Served cafeteria-style, a typical breakfast included a cold buffet of smoked fish, pickled vegetables, feta and kefir (a fermented milk product), plus a choice of hot dishes such as sausages, shirred eggs, cream of rice cereal or porridge (a very creamy, slightly sweet oatmeal), blintzes, kasha (coarsely ground buckwheat), fried cheese and braised cabbage and onions.
Our bread was the state-made white and firm-grained, slightly sour rye, which was served everywhere. To our surprise, the coffee in Moscow was remarkably good, as was the tea.
Over all, the food for lunches and dinners was good but limited in variety. Vegetables were mainly potatoes, carrots, cabbage and occasionally mushrooms. There might be cabbage-carrot or cabbage-apple slaw as an hors d`oeuvre and cooked carrots with the meat. Potatoes could appear in soup, a salad and again in a casserole. If I hadn`t requested other vegetables for lunches and dinners, we would have been served only potatoes.
A few culinary surprises, however, made up for such repetition. Small crepe cups filled with hot mushrooms accompanied an onion-stuffed chicken patty at one meal. At others there were a liver pate tartlet, sliced orange hors d`oeuvres, baked cod with mushrooms and potatoes and a flaky piroshki-small meat-filled pastry turnovers served with chicken broth.
For the last dinner in Moscow I requested beef stroganoff, which was served with mashed potatoes and braised carrot and potato sticks. It was truly delicious, but it was hard to explain the first course of cold sliced pork and a bacon-potato salad.
All of us were touched by the genuine desire of everyone to please us. Because American views of cooking and eating are so different from those in the Sovet Union, it is easy to understand why it was such an undertaking to feed us.
Many more exchanges with food specialists from the United States will be necessary before Soviet chefs and food planners can meet the expectations of American travelers.
