Tag Archives: Nikita Khrushchev

Cornbread with a Side of Stalinist Hijinks

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von bremzenLast fall at the Brooklyn Book Festival, I wandered over to one of the stages where a panel of food writers were holding court and became instantly charmed by a woman with audacious glasses, voluminous scarves and a loud Russian-accented voice. She was just the blend of frank and weird that I like in my authors, so I resolved to read her newest book, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.

I’m so glad I did. Anya von Bremzen’s bizarre mash-up of cookbook, family history and anthropological study of Homo Sovieticus is one of the oddest but most enjoyable food volumes I’ve ever laid hands on. There is surprisingly little talk of borscht, but instead you’ll learn about Russian meat patties while also finding out how Stalin kept himself amused at his summer house meals. (It involved leaving tomatoes on chairs and exhorting high Politburo officials to put “dick” signs on Khruschev’s back. That wacky, mass-murdering prankster!) And the book is beautifully written, so much so that I laughed out loud when she described how her ex-boyfriend humbly offered himself up to co-author her first book and correct her “wonky English.”

cornbreadThe USSR seemingly having been full of voracious meat-eaters whenever supplies allowed, there aren’t a lot of recipes here for a vegetarian to attempt, but von Bremzen did provide a recipe for cornbread that I was eager to try. She actually included it as something of a joke, representative of Khrushchev’s certainty that corn was going to solve all of the USSR’s food shortage problems. Instead, he managed only to baffle and disgust millions of Russians who held firmly to the belief that bread could be made only with wheat. For this, he earned the title Corn Man, which I gather sounds like a worse insult in Russian than in English.

Anyway, the USSR was a massive place, and some of the people there did, in fact, eat corn, like in Moldova, whence the author drew the cornbread recipe. I was attracted to it mostly because it calls for as much feta cheese as it does cornmeal, with some butter and sour cream to boot. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Cold War Cola (1959)

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There is obviously a deep human desire for sweetness, and blackness (in your tummy, fool, Heaven forbid the other!), and a good swift jolt of the jitters.  Once upon a time, spices drove economies—and thus politics—but today we have Coca-Cola and its descendents.  Just over one billion cans of Coke are sold each day across the globe.  Short of North Korea and the Mongolian Steppes, you’d be hard pressed, I suspect, to find someone who hasn’t tasted it.  Coke is America’s ambassador; Wikipedia lists 52 non-Coke colas, all built on the Coke template.

Now, if you’re a country that wants no truck with The States, you’ve got to come up with your own competitor to sate your masses.  Iran has three native colas, including Parsi Cola and Zam Zam Cola, the latter of which was owned by Pepsi from its creation in 1954 until the Revolution in 1979.

The Well of Zamzam is located 66 feet from the Kaaba, that big granite cube that everyone on the Hajj circles.  In Islamic lore, it sprung up from the desert at the word from God when Abraham’s son Ishmael was crying from thirst.  In the 2000s, Mecca Cola emerged from the U.K. to compete with Zam Zam, and a fourth Muslim cola, Evoca, boasts as its secret ingredient black seed, of which Mohammed apparently said, “It is the cure for all diseases but death.”

Perhaps Vatican alchemists are working on the Gethsemane Gulp as I type. Continue reading →