Preface

In the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union were still locked in the Cold War. Brezhnev’s “Era of Stagnation” meant that stores stocked little more than sprouting potatoes and onions. The city claimed two (two!) decent restaurants, neither of which served Russian food. Standard hotel restaurant menus were ceremoniously presented in heavy red leather folders that promised abundance in eight pages of food items. Yet any attempt to order something beyond the ubiquitous meat cutlets and potatoes was met with a peremptory and disdainful nyet. This cookbook, which originally appeared in 1983 as À la Russe: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality, was my response to a central paradox of Russian/Soviet life. I needed to reconcile the elegant dining of the Russian classics—Gogol’s four-cornered pie that could make “a dead man’s mouth water,” Tolstoy’s Flensburg oysters, Chekhov’s blini as “plump as the shoulder of a merchant’s daughter”—with the Soviet Union’s meager, proletarian fare.