The Quilt Inn Country Cookbook

Aliske Webb

,200 recipes provides us with a window from which to view a lost and somewhat

forgotten age, where a well run household, serfless (see above) yet with servants, was

equal only to running a major corporation today. The typical young Russian bride

needed all the organizational capabilities of a major-general.

In fact, the author, Elena Molokhovets, was from a military family, andher meal

preparations came by her honestly. She had ten children, nine boys and a girl, as well

as many grandchildren, either too numerous to count or missing from the Russian

census. Gift was an instant and utter success, and Elena continued to revise, edit

(although clearly with a light hand) and add to the book for another 50 years, when she

disappeared without a trace, presumably a victim of the Revolution, or indigestion.

After the Revolution, she was quoted widely, albeit sarcastically, in Soviet

circles, such as her answer to the problem of unexpected guests. “Send the servant

into the cold cellar for hazel grouse or a ham.” But of course! Many of Lenin’s followers

held her responsible for representing the excesses of bygone days. Is Julia Child’s fate

to be the same?

Anyway, after a few years, the acerbic humor became more wistful, and turned

eventually into disbelief. Could a time of such foodstuffs ever have existed in the

Motherland? Had family members ever sat down to huge meat pies, sturgeon in aspic,

mounds of crayfish, souffles and babas? Had there ever been a time when there was

so much caviar that it was used to clarify beef bouillon and then thrown away?

Even though the servants certainly weren’t eating these delicacies, they did

have access to abundance. There were pirogi (a kind of pie), kasha (grains), shchi

(cabbage soup), kvass (a beverage fermented from black bread), beets, potatoes,

roast goose, duck, pork, and beef, many varieties of fresh, dried and marinated fish,

sauerkraut, sausage and pickles. These staples became harder and harder to find

after the Revolution, even with the exalted “progress” advertised on a yearly basis by

Lenin, Stalin, et seq. Twentieth Century modernism that never quite made it from

revolutionary tome to actuality.

Tamara, our Russian expatriate, urged us to incorporate many of the recipes

as regular fare at The Quilt Inn. I think not. Not because we are not adventurous but

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Country Cooking