Life in Cowtown

Unlike many exotic or unknown cuisines which have gained traction in recent years (Georgian, Turkish or Argentine), Russian cuisine remains in relative obscurity, especially in Canada. Apparently my countrymen despite their increasing numbers are not doing their part in spearheading the effort to introduce the food to our adoptive country. When we first moved to Canada there were very few folk from Russia here, and every time you’d inadvertently overhear someone speak Russian it would be an immediate occasion to introduce oneself and often make a new friend. There was exactly one small store selling Russian food, and people drove from across the city to see and buy familiar ingredients.  

Now it’s heard much more frequently around town, and there are several excellent stores carrying Russian themed items, yet I’ve never seen a native Canadian shop in such a store, even for the sake of curiosity.  The situation is often not helped by the store owner themselves, who sometimes speak poor English and are unable to help a bewildered customer navigate unfamiliar items and wax eloquent about their favorites. Even a local food writer extraordinaire dee Hobsbawn-Smith completely neglected Russian stores in her otherwise excellent book Shop Talk: The Open-All-Hours Insider’s Guide to Finding Great Ingredients in Calgary.  But there are some things which must be shared with the world, so without further ado, here is my tour of a typical Russian store with my highlighted favorites.

As you walk through the door you will see three things common to all Russian stores – tea, jams and canned goods. The teas are mainly imported due to Russian writing on the side of the box, although it comes from London, and can be seen in a few other stores around town, like the small market adjoining Atlas. The jams are rather unique – they are closer to preserves than a traditional jam and are softer and runnier, typically made with just sugar. The labels should help you navigate and some may even contain English labels. The flavors are more common to Russia – cranberry, black currant, red currant, blackberry and cherry are lined up next to the usual flavors of apricot, raspberry and strawberry. In the photo below the first half of the shelves is taken up with sweetened condensed milk and dolce de leche, both ingredients crucial to baking.

Loose tea from London

Next to the tea there are bins and bins of candy – mainly caramel and chocolate. They were rare toward the end of the Soviet era, so many people are quite nostalgic about their flavors. I am not a huge fan of most of them as they consist of a hard caramel shell with a soft fruity filling inside. Meh. The one exception are the candy with a cow on the label – they are fudgy and addictive. There are small bags around if you feel like trying one or a few – it’s candy you can’t go too far wrong.

The canned food section is vast and confusing. If you’re unfamiliar with Russian food, you should stay away from much of it at the beginning. Russian cuisine is not always friendly to untutored exploration and there is too much that will not be a good intro to a western palate. Basically baby steps – try what I’m recommending first before venturing into the murkier depths of traditional soups and spreads. A good place to start though is the vast variety of pickled items. Russia has always had cold and long winters and people had to rely on root cellars and preserving food to make it last through the winter to the harvest ahead. So the food culture evolved around whole grains, root vegetables, fermented foods and meat. On the shelf below you’ll see pickled red peppers, pickled watermelon, pickled cukes, pickled cabbage, pickled tomatoes, pickled zucchini and sauerkraut. You can’t go too far wrong with most of these items, but skip the sauerkraut, it’s made fresh in –house and will be in the fridge. 

Mmmm - pickles

I recommend these tiny crunchy baby cukes: (the label clearly refers to the drinking culture of Russia – it says ‘vodka chaser’ as these items are often consumed while drinking).

And my favorite brand of pickled tomatoes, made in Bulgaria.  Pickled tomatoes are brined without vinegar, just water, sugar, salt and spices. Of course their texture leaves them soft and falling apart, but if you can get past that – the flavor is great. Slightly sweet, rather salty they are an addictive taste and are a popular snack and hangover cure.

Ugly but good

 The sausage counter is just a mix of salted pork belly, lard, salami and ham, sliced to order. Everything is available to sample, and sampling is encouraged. There is no real guide here – the sausage culture is adapted heavily from Germany and Poland and probably other places I don’t know about, but sausage is sausage.

Somewhere near the front counter you’ll see a bread basket. Typically there will be three types of bread inside – a long sliced loaf, similar to the mild German rye that is sold at Superstore at the moment, a square dark rye, almost black, and the loaf you see below.  The square dark rye is perhaps Russia’s most iconic bread – Borodinsky bread. Legend has it that it was developed by nuns who baked loaves studded with coriander around the village of Borodino, famous as a battle site against Napoleon. Sweetened with malt and studded with caraway it is a dark dense loaf, full of flavor that can stand up to the toughest toppings. It’s a noble bread, but my personal favorite happens to be a smaller, even denser loaf with a sweet chewy texture. Even my boyfriend who is rather cautious in his enthusiasm for Russian food happily snacks on it, along with chunks of dry salami and aged cheddar, or dipped in borscht. All the breads can be frozen, so you are under no obligation to eat through a whole loaf, although they keep well on the counter. Very healthy and low calorie they are a filling guilt free snack at our house.

Russian rye - nothing like it

If you were to only purchase one single item as an introduction to Russian food, these would have to be it. Each bags below holds one kilogram of Siberian dumplings – Russia’s answer to wontons in Asia, tortellini in Italy and empanadas in Latin America. They are one of the holy grails of Russian cuisine. When I was a child it was common for the family to get together for a several hour long marathon of pelmeni making. Pork and beef were mixed together in equal quantities, a schwack of onions would be grated in, a good quantity of black pepper and salt would be added and the whole mix would be wrapped up in fresh dough circles, placed on floured trays and frozen. Several thousand would be made at a time and since we lived in Siberia we simply stored them outside.

Try them now!

To prepare pelmeni simply drop them frozen into boiling water seasoned with a bit of seasoning salt and a bay leaf. They will be done about five minutes after they begin floating, or about 10 minutes total. You can serve them in the resulting broth or on their own. Traditionally they are served with melted butter,  mustard, sour cream or vinegar spiked with pepper, but people also love them with ketchup and horseradish. Really you should set out at least three of the above and have a taste test – a clear winner will soon emerge. James loves his mustard (or sometimes Sriracha sauce), and I am a ketchup girl. Although in the winter I’ve been known to dip them into apple cider vinegar and pepper. The world is your oyster. These are amazing and fast treats and THE perfect supper on a chilly weeknight. Ten minute dinner that everyone adores, even if you factor in a salad.

Whew, part 2 coming up on Monday.

The store I took photos in is aptly named Russian Store, and is located at:

523 Woodpark Blvd SW

403-238-4607

But there are several in town, including:

Matryoshka on the corner of 16 Ave and 14 St SW

Slavic Store

17107 James McKevitt Road SW

403-201-0057

Kalinka at 11440 Braeside Dr SW

403-281-6688

Teremok

Avenida Place Shopping Centre

403-873-0962

And the only reason it was ugly is because *I* baked it.

The original pie baked by baker extraordinaire Deb of Smitten Kitchen is very attractive with peach slices arranged artfully in a tender crust rolled out in a smooth circle.   Like this.

But I was not blessed with the ability to craft precise food. All of my cooking and baking looks a bit sloppy, very homemade and well, let’s just call it rustic. Yeah, rustic. Some people have geometric precision built into their ways in the kitchen. They can turn out picture perfect cakes:

How gorgeous is this?

Photo by Stacey Snacks

While my baking more resembles:

Now this is not to say that what I turn out doesn’t taste good, it does. I have a pretty good palate and know my way around the kitchen, but I lack the precision and patience required to turn out works of art.

There is a cultural component too. I was raised on Russian food, and while hearty and filling, it cannot be called delicate, refined or pretty, even if you tried.  Some Russian staples include buckwheat groats, a loaded potato salad, homemade dumplings, a soup made with barley and pickles, pigs feet in aspic (no joke), and many recipes borrowed from surrounding areas like borscht, cabbage rolls and kebabs. S ay what you will but those foods do not lend themselves to a delicate presentation or precision in their making.  If anything a part of their charm is their adaptability to local conditions, tastes and availability of ingredients. But there is a reason you don’t see many Russian recipes in cookbooks.

So needless to say when faced with recipes that look like they came out of a magazine, I sigh and think to myself ‘wait till you see what it looks like in my kitchen.’ (In fact that should be a rite of passage – have your recipe tested by me, because then you’ll know what it really looks like in a  home kichen).  I’m sure they’d see it and cry. But if they turn out delicious, then I feel the need to shake off any hesitation of posting such contrasting works of art and share them with the world. And if your recipes never come out looking as perfect as they do in magazines, stand proud – you’re in good company.

Up until the weekend I had the remnants of the last fresh peaches from BC which tasted heavenly but which were not going to last much longer. They were developing the telltale little brown spots that clearly said ‘eat me now’, and we were stuffed full of ‘em. My friend Google suggested a lovely sounding pie which I promptly proceeded to make.

Other than the time to chill the dough, it came together very quickly.

Pre-bake the crust for a few minutes, smear some crème fraiche, throw in peaches tossed with sugar, add a bit more crème fraiche and a streusel topping which took two minutes to make, seriously.

MMMMM

And the result? While not fit for a photo shoot, this was a seriously delicious pie. Somewhere I went a bit wrong with the dough and it was a bit too buttery, with butter oozing out of the pre-baked crust, and there was likely too much streusel – next time I’d add less and see what happens. And I didn’t have a proper pie plate to bake it in, my last one falling victim to a moving accident. But the flavors were stellar. Juicy tender peaches with just enough sugar to flavor the crème fraiche and bursts of flavor from the streusel made for a very grown up delight. I’d make this again in a heartbeat, tweaking the recipe for any stone fruit around and perhaps trying this dough thing one more time.
 

In a small bit of gardening news, I planted some beautiful fragrant daffodils in my beds for next year, replacing a very ugly evergreen bush that was simply not thriving. Since the sun sets abysmally early these days I had to plant in the dark. Wielding the shovel I felt kind of criminal, like I was burying a body or something, but that’s gardening in the north for ya.

Our October weather went to pot, and I got bit by a cooking bug. It’s something I take advantage of when it strikes, since it does not strike that often. But something about the first chill in the air, the first snowflakes on the ground and yard chore avoidance collided in a perfect symphony of cooking up a storm. Some recipes I made were old favorites, like the aromatic and garlicky adobo from the Philippines, and others required no recipe, like a basic steak. But variety is the spice of life, so every so often I take down one of the many cookbooks littering my shelves and browse for inspiration. Like many cooks I keep a running list in my head of recipes I’d like to actually make, not just read about.  A good third of them are Jeffrey Steingarten’s. I browse through both of his books regularly and even though many recipes involve heroic shopping efforts and epic cooking sessions, something about his writing style implies success before you even begin.

Much of his recipe seduction comes from meticulous instructions. The details of each step are so well explained that one feels like he’s hovering over your shoulder, pre-empting any shortcuts you may attempt and explaining how he’d really like things done.  There is no ambiguity in the explanations of each step, which is very nice given that many recipes he provides are so time consuming that you would cry if they met with failure. But not every recipe he published has been a culinary Everest (like the home made Turducken, or boudin noir), and there are a few that are not only feasible to try at home, but actually look simple. One of them was potatoes au gratin.

After a wonderful discourse on the merits of potatoes au gratin and the plebeian tendencies of many recipes to smother the potatoes with cheese, he goes on to provide his own recipe which he accidentally stumbled upon all by himself. The recipe requires few ingredients, namely butter, milk, potatoes and cream, and does not take much more than a mandoline and an oven, so I bravely ventured forth to try it out. What appealed to me in the recipe is the lack of cheese. I live with a guy ready to smother breakfast cereal with cheese, while I like to use a smaller amount of sharp cheese, and find a large melting blanket of cheese oily and gross.

I heated the milk with garlic, salt, pepper and nutmeg:

I sliced the potatoes without killing myself:

I poured cream on the potatoes, dotted with butter (forgive me treadmill), and baked the gratin:

And the result – utterly delicious. The cream cooks down into a rich clotty sauce, faintly scented with garlic  and nutmeg, (next time I’m tripling the garlic), and they were universally proclaimed by the cheese eater and his father an excellent recipe. So if you’re willing to take the caloric hit, but have a stellar side dish, then embrace the fall and make these potatoes. And contrary to Jeffrey’s instructions, they taste fantastic lukewarm out of the pan an hour after dinner. Not that I would know anything about that.

Recipe here.