Way Better than Trail Mix!

Our intrepid Crimean correspondent, Peace Corps volunteer Barb Wieser,  continues to update us on life and food in Crimea.  An avid outdoorswoman,  Barb has found incredible hiking in the mountains of Crimean and in this post,  shares a mid-hike meal, Ukrainian style.  Thanks to Barb, for sharing, and thanks also to Cheryl Pratt,  a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, and Lilya Emerova, a colleague of Barb's, who each took some of these great photos.

 

One of the things that has amazed me about food in Ukraine—and continues to amaze me after three years of living here—is how Ukrainians never hesitate to turn an ordinary meal into a banquet.  Weddings, holiday gatherings at work, birthday dinners at home, relatives visiting, breaking of religious fasts, guests from a different country—the list is endless of the opportunities to turn a typically “good” meal into a true feast.

But nowhere do I see this phenomenon so dramatically as out on the hiking trail. More than once I have been travelling with a group of Ukrainians, carrying all of our food and water on our backs, only to sit down for lunch and watch them pull out a vast array of different dishes to share with everyone—a true trailside banquet. This past weekend was a case in point. My hiking partner, fellow Crimean Peace Corps Volunteer Cheryl Pratt, and I joined with our newest Ukrainian fellow hikers for a day trip into the Crimean mountains. Our group was composed of:  Lilya, a young woman who works at my library; Anton, a young man we met on our last hiking trip (where he helpfully guided us back to the right trail as we had gotten a bit lost); his mother Olga, an attractive, very fit looking woman in her forties who works as a psychologist in two local schools; and two individuals we met on the trolleybus on the way to our starting point—Pavel, a 60-something TV technician, and his 13-year old son, Boris. Pavel had heard Cheryl and I speaking English on the trolleybus while looking at a trail map. He gave us lots of friendly advice on future trail possibilities, and then asked if he and his son could join us that day. But, in truth, we ended up joining them. Pavel turned out to be a very experienced hiker and had been on the mountain many times and knew the correct route (which I was a little hazy about). We also realized he was an excellent English speaker, a rarity in a Ukrainian of that age. He told us that in his earlier life he had been a professor of English at a local university. 

As we began the long trek up to the high plateau of Chatyr Dag (“tent mountain” in Crimean Tatar), Pavel pointed out the vegetation along the way, frequently giving us the Russian, Latin, and Crimean Tatar names, and told us some of the history of the area --how the plateau was at one time used as a pasture for Crimean Tatar shepherds and later Soviet collective farms--and also how to find some of the fifty caves located on the vast plateau. What a wealth of information he had, and oh so wonderful, he spoke English and I could understand him! 

After struggling up some very steep inclines, we finally reached the plateau and made our way to the lowest of the two peaks on Chatyr Dag, marveling at the views all around us as we were on the second highest mountain in Crimea. To the south was the Black Sea, to the east and west the peaks and plateaus of the Crimean mountain range, and far to the north, the city of Simferopol. Somewhere in those distant northern ridges was my village of Ak Mechet, where I so frequently gazed at this very place we were standing on.

The fog from the sea rolled in and out, temporarily obscuring our views and the warmth of the sun. This sea fog is the reason that the Crimean mountains, though not high, are considered dangerous, as the frequent and sudden fogs result in several deaths every season when inexperienced hikers become lost and stumble over the steep precipices on the edges of the mountain plateaus. 

Deciding to take a break after our steep climb, we all settled down on the soft carpet of alpine grass and got out lunch. As usual, Cheryl and I pulled out our standard lunch fare—cheese, bread, hard boiled eggs, cucumbers (in season now), apples, and cookies. Pavel and Olga, however, had other things in mind. First, Olga got out a flower print plastic tablecloth and spread it on the ground. Then she started hauling out food from her and Anton’s backpacks: a plastic container of cheese pancakes (made from the local cottage cheese called tovorg which is frequently sweetened with sugar); another container of cutlets (ground meat mixed with onions and herbs and fried in the ubiquitous sunflower oil); a large bag of cucumbers; bread (“baton” in Russian, what Americans call French bread);  pre-made sandwiches (egg salad I think) on two types of bread, white and dark; and apples and juice. Pavel added salo (cured slabs of fatback, an Ukrainian national food) that he cut into small pieces with his hunting knife, fried pieces of fish, and “blinchikis” (thin crepe-like pancakes wrapped around some kind of filling) filled with a meat/spice mixture that was quite tasty. 

Both Olga and Pavel assured us that all the food was “domashne”—made at home from scratch, as it always is in Ukraine. Pavel even made sure that we knew his mother (whom I’m thinking must be at least 80) made those blinchikis. And also, as always, food was brought to share and in large quantities and was laid out in the middle of the tablecloth where we all gathered around and chose from the many offerings.

I think about our typical American hiking lunches—each individual having their own sandwich and maybe an apple and a couple of cookies (something I have learned NOT to do here in Ukraine)--and think, “yep, these Ukrainians really have this food thing figured out.” What a wonderful meal in the middle of what turned out to be a long and arduous hike. It provided nourishment for our bodies and also a chance to share with other people, who before that day were mostly strangers, the fruits of our labor. 

Rested, satiated, filled with the pleasure of eating delicious food surrounded by the beautiful scenery of Crimea, we were ready to trek on to the highest peak on Chatyr Dag, a few kilometers away, and then down and across the lower plateau to our final destination of the village of Perevalnoe and the trolleybus back to Simferopol. Daylight had faded by the time we arrived in the village after our 11-hour hike, but despite our tired and sore bodies, I think we were all filled with wondrous memories of the day and the gladness of finding new friends to share it with. And of having eaten some really good food.

Lviving On A Jet Plane

 
A final guest post from Caleb Zigas, traveling companion for our October Conversations. 

So after four conversations, three train rides, at least 2 pounds of salo consumed and countless liters of vodka (the best was the homemade kind) what are the takeaways?

In writing about travel, and writing about it in the first person no less, and in a format like a blog even more, I think it’s important to recognize that one most likely learns far more about one’s self through travel than one possibly can about one place. Place is too nebulous. Too large. Too all-consuming. I didn’t eat enough, or from everywhere. I didn’t eat in anyone’s home, share a meal with a person who cooked it, or stumble into an expected delight enough times to give a sense of place. But I did eat wonderful food, much of it home-cooked, and I did listen and talk quite a bit about not only the food but also the act of cooking and consuming it.

When I left the States I felt, as I often feel, conflicted about the work that I do. Without boring you too much with insights into my own personal struggles, it’s enough to know that I do what I do because I believe the world can be a better place. I often think that one of the main factors in preventing such betterment is the dominance of capitalism, yet what I do simply aspires to make poor people better capitalists. But what of this thought in a post-Communist society?

The irony, or really it’s not irony but the realization, is that small business can be powerful. In the many conversations we had, meals we shared and foods we tried, the idea of small business was rarely on the forefront of anyone’s minds. The questions I ended my discussion with (What foods do you think you could sell, for instance) often led to blank stares and boring conversation. The explanations provided were often that government regulation, corruption and taxation were too daunting of tasks for small business to have any traction in this place. And so small business begins to feel powerful.

I imagine a group of piroshky selling women banding together with a solid brand and making a living for themselves. Or the subsistence farmers creating value-added products with regional variations in order to maintain the life style that their sons and daughters are abandoning. While their sons and daughters work in cities and earn money in order to purchase the foods they miss from the village. And while our conversations seemed to state that this was not, yet, a reality, some part of me feels that we simply didn’t find the right places to have that conversation.

If there was no belief in that kind of opportunity there would be no Pizzata Hata and no Kompot. There would be no informal vending, no funnel-cake hot dogs, no coffee shops and no tandoori-like fired breads. By the end of this trip I’ve come to believe, again, in the power of small business, or at least the ideal of it, the notion, to provide some kind of opportunity for economic freedom. It’s a concept that is utterly complicated by the rippling impact of collectivism plus oligarchy, but, perhaps for the first time in a long time, it often feels like a solution.

Given the pace of capitalism that we experienced, I’m not sure that Ukrainian capitalism currently looks any different than the malicious brand of American capitalism, rife with income inequality and lack of opportunity, that we are so quick to export. But I’m also not sure that has to be the case.

In our last conversation in Lviv, a young woman was asked if she still cooked, and she answered (like nearly everyone else we asked in the time I was there) that she did. But, she was quick to point out, instead of spending Sunday making vareniki all day long, she cooked something quick and delicious. If she were to spend an entire day, she said, she’d have friends over and they would make something they wanted… sushi.

In Lviv we ate one meal at the Salo Museum. A high-concept restaurant bar that chooses not to examine the history of this national dish but instead to focus on its future, draping models with small bits of it in artsy-soft-porn poses and offering a menu of salo based concoctions. One of which we tried—salo sushi. Like so many other things, it was imperfect, but emblematic. There is no such thing as tradition. No such taste as authentic. There is only what we are, and that is constantly changing. So salo sushi is no less Ukrainian than borscht, no matter how much we miss the borscht our grandmother’s made.

What can be more powerful than the memory of that borscht, or the taste of any other number of foods, is the power to choose the foods that we make and eat. Ukraine, like so many of us, is in a struggle to define that future for themselves, and it’s one you can see, hear and taste on the streets and in the markets every day. I will remember, for a long time, the taste of that borscht and the taste of that sushi, and I will wonder, for a long time, what it will taste like the next time I go.

Photos by Rueben Nilsson, our fellow traveler.  From top:  borscht;   cheese seller at Bessarabka market, Kyiv; salo sushi (no kidding); and Sarah, Linda and Caleb in L'viv.

Because Why Shouldn’t Uncooked, Lightly Cured Bacon Be Considered Delicious?

Another guest post by Caleb Zigas.

As far as museum experiences go, the Bulgakov Museum on a torn-up street in Kyiv surpasses nearly every expectation for a memorial to an author, even in a country with an impressively high literacy rate. The Museum is as much memory as emotion, and it was here that we had our first conversation.

At that point, my culinary experience of the entirety of Ukraine, let alone Kyiv, consisted of the following; Crimean Tatar food in a basement restaurant, that delicious funnel-cake-wrapped hot dog on the street, multiple markets with their varieties of pickles, a new-wave Ukrainian restaurant with hemp beer and incredible furnishings, several coffee shops, an organic demo marketplace with roasted pig, amazing soup and horseradish vodka in a tent under the rain with new friends and Puzata Hata, a Ukranian cafeteria-style chain with an open kitchen and servers in national garb. On the table at the Bulgakov we began with salo and vodka.

One of the reasons that not only have I always loved food but also working in food lies in the stock I put in hard work and in craftsmanship—in pride. I believe that this happens at tables, benches and backyards across the world, even when there is scarcity. But Ukraine was home not only to significant amounts of death in the  20^th Century but also home to one of the worst famines of the same period. And so scarcity perhaps takes on a different meaning.

Our conversation began here, with scarcity, although somewhat unintentionally. I began these conversations in Kyiv with an interest in understanding who made what, why they made it and whether or not there was a market for it. My assumption about the changes that urbanization would bring revolved around the mass industrialization of foods and, therefore, not necessarily the disappearance of those foods but rather their replacement with more commercial versions of the same. In my own life, especially in America, my antidote to industrial-scale food production lies in taste. In deliciousness. Admittedly, it is thin ice to stand on, or, rather, a fairly subjective stance from which to stand, but something about me believes it, and so I stand.

And so it was fascinating to hear from Roman, a Ukrainian organic dairy farmer, that the National table relies on volume, or, in his words, calories. In his telling, at a crucial point in our conversation, the very value of the meal one offers not only resides in tastiness but also mostly in the quantity of food offered to guests. Now, I believe as much as anyone in never running out of food, but given the history of place and the sincerity of statement there is weight to thinking about this.

Could it be that Americans, or, for that matter, cultures unaware of the pangs of recent hunger, prioritized taste in an appropriate way? I thought about meals I’d eaten in El Alto, Bolivia, an incredibly poor place with a similar subsistence economy, and the pride a family would take in the taste of its offerings and found such a simple volume equation to be unsatisfactory. But the rest of the Ukrainians at the table agreed; taste, they said, was overrated.

But then why go to Puzata Hata? Because it felt like home? Because it was cheap? Why go anywhere for that matter? Why differentiate? The issue of taste runs central to food. Yes, we all eat to live, and the majority of us (despite ridiculousness like Man Against Food on the Food Network) do not live to eat. We live because we eat—in so many ways. And so I am given to wondering about the perception of taste. Not the way one piroshky feels compared to another but, rather, what the word itself means and what it gains and loses in translation. And so at the first of these conversations I find myself questioning if I even know how to explain my very fundamental relationship with eating in a way that is true to translation. In a way that will convey my appreciation for taste. For all kinds of taste.

And to do that while eating salo gives one quite a contemplative moment.

Images, from top:  
Salo, at the Pickle Project Conversation at the Bulgakov Museum
Bulgakov Museum interior, courtesy of the Bulgakov Museum
Puzata Hata food line, photo by Caleb Zigas
Kyiv Pickle Project participants
Caleb talks taste
Organic milk and honey, homemade pickles, brought to share at the conversation in Kyiv.

Chatting and Chewing in Kyiv

As Caleb mentioned in the previous post, the first in this autumn’s series of Pickle Project Community Conversations took place at the Bulgakov Museum. The museum is perched on the renowned Andriyivsky Uzviv, a steep, curvy little street that winds down a Kyivan hill. The museum observes the life and works of the beloved Ukrainian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, most famous for his novel The Master and Margarita, the subversive commentary on the oppression of the Soviet Regime.

The building itself was Bulgakov’s home for a time and the Museum uses the house’s rooms to imaginatively braid together the themes from Bulgakov’s own life with that of the Turbin family, featured in his novel The White Guard, set against the chaos of the Russian Civil War. The Bulgakov Museum is known for inventive programming that often includes food traditions, drawing on Bulgakov’s life and works. For me, the Bulgakov Museum has a warm, familiar and almost magical quality. Thus, it made a wonderful and fitting setting for the event.

The evening began with cheerful mingling and refreshments. Between refreshing sips of icy vodka, a personal favorite, and nibbles of black bread and salo, participants chatted and jotted down responses to questions posted on the walls with thick markers. These included “What is your favorite meal? and “What makes food natural?” The crowd was a lively mix that included diplomats and dairy farmers, rural development specialists, municipal managers, grandmas, college students and teenagers.

A sequence of deeper discussions ensued, sparked by mini-presentations around the food-centric themes of personal memory, entrepreneurship, science and sustainability. We told stories about our grandparents and grandchildren. We laughed about why we hate some foods and love others. We talked about what it means to make food for your children and if a person can actually “taste the love.” We explored the element of trust in our food system and what our national dishes really are. There was technical tête-à-tête, about calves’ intestines and compliance requirements among the dairy professionals in the room, and the salt-to-water ratio for good pickles between experimental American picklers (ahem..) and seasoned Ukrainian ones.

To accompany these exchanges, there were second and third courses to our feast. We enjoyed kasha with sautéed onions, golden cabbage and squashes with caramelized pork. There were home-made pickles and marinated mushrooms! Oh my! Then, we had coffee, tea and sweets.

The evening concluded with the exchanging of home canned goods, raw dairy products, hugs and kisses. Set in the Bulgakov Museum’s comfortable space, the event and dialogue offered many levels of engagement and was enriched by the openness and energy of the participants. And, we headed out into the dark Kyivan night, a bit brighter by the connections we'd made.

The Bulgakov Museum maintains an interesting blog and Linda has written more about the Bulgakov Museum at the Uncataloged Museum.

Market Report: Carnivores Edition, March 30, 2011, Kyiv

This post is for carnivores only.  At markets,  meat is on display in its many forms.  Ukrainian butchers really use the tip to tail, so beloved by trendy chefs.  I didn't get a picture, but I think oxtails today, along with tongue, liver,  hearts, and more.  And of course, salo,  the pork fat much beloved here.  So, meat-eaters, enjoy!  Vegetarians, avert your eyes!

Chewing the Fat

Ah, salo, glorious salo! It is the adored raw pork fat enjoyed on its own and in many of timeless Ukrainian dishes. A classic preserved product, salo (са́ло) is typically fatback that is cut, salted, rolled or tied with twine and hung in cool, dark cellars or cupboards to dry and age.

Salo does vary widely in taste, reflecting diverse curing techniques, flavor additions such as herbs, preservation length, and the animal’s feed. Creamy and white, in my opinion, the best salo is smooth and just a bit salty. Thinly sliced, it is a tasty atop sliced black bread, accompanied by cloves of raw garlic and shots of vodka or horilka. Finely chopped, it provides an ideal medium for sautéing perfectly crispy potato slivers or golden onions to complement varenyky.

This week, a festival was held in the frigid streets of Poltava to celebrate the wonders of salo. Apparently, the Poltava region has a long standing connection to pork production. According to the book Culinaria, edited by Marion Trutter, the city of Myrhorod in Poltava Oblast, was a center for livestock trading in its central market, since the 17th century. Indeed, the Myrhorod pig is a signature breed for salo in Ukraine prized for a high fat to lean meat ratio.

Salo is also a cultural icon and source of pride for many Ukrainians, who jealously guard recipes or the names of butchers from whom they source their choicest slabs. Joke and anecdotes about the relative importance of salo in one’s life abound. (As in: “Toward what does a drowning man swim? His wife or his salo?”) While visitors famously cast aspersions on this national love of lard, the trend is catching on as cracklings and cuffia are hot topics of foodies around the globe ($7 bacon chocolate bar, anyone?). And, why not? Truly, what is not to love about pork fat?