Author sheds light on Russia’s homey cuisine

A focus on whole foods and grains puts the cuisine in step with today

A child, rosy-cheeked and bundled up in a vividly patterned snowsuit with mittens attached, holds a face-sized blini. Beaming, the child’s expression is as bright as the golden, lacy-edged pancake.

One of many evocative portraits featured in Darra Goldstein’s new book, Beyond the North Wind (Ten Speed Press, 2020), it expresses the vibrancy and welcome at the core of the collection of 100 Russian recipes.in taking readers into Russian kitchens, Goldstein explains that she sees herself as an interpreter — a medium through which the food, essential and homey, speaks for itself.

“The main thing that is important for me to communicate is the amazing warmth, generosity and hospitality of the people,” she says. “To try and set that apart from whatever political realities there are and whatever political ugliness there is.”

Beyond the North Wind represents nearly 50 years of Russian scholarship. It also marks Goldstein’s return to the subject of her first cookbook, which likewise came at a time of turmoil.

Inauspiciously, the launch of À la Russe: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality on Sept. 1, 1983 coincided with Soviet fighter jets shooting down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all 269 people on board.

Although she signed the contract for her new book during a “very sweet moment of rapprochement with Russia,” the dynamic changed after Donald Trump was elected U.S. president in 2016.

“Now, once again, Russia is eyed with great suspicion,” she writes, “and once again I find myself trying to convey what’s so captivating about Russian culture and cuisine.”

With its emphasis on fermentation, preserved and wild products, whole foods and whole grains, Russian cuisine is in step with contemporary tastes, Goldstein says.

Whereas in her first cookbook, she focused on the food of Russia and the former Republics of the Soviet Union (such as Armenia, Estonia and Georgia), here Goldstein takes readers to the country’s northernmost reaches.

She opens her new book more than 300 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, in the town of Teriberka on the Barents Sea.

If you saw Andrey Zvyagintsev’s award-winning film Leviathan (2014), you can picture it: desolate and frozen, relics of a waning fishing industry in various stages of decay. To get closer to the foods of the past, Goldstein travelled “to one of the literal ends of the Earth.” In the Arctic, she found “elemental flavours” that still resonate, epitomized best by a saucer-sized blini made with yellow split-pea powder (rather than buckwheat or wheat flour). As evidenced by one of Russia’s most ancient foods in a particularly antique form, she says, the old ways are “very much alive.”

In pursuing the past in the Far North, Goldstein illuminates the mythology and poetry of Russia too, which she alludes to in the book’s title. “I was trying to convey the beauty and the mystery of the place because there’s always something mysterious about Russia in people’s imaginations. When I was studying Russian literature, everyone wayback-when was talking about the Russian soul — it’s that ineffable thing about Russia,” she says.

“I wanted to capture the idea of that myth, that thing that you can’t quite put your finger on and name. But it also worked really wonderfully with the Greek myth of the Hyperborea, the ‘beyond the North Wind’ utopia. (I tried) to peel back these layers of darkness that enclose Russia in people’s minds to show that there’s something radiant beyond what you see on the surface.”

Recipes reprinted with permission from Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore by Darra Goldstein, published by Ten Speed Press.