A Kamchatka Childhood
London-based curator Elena Zaytseva shares evocative memories of growing up in the Far East of Russia, how food reconnects her with her parents and the secret to enjoying the classic Soviet dish ‘Macaroni Po-Flotski’
I live in London where my family and my home is now. The Russian language has one word for both house and home - it’s dom. In English there are two. My home in London is a house. Friends who visit us say that the house feels very English - we have some furniture from my English husband’s family and the house itself is, probably, the only one in our long Edwardian terrace that hasn’t changed its layout since 1905. I like living in an English house with its original features very much; it feels like the embodiment of a childhood dream, something from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that I read in a Russian translation when I was 10 while on my summer holidays in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, in the far East of Russia, where I spent much of my time in a children’s library. My husband cooks some English food among which a ‘Full-English Breakfast’ is our favourite. We have it every Sunday morning, no matter how early we have to go out - even if we are in a rush we have to make a shorter version of it.
Whenever I cook, it is mostly Russian food, or fusion with a Russian twist. I have noticed that over the years of trying different receipes borrowed from friends, I am more and more sticking to the way my parents cooked. Since both my father and my mother have passed away and I am raising my own child, the food is a very intimate way to reconnect with my parents. My mother’s family was from Moscow, and they knew how to cook borscht so that it was incredibly rich and harmonious in its flavours at the same time as being light and fresh. My mum’s borscht is my comfort food - there is nothing better for warming me up and finding some hope for harmony between myself and the world around me.
My father was from Gatchina, a palace town near St. Petersburg (called Leningrad then) with a grand palace of the Russian Tsars, surrounded by some nice apartment blocks, turned into Soviet communal housing, in one of which he grew up. And he cooked an absolutely divine Leningrad Rassolnik, a chicken soup which has been my favourite food ever since my early childhood. I don’t remember him cooking anything else apart from two dishes: Leningradsky Rassolnik and ‘Macaroni Po-Flotsky’. The latter directly translates as ‘Macaroni as in the Navy’ - it is basically pasta with corned beef and I don’t know how to cook it; no matter how many times I have attempted to make the dish it has never been anywhere near as tasty as my father’s. But I think I do know the secret ingredient for ‘Navy Macaroni’ - it lies where I lived as a child, and I haven’t yet been able to reenact that wonderful experience.
My father was a Navy officer and because of that I spent my childhood between Moscow and Kamchatka where he was posted. Before Kamchatka he had a post in Liepaja in Latvia, but I was too small to remember it. Kamchatka, on the far East of Russia, across Siberia, some nine time zones from Moscow, fascinated my parents when they first arrived there. They decided to stay much longer than was necessary - so I grew up there. I remember that as a teenager I was furious that instead of spending my best, as I believed, years in glorious Moscow or, at least, in Gatchina - I was forced to sit in that hole in the middle of nowhere. I read Chekhov’s Three Sisters and projected it on to myself - probably, the silliest thing to do.
My father, Vitaly Michailovich Zaytsev
My mother, Lora Valentinovna Zaytseva
“My bedroom window overlooked the three volcanoes, one of them constantly steaming.
And sticking my head out of the window I could see the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean.
It was a wonderful place to be, hugely underestimated by me back then. ”
Actually, Kamchatka was a very special place. It had only one museum - with some mammoth tusks and ingenious people’s sledges - that came nowhere near to the Tretyakov Gallery (where my mother took me on our frequent visits to Moscow and where I ended up working for a large chunk of my life) but the beauty of nature in this place was unbelievable with its volcanoes, the Pacific Ocean, salmon rivers, tundra, and waterfalls. I can’t compare the beauty of its nature with anything else. My bedroom window overlooked the three volcanoes, one of them constantly steaming. And sticking my head out of the window I could see the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean. It was a wonderful place to be, hugely underestimated by me back then.
Bored with the lack of art and culture, I spent most of my pre-university time hiking. Kamchatka is The Best Hiking Place Ever. And this is how the secret of the ‘Navy Macaroni’ is revealed. You go hiking for a week into wilderness around volcanoes, Pacific Ocean bays; you see bears, you drink crystal pure water from the streams and lakes - and you carry all your food in a rucksack. In the morning, when you are on duty, you take a bucket, go to the stream, bring back some water and put it to boil over the campfire. Then you put some salt and pasta into the bucket and, when it is just about ready, you add some corned beef from the tin. It tastes divine. But, bear in mind, the volcanoes and Pacific, and the tundra and the stream are all part of the recipe!
Both my parents despised written recipes and believed that food should be cooked off by heart and from the heart - how you feel it on the day. My mother used to say that there are as many recipes for borscht as there are for the number of times you cook it. And it really did taste different every time she cooked it. Nonetheless, I did manage to learn Leningradsky Rassolnik from my father - he did actually have a recipe! So here it is:
Leningradsky Rassolnik by Vitaly Michailovich Zaytsev
Ingredients
1 small free-range chicken
2 litres of water
5 salted gherkins (pickled ones would do as well)
100 ml gherkin brine
50 ml sunflower oil
5 medium-sized potatoes
120g pearl barley
2 onions
2 carrots
1 clove of garlic
Bunch of dill
Some parsley
A few peppercorns
Pinch of salt
A bay leaf
6 tbsp of creme-fraiche
Method
Prepare a chicken stock by boiling the chicken with one of the onions and one carrot, the bay leaf and peppercorns for about 1 hour 40 minutes.
Take the chicken out, cool and separate the meat from the bones. Also remove the carrot, onion and bay leaf from the stock.
Add the chopped potatoes and barley to the stock and boil on a low heat for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat the sunflower oil in a pan, add chopped garlic, one chopped onion and the one chopped carrot and saute on a medium heat until soft and very lightly golden. Add it all to the boiling stock.
Chop up the salted gherkins, add them to the stock with some chopped dill and parsley. Add the gerkin brine, taste and add some more brine and salt if needed. Add half of the chicken meat (you decide what to do with the rest of it - we had it with pasta the next day).
Boil for 3 minutes, taste and decide whether you need to add some more salt, brine, or pepper.
Leave for 15 minutes to cool down and then serve in bowls with a dollop of creme-fraiche.
Elena Zaytseva is a curator and historian of art. She has curated exhibitions at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow and at Pushkin House, London; special projects of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary art and exhibitions in independent art spaces in Moscow and London. She holds a PhD from the Research Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts, Moscow, and an MFA Curating from Goldsmiths, London. She is a co-editor of ‘Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing’, published by ZED Books, London, in 2017.
This food blog is part of our ‘Food of the New East’ series curated by Katrina Kollegaeva of Rosehip & Rye.
What is special about Russian food that the world needs to know about? This question is at the heart of our quest. Together with Pushkin House we are travelling through the seasons and regions of Russia and beyond, sharing the recipes of chefs and well-known writers, interviews with Pushkin House followers and stories of people making Russian-ish food across the UK - did you know there is someone making salo in Wales?
And an important disclaimer. When we say Russian, we often refer to the whole of the so-called ‘New East’ region, the former USSR. Whilst being very much aware of how problematic this ‘Russifying’ of so many countries can be, we choose the word as a shorthand and in recognition of the fact that millions of people who live outside Russia across the post-Soviet space, think of themselves as Russian, at least in part.
Katrina (Katya) Kollegaeva is a chef, food writer (Guardian, FT, Time Out restaurant reviewer 2009-2012) and sustainable food specialist with a background in food anthropology. She grew up in Estonia to a Crimean dad and a Ukrainian mother. Together with Karina Baldry she runs Rosehip & Rye, a catering and food delivering company specialising in the 'Soul food from the New East'.