Book 12 - Chapter 12 - Makarony Po Dalnevostochnomu and Tolstoy Has Started to Play With Time

"But the calm, luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only about phantoms and reflections of real life, went on in its old way and made it hard, except by a great effort, to realize the danger and the difficult position of the Russian people."

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter

Makarony Po Dalnevostochnomu

(Far Eastern Style Seafood Spaghetti)

2 tbsp butter
2 small onions, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 red bell pepper and 1 green bell pepper (the Pathmark didn't have green pepper, I used scallions)
1 cup white wine
3 1/2 oz of each of the following seafood items, pre-cooked:
Crab meat, shrimp, sea cucumber, squid rings
3 1/2 oz of each of the following fish, uncooked and cut into bite sized pieces:
Salmon and turbot
1 lb long pasta (I used Fusili Bucati) cooked Al Dente
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh parsley, finely chopped

I couldn't find sea cucumber anywhere.  I had just made a salmon dish the night before.  I cut this recipe down to just the crab, shrimp, and squid rings.  That said, melt your butter over medium high heat and saute the onions until they start to turn translucent.  Add the peppers and garlic (do not let your garlic turn brown - I often do and it adds a smokey flavor that's not the worst thing ever, but is better avoided).  Add your white wine and bring to a boil stirring constantly.  Reduce the heat to medium low; if you are using fish, place the pieces in the sauce and simmer for about 5 minutes, then add the seafood simply to heat it through.  Do not let this boil or leave it too long on the heat, your seafood will get overcooked and turn rubbery.  Serve the sauce over the pasta and garnish with parsley, if you remembered to buy some.  

A few words about squid; last night might have been the first time I have quailed in the face of an ingredient.  The 125th Pathmark carries squid!  It's whole squid with the head and tentacles still on.  I could have handled this but for the tiny fact that they sell it frozen in a giant brick.  I would have had to defrost the whole squid brick, separate the various tentacles from each other and would have been stuck with way more than 3 oz of squid heads.  I retreated to the crab and shrimp section and called my friend Deepak.  Kitchen helper Dee had a far more pleasant experience at the Union Square Whole Foods, where he was able to buy fresh, nicely packaged, cleaned squid bodies, tentacles removed.  They look a little like used condoms.  Thanks to the Minimalist Chef, Mark Bittman, I didn't overcook my squid (too much).

About the book:

One of the challenges of authors with complex plots is how to represent a lapse of time when you are switching between characters.  Kurt Vonnegut relied ironically on "meanwhile, back at the ranch," but most authors, including Tolstoy, generally state at the outset of a new chapter something to the effect of, "while Natasha was plotting to elope with Anatole, Andrew was faithfully writing her a love letter."  Except that after the burning of Moscow he stops doing this.  He jumps from subplot to subplot leaving us to think that we are simply continuing forward in our regularly scheduled timeline.

The effects of this are stunning when he has Vasili Kuragin perform a dramatic reading of the dedication of an icon to the defense of Moscow.  When I read this, I thought, but Moscow's already burning!  And it isn't until halfway through the chapter that you realize Tolstoy has jumped back in time to before the battle of Borodino.  Prince Vasili doesn't know that his son has nearly died.  The characters do not know that Kutuzov has abandoned Moscow or that most of Moscow has burned to the ground.  When the people of St Petersburg get the first misinformation that Kutuzov has won the battle, it comes on the emperor's birthday, "so now the courtiers' pleasure was based as much on the fact that the news had arrived on the Emperor's birthday as on the fact of the victory itself. It was like a successfully arranged surprise."  But the reader knows the truth of the battle, and it is this dramatic irony that shapes the pathos which we feel for these proud, pathetic characters.