"And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths. 'And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!' thought Pierre. 'And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!' He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside his companions."
Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter
Treska Zapechonnaya v Moloke
(Cod in Cream Sauce)
To poach the fish:
1 1/4 cups hot milk
2 tbsp butter
2 onions, sliced
1 3/4 lb cod fillet, cut into small portions
Salt and pepper to taste
For the sauce:
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/4 cups milk, reserved from poaching the fish
1 egg yolk
Salt to taste
Heat the milk to almost boiling, add the butter to the pan. Add the fish and onions and poach for 20 minutes. Remove fish and onions (if you like your onions more thoroughly cooked, you can separate them from the fish and saute them a bit in the sauce butter) and reserve milk mixture.
When the fish is almost ready, melt the butter in a sauce pan over medium heat, add the flour to make a roux. Add the milk mixture and stir over the heat until it is thickens. Add the sugar and the egg yolk, stirring constantly. Return the fish to the sauce to heat it through. Serve with steamed green beans and garlic roasted potatoes.
This was a delicious recipe, quick and simple, and I didn't even have a student crisis that caused me to burn my potatoes. I omitted the sugar because I don't like things too sweet and I maybe added a little less salt because my mom is visiting, and she doesn't like a lot of salt in her food (I used the shaker to add extra to my plate while I was eating it). I think this was the real recipe for that "Quick" Chicken that I made back in January that was so eggy.
About the book:
After living in the POW camp for 4 months, Pierre has lost all his weight and all his fear of the French. They are treated rather well, in fact, and he personally is given great distinction because he speaks French so well. It is only on the orders to march, that he encounters again that compulsion he has learned to recognize, "'There it is!... It again!...' said Pierre to himself, and an involuntary shudder ran down his spine. In the corporal's changed face, in the sound of his voice, in the stirring and deafening noise of the drums, he recognized that mysterious, callous force which compelled people against their will to kill their fellow men—that force the effect of which he had witnessed during the executions. To fear or to try to escape that force, to address entreaties or exhortations to those who served as its tools, was useless. Pierre knew this now. One had to wait and endure."
He is not afraid. He thinks about his soul and what the French tried to do to him by locking him up in a "shed boarded up with planks." He smiles at this because he has realized his place in the world, his soul's connection to everything around him. And he has realized that he cannot be contained by loosely hammered, half-scorched planks scavenged from the wreckage of Moscow.
I was thinking about this and about myself and the people that we know and the ways in which we behave toward each other. Sometimes we are the "forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance." Sometimes we are the planks used to hold other souls back. We don't see it this way at all, but all the same, society always operates in this way. We think sometimes we are doing what's best, when in fact we are locking ourselves up with the planks.
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