Book 14 - Chapter 13 - Gvriti Kirdznita Da Makvlit and Tolstoy Contemplates Guerrila Warfare

"Strange as may be the historical account of how some king or emperor, having quarreled with another, collects an army, fights his enemy's army, gains a victory by killing three, five, or ten thousand men, and subjugates a kingdom and an entire nation of several millions, all the facts of history (as far as we know it) confirm the truth of the statement that the greater or lesser success of one army against another is the cause, or at least an essential indication, of an increase or decrease in the strength of the nation—even though it is unintelligible why the defeat of an army—a hundredth part of a nation—should oblige that whole nation to submit."

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

Gvriti Kirdznita Da Makvlit

(Wild Pigeon with Grape and Blackberry Sauce)

For the pigeons:

4 wild pigeons, oven ready (No, I didn't use pigeons.  The little warblers outside my window, though plump, were too fast for me to catch.  Just kidding.  I used a duckling instead.)
Salt
4 Tbsp melted butter
Bread crumbs


For the sauce: 

1 lb unripe green grapes (mine were somewhere between bitter and sweet)
1 lb blackberries
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 bunch each of dill and cilantro, finely chopped
(I added a lot of salt here, but omitted the salt from the duck)


I roasted my duck at 375 until it reached 160 degrees (at first thinking it was supposed to be 180, it sat in there a bit too long and could have been more moist!) without the breadcrumbs, with just butter on the outside, some garlic cloves stuffed inside, and some chicken broth and onions in the bottom of the pan.  

The sauce calls for everything to be run through a juicer and then served cold, but I thought it best to heat the grapes and berries in a pan and mash them up hot, then use the sieve (reserve some fruit for garnish).  It was interesting, at first, all I could taste was garlic, then when I added the cilantro and dill, all I could taste was cilantro. I ran it through a sieve to take out all the skin and seeds, reheated it to reduce and thicken it, and by the time we served dinner, it had really blended into a delicious whole, but I can imagine that it might have been even tastier if I had made it up the night before and let it all sit together happily marinating over night. I sliced up my duck, poured the sauce over it, (which unfortunately, looks a little like blood in the photos) and served it with rice boiled in chicken broth and steamed broccoli.  

The recipe was delicious.  Here are some thoughts about the expense of it, though:

Blackberries are pretty expensive, and as I was buying 3 pint-sized containers of them, I thought, maybe I should just get 2...  Then I thought, fuck it! this is the food of the Czars!  You can't skimp on this!

This was the first duck I've ever cooked.  There's not a whole lot of meat on there.  Barely enough for the 5 people who ate it.  Thankfully we'd all had a lot of appetizers before.  Everyone says that duck is extremely fatty and it's 100% true.  I did get my skin to crisp up, thanks to the good advice of kitchen helpers Jay and Jerilyn who reminded to put the butter on at the last minute.  But there's a lot of fat and not a lot of meat.  I think this recipe would have been just as tasty had I made it with a nice economically brined chicken.

About the book:

Kutuzov, knowing the French were going to fail, tried his utmost to restrain his troops from engaging in senseless battles.  He knew that on the retreat, the French would turn and fight more fiercely, and Russian soldiers would die needlessly.  He also knew that the Russian people would do the fighting for him.

Napoleon retreated along the same road on which he'd advanced.  And this road had been laid waste by the battles, but also by the Russian peasants who burned their crops to keep the French from getting them. It was only a matter of time before the French would surrender, according to the rules of war.  But the Russians were not fighting according to the rules of war.  The army was, and it was still looking for glory and plunder.  But the Russian people had started to fight of their own accord, and in their own manner.  Tolstoy makes a comparison to fencing when the winning rapier is raised and the victor is surprised to find that his opponent has thrown down his sword and beaten him over the head with a club.


Tolstoy has this to say about Guerrilla Warfare,  "such a war does not fit in under any rule and is directly opposed to a well-known rule of tactics which is accepted as infallible. That rule says that an attacker should concentrate his forces in order to be stronger than his opponent at the moment of conflict. Guerrilla war (always successful, as history shows) directly infringes that rule."  In this, he is referring to "small scratch groups of foot and horse, and groups of peasants and landowners that remained unknown. A sacristan commanded one party which captured several hundred prisoners in the course of a month; and there was Vasilisa, the wife of a village elder, who slew hundreds of the French."  These are the fighters who do not submit to the idea that because a small portion of the country, in the uniforms of the army, have lost a battle, they should start speaking French.  The people fight back, and they do it in a mercenary, ungoverned, vengeful kind of way.  And they win.

And this is why Kutuzov knew that the loss of Petya Rostov's life in a "skirmish" over some wagons, was a waste of a good life, the French were ready to surrender anyway.  


It is for this reason that America lost during the Vietnam War, when the Vietnamese lost a battle, they did not lose their country.  When the Russians lost at Borodino, they did not lose their spirit.