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.

Book 12 - Chapter 1 - Lososina Tushonaya S Susom Iz Petrushki and Piere Saves Himself and a Little Girl

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

Lososina Tushonaya S Susom Iz Petrushki

(Steamed Salmon in a Parsley [and Butter] Sauce

To steam the fish:

2 Large Salmon Fillets (cut into small portions)
7 tbsp butter (yes, you are reading that correctly)
1 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup pickeled gherkin brine
1 bunch parsley, finely chopped
1 bay leaf

For the sauce:

1 shallot, finely chopped
7 tbsp dry white wine
3/4 cup fish stock (reserved from steaming the fish)
2/3 cup butter (yes, more and yet more butter), cut into tbsp pieces
Salt and pepper (but you really don't need much salt if you are using salted butter)
1 bunch parsley, finely chopped

To steam the salmon, melt the butter, add the wine, brine, parsley, and bay leaf.  Bring to a boil, lower heat, cover and steam fish for just about 3 minutes.  Set aside and keep warm.

For the sauce, saute the shallots in the wine until the liquid has evaporated.  Add the reserved fish stock and boil until it reduces to half its volume.  Add the butter a piece at a time stirring constantly.  This seems to be some kind of Russian style hollandaise sauce.  Add the parsley and heat through, adding the fish back to the pan to warm it.  Serve with blissfully plain boiled potatoes.

This is a good recipe.  It's indescribably rich (as though it could be otherwise with all that butter!).  However,  two of the people eating it hate sweet pickles (Jay and I).  Here're the changes I would make:  1.  Cut down the butter slightly when cooking the fish.  2.  Cut the brine to 1/8 cup, unless you LOVE sweet gherkins, then you might actually want to finely chop a few and throw them in.  3.  Use a steamer basket to keep the fish out of the stock and prevent its being overcooked.  4.  Strain the fish sauce through a sieve to remove the brown parsley.  5.  Cut down the butter even further for the sauce and maybe add a little more wine.

All in all, everyone enjoyed it, but Yoga was compulsory today in order to feel secure in the right functioning of all arteries.

About the book:

Some people only discover what they are capable of when they are acting in the service of others.  Pierre Bezhukov discovers this in the last chapters of Book 11.  He is driven to do something for Moscow but realizes he hasn't the right temperament to make a good assassin. Instead, he finds himself wandering through flaming Moscow nearly delirious.  He rescues a young girl from the fires and then prevents a French soldier from violating a beautiful young woman.  He is arrested for his actions and taken into solitary confinement but he has yet to reveal his identity.  This might be the event of his life that makes him change from a purposeless nobleman into a man.

Book 11 - Chapter 30 - Kurka po Kyivske, Nachyneny Perets, and Pierre the Would-be Assassin

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

Nachyneny Perets (Stuffed Bell Peppers)

4 good sized Bell Peppers (I used red, orange, and yellow)
2 carrots, shredded
1 large onion, finely chopped
8 oz white cabbage (leftover from the stuffed cabbage we made earlier), finely chopped
2 tbsp oil
1 cup cooked rice
Dill, salt and pepper to taste
1 cup vegetable stock 

Carefully cut the tops off the peppers and scrape out the insides.  Saute all the vegetables until they are tender.  Mix together with the rice (I suggest cooking your rice in vegetable broth for added flavor, it took a lot of salt to avoid being bland) and fill the peppers, replacing the tops.  Pour the stock into a casserole dish, arrange the peppers so that they are standing up and covered with their tops, cover the dish and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.  

Kurka po Kyivske (Chicken Kiev)

3/4 cup of cold butter
4 thinly sliced chicken breast fillets
Salt and pepper
3 tbsp of flour
1 cup breadcrumbs
2 eggs
Oil for frying


It is most important that you shape your butter into elongated balls and re-chill it before attempting this recipe.  We just put the butter in the freezer and cut it into cubes, I think this made wrapping the chicken around it much harder.  That said, lay out the fillets and pound them into an even thickness, try to ensure that they are as wide as they are long, this will also help to keep the butter in the chicken when you fry it.  Fold the sides of the chicken around the butter, then roll from the long end, tucking in the sides as you go.  Some people use toothpick to keep it in place, we resorted to the ever useful kitchen twine after a few mishaps.  Dip the chicken rolls in flour, then in egg, then in breadcrumbs.  Through some oversight, the ingredients list in the cookbook did not include the breadcrumbs.  We omitted them by accident. I rather think that extra thick batter would have also done a better job of keeping the butter in the fillets.  Chill for 2 hours (another step we skipped, as it was already getting late).

Fry your rolled chicken in superhot oil for about 3 minutes.  This will bubble and pop as all good fried food does, but if, about halfway through, you hear the bubbling and popping increase dramatically, it means that all your butter has leaked out of your chicken.  Don't worry, you will still have tasty fried chicken, it just won't be Chicken Kiev.  We had about a 50% success rate.  

Those chicken rolls which retained their butter were purely delicious.  Cutting into the roll was exciting, because you could sort of hear the butter squishing around and then it turned into a delicious lake on your plate.  All that butter complemented the peppers nicely as well.  Many variations to this recipe add parsley and garlic or other tasty additions to the butter.  I contemplated this, but honestly, the more authentic recipes just call for butter and while it might be nice to experiment, things remain traditions for a reason;  it might not have been healthy, but it was darn good.

Special thanks to kitchen helper Jay for being in charge of the frying after I splashed my finger into the hot oil! Thankfully, my hands were more or less covered in flour and egg, so I wasn't damaged badly, just battered.

About the book:
Our friend Pierre is still roaming around Moscow (which has started to burn!) and he is having grand fantasies about assassinating Napoleon.  I'm not really sure how he thinks he will accomplish this, but he has a knife and a loaded pistol.  We shall see what the future brings to him.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Piroshki, Yablonchna Babka, and A Few More Words About War

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

Music:  War and Peace - Prokofiev

Piroshki

Russian Yeast Dough


1 1/2 oz dry yeast
1 cup milk
2 tsp sugar
Generous 1 lb flour (the internet claims this is about 3 1/2 cups)
2 egg yolks
8 1/2 tbsp butter
1 pinch salt
Beaten egg for sealing and glazing


Dissolve the yeast into 7 tablespoons of lukewarm milk (this is most important, if the milk is cold it will clump up and probably damage the whole process).  Add the sugar, cover and leave for 15 minutes.  Stir half the flour into the yeast mixture with a wooden spoon to make a "pre-dough"; mine came out more or less dry after this.  Cover and leave in a warm place for about an hour or until it has doubled in size.  Beat the egg and butter until frothy, add salt and remaining milk and work into a smooth mass.  Add the remaining flour and knead on a floured surface until the dough no longer sticks.  


Once the dough is ready, you can roll it out until it's about 1/4 in thick and cut it into rounds using a glass cup.  I think I make mine a bit too thin...

For the fillings, the book has a super long list of things that people bake into piroshki.  I opted for the following 4, the "recipes" for which I more or less made up. I'm just going to list ingredients and leave the proportions up to your imagination.

Mushroom and Onion - Brown onions in butter then add mushrooms and cook until almost all the liquid is removed.   

Potato and Curd Cheese - for this I once again squeezed all the liquid out of the American cottage cheese and mixed it in roughly equal proportions with the mashed potatoes.  I added just a tiny bit of cream to make it a bit easier to manage.  An important note about the potato filled piroshki, they need to have some kind of holes poked into them, or decorative slashes added to their tops, otherwise all the yummy potato cheese filling explodes out of them. 

Sauerkraut and Onion - I browned onion in butter and added slightly more sauerkraut than onion. 

Ground Chicken - kitchen helper Jay browned onions, garlic and ground chicken in a frying pan and I ran it through the food processor.

Fill each round with about a tablespoon (or less) of filling, brush the edges with beaten egg and seal.  Brush the sealed piroshki with beaten egg and bake at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve hot with sour cream and sauteed onions.  The dough will make about 60 piroshki.

This was the first batch; I forgot to brush them with egg, and they were a tiny bit over cooked (the original recipe said 20 minutes - I took these out after about 13 minutes) but they were very tasty - and you can see what I meant about the potato filling coming out.  The second batch came out beautifully and I was too busy eating to remember to take any pictures of it.

Another note about making piroshki, at first I was sealing them by hand, which I'm not very good at, then I remembered that years ago, I'd bought a dumpling press at a market in Chinatown.  That made my life much easier and made piroshki production a lot faster. I also suggest making the fillings ahead.  It's exhausting trying to do it all in one night - so exhausting that I shoved everything in the fridge and put it all together the next day.

Yablonchna Babka

 (Apple Bake)

1 1/3 lb apples, peeled, cored, and chopped into small pieces
Lemon juice
9 tbsp sugar
4 eggs separated
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of Salt
Butter for greasing the pan
Confectioners' sugar and fresh apple slices for garnish (optional)


Preheat oven to 340 degrees and grease a small baking dish with butter  Coat the apples with a bit of lemon juice immediately to prevent browning.  Beat the sugar, egg yolks, and sour cream in a bowl until frothy.  Beat in the flour, cinnamon, and salt.  Hand mix in the apples.  Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and gently fold into the rest of the batter.  Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

This recipe has so much egg in it, it's almost a custard.  I didn't have any extra apples left for garnish and I don't like confectioners' sugar, so I just ate mine plain.  Rich and delicious.

About the book:
At one point in the novel, Pierre starts to feel as though he must "do something." So he goes off to watch the battle of Borodino.  Thinking he will be out of the way, he lands himself smack in the middle of the target for the heaviest French fire.  He nearly dies there, is almost captured by the French, almost kills his would-be captor, and isn't heard from by anybody for many days after.  He feels himself an utter coward for running away, remembering how earlier he had seen soldiers marching toward the battle exchanging witty banter with the wounded being carted back.  He wonders (as do I) how they can continue marching forward when they see the mirror image of their future selves in the wounded and dying.  Another of the many ways in which war makes no sense to me.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Carters' Millet, Golubsty, and I Didn't Read This Weekend

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes:  Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson

Music:  Downloaded a yoga video to burn off some of this sour cream, but no new music

Carters' Millet

1 1/4 cups millet
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
4 oz bacon
1 tbsp olive oil
1small onion, thinly sliced
3 cups mushrooms, sliced
1 tbsp fresh chopped mint (had I been able to find any of this, I'm sure it would have added a lovely flavor)
Salt and pepper


Rinse the millet in a sieve.  Mix in with the stock, bring to a boil, then cover and simmer 30 minutes.  Fry the bacon until crisp, remove from the pan, reserving some of the fat.  Add olive oil to the pan and brown the mushrooms and onion for about 10 minutes.  I added some Asparagus, because it was in my fridge and about to go bad.  It added some color and flavor.  Mix all ingredients with the millet and heat through.

Golubsty

(This is actually a Polish recipe, according to the book, 

but I'm sure the Russians eat something similar)

1 large Savoy cabbage (emphasis on large)
2 tbsp sunflower oil
1 lb of ground beef, lamb, or pork
1 tsp ground corriander
5 tbsp stock
2/3 cup cooked long grain rice
chopped fresh parsley (I didn't even have dried parsley - oh well)
2 tbsp butter melted


For the sauce:
1 1/4 cup sour cream
2 tbsp tomato puree (we used tomato paste)
1 bay leaf
Salt and Pepper


Preheat the oven to 350.  Carefully remove 12 outer leaves of the cabbage, rinse, blanch in a pot of salted boiling water for 4 minutes, remove and pat dry.  Buying a smaller cabbage because you are thinking to yourself, "what the heck am I going to do with the rest of a large cabbage?" is a mistake.  It will make wrapping your "parcels" much more difficult.


To make the stuffing, brown the meat in a frying pan for 5 minutes, remove and drain off excess fat.  Add the oil to the pan and cook the onion for 5 minutes.  Stir in coriander, meat, stock, rice, and half the parsley, salt and pepper.  Simmer for 5 minutes. Place a tbsp of filling in a leaf and wrap it up.  If you bought a small Savoy cabbage and missed the step about blanching it, kitchen twine will help you out a lot on this recipe (I actually found the missing twine, it was under the couch - I don't understand either).  Arrange in one layer in a baking dish and brush with melted butter.


Heat the sour cream, tomato puree, and bay leaf, stirring until bubbly. Stir in remaining parsley and salt and pepper.  Pour sauce over the cabbage. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes.  Uncover and cook an additional 15 minutes.

We forgot to cover them.  They didn't get dried out, but the sauce could have been creamier.  We didn't do a lot of things on this recipe.  Probably because my kitchen helper Jerilyn brought over 2 bottles of our favorite pink prosecco and we started drinking before we started cooking.  This is a warning about the dangers of cooking while under the influence, kids.  It wasn't a tragedy this time, but ugly things can start to happen in your kitchen. We suggest staying sober while chopping your veg, and doubling the sauce to make this recipe extra yummy.

About the book:  I was going to read yesterday, but my Kindle battery was dead.  Instead I read about some English Kings and Queens.  I won't bore you with the details, but I will say this, George III sure lost some prime real estate.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Cheese Dumplings, Galushki, Pampushki, and Tosltoy Waxes Melodramatic

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music:  Still Nothing New to Report

Cheese Dumplings

1 cup flour
2 tbsp butter
1/3 cup crumbled feta
2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
4 tbsp cold water
Salt and pepper
A pan of salted water (or vegetable broth)


Cut the butter, feta, and dill into the flour using a pastry cutter.  Add water by the tbsp until you have a manageable dough.  Roll the dough into balls and simmer them for 20 minutes.  I used vegetable broth simply because the Galushki had to be boiled in broth and I got confused.  The dumplings tasted really good to me anyway, so I suggest it.   These dumplings can be served in soup but if you are serving them plain, I recommend drizzling with olive oil to keep them from becoming too sticky as they cool.
 

Galushki

2 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp butter
2 eggs beaten
2 cups vegetable stock
4 oz bacon cooked and crumbled


Cut the butter into the flour, mix in the eggs and knead into a smooth dough.  Wrap in plastic wrap and rest for 30 minutes.  Roll out the dough until it's 1/2 in thick, with your brand new rolling pin (compliments for which were given by no fewer than 2 people in the line at Bed Bath and Beyond - I guess it's a really good one.).  Don't roll it out to 1/4 in thick, realize that's too thin and start over.  Your dough will pick up too much flour, get dried out and, as it turns out, not cook properly.  Once you have it at an optimum 1/2 in on your first try, cut it into 3/4 in squares.  Leave these to dry on a floured towel for 30 minutes then drop them into your stock and simmer for 10 minutes.  Serve with olive oil and crumbled bacon.  If, as mine were, you have overrolled your dough, it will be tasty and bacony on the outside and dry in the middle.  The bacon might entice some of your guests to overlook this.  Others will steal the bacon from the Galushki and put it on their Cheese Dumplings, which is also tasty. 

Pampushki

1/2 lb potatoes peeled and shredded


2 2/3 cup mashed potatoes (don't add anything, just mash the potatoes plain)
1/2 tbsp salt
2 tbsp snipped chives
1/2 cup curd cheese
black pepper
Oil for deep frying


*This recipe uses a lot of cheese cloth*


I have not been able to find curd cheese anywhere.  Maybe if I went to Coney Island, but I haven't yet.  I looked it up online and discovered that it's close to American cottage cheese, only less watery and that you can get something similar by squeezing the liquid through a cheese cloth. I bought the largest tub of cottage cheese at the Pathmark and tried it.  By the end of the experiment, my sink looked like some kind of creamery nightmare scene, but I did have, resting in the cheese cloth, a much reduced but creamier looking cheese.
Mix this with the chives (or scallions if you can't find chives) and set aside.


Again, using your cheesecloth, squeeze out as much liquid as you can from the shredded potatoes.  It will be a lot more potato juice than you expect.  Mix the shredded potato with the mashed potato and salt and pepper. Taking small rounds of this dough flatten out a circle in your palm, fill it with some of the cheese mixture and wrap the potato around it so it forms a ball.  When you are done, don't leave them to await frying, they will eventually turn purple and look less appetizing.  Also, don't put them into the fridge to await frying, because they will be so cold, they will bring the temperature of your oil down and dissolve into mush in the pan (tasty, purplish mush, it must be admitted, but mush all the same).  Use enough oil to cover the dumplings completely (I didn't quite have enough) and heat your oil to well over 340 degrees and drop the balls in so that they do not touch each other (if this happens, it may also cause mush).  Fry them until they are golden brown (or golden purple, as the case may be), remove from the oil, drain them on a paper towel and enjoy.

These were the best snacks of my birthday night.  But nobody really got to try them because I've never cooked in oil before and had a slow learning curve.  The first batch was fried in oil that wasn't hot enough - super mush.  The next single, lonely pampushka was cooked in perfect oil, came out brilliantly and was divided between myself and my 2 kitchen helpers to great applause.  The next batch was too cold and lowered the oil temperature - tasty mush that everyone got to nibble on.  The third and final batch - photo documented here, was made the following night in super hot oil and was delicious, but purple.

And that wraps up the birthday blogs.

About the book:

Remember Natasha Rostova and her brief, splintered love for Anatole Kuragin while she was still engaged to Andrew Bolkonski?  At the battle of Borodino, Andrew was wounded almost to death and brought to the medical tent and who's on the bed next to him having a leg amputated?  Anatole Kuragin.  And how does Andrew react to seeing this man that he wished to duel to the death?  He forgives him in his heart on the eve of what he believes will be his own death.  And to whose house do they bring the wounded Andrew? Natasha Rostova's.  Oh, Tolstoy, couldn't you have resisted the melodrama?

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Herring Pate, Chicken Bitki, and Tolstoy Contemplates the Causes of Great World Events (A Lot, and Kind of in Circles)

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music:  We've maybe been slacking a bit on the Russian music, but there might have been some Russian guitar at the beginning of the night...

Herring Pate

2 fresh herrings, filleted
4 tbsp butter
1 tbsp creamed horseradish sauce
Black pepper


I was seriously concerned about this "fresh herring" as nowhere in the directions does it say "cook" the herring.  Being uncertain, and thinking I would never find cured herring fillets, I just bought a jar of pickled herring in cream sauce, thinking, why not?  I threw it all into the food processor and it was the least favorite snack of the night.  It wasn't horrible, but even I didn't eat that much of it.  As it turns out, after buying the jar, there were cured fillets right in my backyard Pathmark which might have made the dish tastier.  And Wikipedia has this to say about raw herring: served as a Dutch delicacy, Hollandse Nieuwe, (Dutch New),  is raw herring from the catches around the end of spring and the beginning of summer. This is typically eaten with raw onion.  So, Bethany and Carey, when in Holland...

Chicken Bitki

1 tbsp butter
4 oz mushrooms, finely chopped
1 cup fresh breadcrumbs
12 oz ground chicken
2 eggs, seperated
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2 tbsp flour
3 tbsp oil
Salt and pepper
Lettuce leaves and sour cream to serve


Cook the mushrooms in the butter over medium high heat for 5 minutes or until all the juices have evaporated.  Mix crumbs (crushed crackers - if have no idea where your Pathmark keeps its breadcrumbs and never have bread in your house), chicken, yolks, nutmeg, and mushrooms.  Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.  Kitchen helper Jerillyn was going to do this with a whisk "because it says you have to," but I turned her on to the hand mixer and saved her from carpal tunnel.  Fold the egg whites into the mixture and shape it into flattened and elongated meat balls (oblongs instead of spheres).  Roll in the flour to coat and then fry 10 minutes or until golden brown and cooked through.  The original recipe doesn't call for sour cream, but we found ours to be a bit lacking without it.  

Everyone liked the Bitki better than the pate.  Small wonder.

About the book:

I have read way ahead since my last blog and am trying to fill in the gaps.  One of the things Tolstoy constantly circles back to, and back to, is the idea about who is responsible for the great, man-made events of the world.  He has Napoleon thinking always that he is responsible.  Tolstoy tells us in asides this is absurd.  He seems to believe (though his repetition and insistence imply that he was not 100% certain) that the greater the man, the less control he had over his own decisions.  There is some merit to it, I suppose, in that, had the Grande Armee not wanted to got to war, Napoleon would have been arrested as a lunatic for trying to rile them up.  In a nutshell, Tolstoy seemed to think (and this is where his theory falls down, folks) that somehow the world is ready for massive numbers of people to move from West to East and so a Napoleon must arise with a great idea to conquer Moscow.  It was the will of the something which makes the people want to support a Napoleon.  He never uses the word god.  He simply states that the world was going to do it, and Napoleon, or any great leader, far from being responsible, is simply carried by the tide, incapable of stopping himself even if he wanted out (which, being Napoleon, he didn't).

I find it troubling, because, he has a point.  How on earth can one person be responsible for so much human turmoil? But then, where does the idea originate?  Economic depression perhaps?  The latent human urge to create upheaval and reroot ourselves?  Tolstoy never touches on it, and we are left looking backward at the events of the past, possibly missing the signs for the future.

No new music:  Sorry.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Liver and Bacon Varenyky, Aubergine "Caviare," and Acts of Desperation at the Abondonment of Smolensk

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Polish Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson


Music:  We've maybe been slacking a bit on the Russian music, but there might have been some Russian guitar at the beginning of the night...

Liver and Bacon Varenyky

For the dough:


1 3/4 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
1 tbsp butter
Beaten egg, for sealing
1tbsp sunflower oil


For the filling:


1tbsp sunflower oil
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
4 oz bacon, roughly chopped
8 oz lamb's or chicken liver, roughly chopped
2 tbsp snipped chives
Salt and pepper to taste

Olive oil and capers to serve

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, make a well in the center, add eggs and butter, mix into a dough and knead on a lightly floured surface.  Wrap in clear film and rest for 30 minutes.  Roll it out to 1/8 inch thick and press into rounds.  Or you could just buy Asian wonton wrappers and skip this whole process.  Maybe not authentic, but certainly faster.


For the filling, heat the oil to medium high and cook onions for 5 minutes, add the bacon and cook another 4-5 minutes.  Add the liver and cook until browned.  Or, add the chicken gizzards and hearts (mostly gizzards) because your local store doesn't carry chicken liver, and after all, viscera is viscera, no?  Dump the whole pan into your food processor and blend until it's finely chopped.  Add chives (or not, if you can't find any) and lots of salt and blend a bit longer.  Do not, under any circumstances, sniff the mixture.  But do taste it, and possibly add yet more salt.


Spoon a teaspoon of filling into each dough round or wonton wrapper, if you are using dough, brush the edges with egg and seal in a half-moon shape, if wontons, brush with water and seal into a triangle.  You can crimp the edges with a fork to make it pretty, if you want to; I gave up after the first one.  Once you have all your dumplings shaped up, if you are using dough, throw them into a pot of vigorously boiling, salted water for 10 minutes, if you are using wontons, oil a steam basket generously and steam them until the wontons turn translucent.


Remove from the heat, douse with a little olive oil to prevent sticking, dare your kitchen helpers to try them, they will agree, it's not that bad.  Then douse them liberally with capers and everyone will agree this is the best dish of the night, even after you've told them what the filling is made from.  (One of my kitchen helpers almost single-handedly folded all these dumplings together, then steamed each and every batch. All I did was fry up the filling, and that was before helpers arrived as I was somewhat afraid of a general strike on account of the ingredients)

Aubergine "Caviare"

3lb eggplant
1 onion very finely chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed
5 tbsp olive oil
1 lb tomatoes, peeled and chopped
2/3 cup Greek style yogurt
Salt and pepper to taste

Cut your eggplant in half (I used just one eggplant and roughly adjusted everything down, except the garlic, which I probably adjusted up) and grill in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.  Leave to cool.  Fry the onion and garlic in 1 tbsp of oil for 10 minutes on medium high heat.  Scrape out the eggplant and puree with the remaining oil in a food processor.  Mix into a bowl with the remaining ingredients.  Cover and chill before serving with bread or crackers.  (One of my kitchen helpers completed this whole recipe; she even peeled the tomatoes "because it says you have to," which I most certainly would never have done.  As it was, all I did was cook the eggplant. - It was a good night to be me with a kitchen full of helpers!)

Last Saturday we celebrated my birthday.  I made a lot of Russian snacks and we drank some vodka.  I will be updating this blog in installments to spare you the long array of recipes at once.  I contemplated not telling my guests what was in the Varenyky.  Feeling unjust, I tried being circumspect and saying, "it's made from parts of the chicken you usually don't eat."  When that was too much for their curiosity to stand I simply told them the truth.  At the end of the night, I asked everyone to vote on their favorite dish.  I think 7 out of 9 people picked the Varenyky first.  Let's hear it for hearts and gizzards! These are Jerilyn's hands holding her favorite dish, the eggplant caviare on a cracker (which means spread, by the way, not fish egg).

As a birthday gift, I was given this Russian cookbook:

And these 2 pages prove conclusively that there is Russian wine out there, and now I just have to find it:

Look for more birthday recipe posts in the coming days, as well as Carters' Millet and possibly Chicken Kiev (breast meat this time, not viscera meat!)

Special thanks to my kitchen helpers from Saturday, Katie and Jerilyn! Come to my house, get an apron to wear!

About the book:

When the Grande Armee marched on Smolensk, the retreating citizens burned it to the ground.  Though some shopkeepers, at the start of the bombardment, tried to defend their wares, others were throwing them into the streets for the rioters to take, under the belief that it was better to let Russian plunderers profit from it than to let the French army enjoy even a minute of it.  It was a last act of desperation,  "'Ou-rou-rou!' yelled the crowd, echoing the crash of the collapsing roof of the barn, the burning grain in which diffused a cakelike aroma all around. The flames flared up again, lighting the animated, delighted, exhausted faces of the spectators." That their faces are "delighted" indicates some very human part of human nature which exults in destruction for the sake of perceived salvation.  It is the furor aroused when you have willfully destroyed the last thing you can lay claim to. It must bring such freedom and ecstasy... we break so many things in the passion of a moment and spend the rest of our days sifting through the rubble to recapture the lost treasures.  But better our most beloved things become rubble than fall into the hands of those we despise.

This is what I thought as I read that chapter.

Sadly, there was no Russian music to review this time.

Book 9 - Chapter 22 - Blini with Creamed Mushrooms and the Coming of Age (Disillusionment) of Nicholas Rostov

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music:  Just had Jay's ipod playing on shuffle

Blini

2/3 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp easy-blend dry yeast
3/4 cup warm milk
2 tbsp butter
1 egg separated
3 tbsp oil for the pan 

It is possible that if you don't mix everything in the right order, your batter will come out thick and rather gluey. It is also possible, since I've never made it before, that it will be thick and gluey no matter what you do. That said, the instructions are to mix the flours with the salt and the yeast, then make a well in the center. Pour in the warm milk, mixing until smooth and let rise one hour. If you live where I live, you already know that some ingredients are harder to find; I had to go downtown to a Whole Foods for the buckwheat flour and exotic mushrooms, never guessing that I should have picked up yeast while down there - there was none in the Pathmark at 125th. I used baking powder instead. I also made the very foolish assumption that these would be made just as regular pancakes are, and I didn't really read the directions. Instead of making a little well, I just dumped all the ingredients together in a bowl, including the oil, which was really for the pan. I also do not have a microwave, so I assumed I could just heat the milk and melt the butter together in the same pan. If you were to be more literate than I, at this point, you will have waited out your hour, and can now mix the egg yolk and butter into your batter, which will have dutifully risen to double its original size. The final step is to beat the egg white with a whisk until it forms stiff peaks and fold it into the batter, which you then cover and let stand for 20 minutes. I did beat my egg white, but not with a whisk, I strongly recommend technology in the form of a hand blender. Heat the oil, which you will in no way have mixed into your batter, in a frying pan and take in the show of trying to get small, silver dollar sized rounds out of the glutinous mass that your batter has become if you have failed to follow instructions properly. Panic, flip the first, thick cakes and flatten them with the back of the spatula to attempt to get the right thickness; then add water to your batter until it becomes somewhat more manageable. Cook the rest of the batter in the way of regular pancakes, waiting for bubbles to appear before flipping, and keep warm while you wait for your mushroom sauce to cook. Or in my case, due to much panic and nonsense, keep your mushrooms warm while you wait to sort out the near-disaster of your blini.

Creamed Mushrooms

1 small onion sliced
4 tbsp butter
6 cups sliced mushrooms
2 tbsp fresh dill
1 1/4 cup sour cream
Salt and pepper to taste


Melt the butter over medium high heat and saute the onions for 5 minutes. Stir in the mushrooms and saute for another 3 minutes, stirring constantly. The recipe calls for white button mushrooms, but since I love exotic mushrooms, I used a mixture of buttons, baby Portobello, Shiitake, Maitake, and some dried Chantarelles that I resuscitated in hot water; and a good thing, because I think the stronger mushrooms added all the flavor that the dish had. Stir in the now familiar sour cream and dill, add salt and pepper generously to taste and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer another minute or until the sauce thickens a bit. It will not get that thick if you leave all the mushroom liquid in the bottom of the pan. However, draining off the liquid, I think, would take out most of the butter and flavor, so I just left it in. Add a lot of salt and pepper, and extra dill to this. It is almost, but not quite bland. You might even consider adding some chicken or bacon. I considered and found the consideration quite feasible. 

Serve your mushrooms hot over your blini with a salad on the side. It's pretty tasty, but you really have to love mushrooms. The recipe is listed in the appetizer section, but it only took one look at the pictured blini to realize that this was easily heavy enough to be a main course. The salad is necessary, as stated in a previous post, to save this from being an overly brown meal.  (Special thanks to Jay for his decorative arrangement of salad and mushrooms for the photo op.)

About the book:

"Since the campaigns of Austerlitz and of 1807 Rostov knew by experience that men always lie when describing military exploits, as he himself had done when recounting them; besides that, he had experience enough to know that nothing happens in war at all as we can imagine or relate it. And so he did not like Zdrzhinski's tale, nor did he like Zdrzhinski himself... But he did not express his thoughts, for in such matters, too, he had gained experience. He knew that this tale redounded to the glory of our arms and so one had to pretend not to doubt it. And he acted accordingly."

Nicholas Rostov, formerly a coward of the Czar's army, has this wonderful coming of age scene.  In the above passage, he condemns a man in his mind for exaggerating about war.  He does not speak about his thoughts, does not even convey them and the sixteen year old adjutant attached to him (as devotedly as he was formerly attached to Denisov - and where is Denisov, by the way?) will buy the whole tale, or also pretend to, for it is glorious to hear valiant tales of war.  Rostov is learning to be a military man for whom nothing is important but victory for the sake of being able to go home alive to a home that is as close as possible to the way you left it.  

He realizes that bravery comes more from thinking of anything other than the danger rather than from facing the danger head on.  He captures a French officer and is embarrassed by it rather than elated.  He has become disillusioned with heroism, as have many of the other characters of the book. "So others are even more afraid than I am!" he thought, "So that's all there is in what is called heroism! And did I do it for my country's sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes? And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George's Cross.... I can't make it out at all."  He is learning that it is possible to take a man's life simply because his leader is at odds with the other man's leader.  He realizes this with an "unpleasant feeling of depression in his heart."  He is also learning the value of medals of honor and soldierly banter.  

He may actually become a better sort of character as we keep reading on.