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 8 Chapter 15 - A Giant Bag of Frozen Pierogies, Stone Imperial Russian Stout, Lamb Plov, and Natasha Rostova is a Fool

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Recipes:  Mrs. T's Pierogies
Stone Imperial Stout
Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson


Music: Prokofiev - War and Peace

Mrs. T's Frozen Pierogies

We baked them, then fried them in olive oil and served them with the requisite sour cream.  They were a little dry; I think because of the baking.  Next time I will steam them and then fry them in butter.  

For a giant bag (it was the only one they had in the freezer section and it was also on sale) of mass marketed frozen Pierogies, they could have been worse.  I most certainly would have done better to head to a Russian or Polish store and get some fresh ones.  Very soon I will be purchasing a rolling pin and assembling a crack team of Pierogie stuffers and making my own.

Stone Imperial Russian Stout

10.5% Alcohol by volume.  Allegedly brewed in the style of the Czars who liked their beers dark, it's thick, rich, and delicious.  And too much of a good thing will knock you on your ass (just ask Sam).  

Lamb Plov 

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 cup prunes

1  tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp butter

1 large onion chopped

1 lb cubed lamb fillet

8 oz ground lamb

2 cloves crushed garlic

2 1/2 cups vegetable or lamb stock

1/2 cups long grain rice

Large pinch of saffron

salt and pepper to taste

Put the raisins and prunes in a bowl with just enough water to cover them and add the lemon juice.  Set this aside and start browning the onions and garlic in butter.  Add the meats and brown them for 5 minutes.  If you are like me, and you can't, apparently read, you may have over purchased the ground lamb and gotten a full pound instead of just 8 ounces.  This will not ruin your recipe, but will make it much richer and meatier.  Stir in 2/3 cup of the stock; bring to a boil then cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 1 hour or until lamb is tender.  I used the remaining Vegetable Better than Bouillion that I managed to scrape out of the jar. After the hour has passed, add the remaining broth, saffron, and rice, bring to a boil, then reduce heat, cover and simmer until rice is tender.  If you live near the 125th St.  Pathmark in Harlem, you already know how huge it is, and that it has a ton of odd products you might not find anywhere else in the neighborhood as well as a reputation for 20-30 minute wait times at the register.  You may also know (as I do... now.) that it does not sell vegetable stock in any form that's not the Lipton Onion Soup and Recipe Mix that my grandma always made into French Onion Dip for the Super Bowl.  I had to use this soup in my recipe and cut out the extra salt.  I also used brown basmati rice which takes a lot longer to cook than regular rice and which absorbs liquid a bit differently I think.  Following these adaptations, your Plov will be more saucy and a little darker brown than the picture in the cookbook. When your brown rice is finally cooked, add the raisins and prunes right at the end, and heat through.  Serve with some kind of green vegetable that was not indigenous to Russia, but which will prevent you from being bored with all this brown food.  I used plain steamed broccoli and the combination of flavors (and a little color on the plate) paired very well. 

About the book:  Nataly Rostov is a fool.  A fool in love with love who is about to attempt an elopement with one of the biggest liars and womanizers in Moscow.  I liked her character when she was engaged to Andrew Bolkonski; she was a young girl learning to be a woman and she was interested in being intelligent and cultured for Andrew.  Now that she is about to throw him over for Anatole Kuragin, I almost don't even want to read about her.  She is obsessed with his obvious pleasure in her beauty which means she is really just obsessed with herself.  He has written her two letters and met her about four times. He is already secretly married to some country peasant woman he compromised whose father apparently caught up with him.  He didn't even write her the first love letter; Bergerac-style, he got his friend to write it for him.  

What is most interesting is the way in which Tolstoy captures that hysterical nature of a stubborn woman who is bent on doing something she knows is stupid but who cannot stop herself.  She was screaming at her friend "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!" She is clearly afraid to hear the truth about Anatole, which is that he's a bastard.  

About the music:  The opera, of course, cuts out so much of the book.  I've never heard a Russian opera before, but it's not that much different from most of the others.  And of course, I read all the song titles and now I'm curious to know whether Natasha and Andrew get back together before the end, or whether a bunch of Natasha's loves die in the burning of Moscow.