Chapter CXVII - Bolinhos de Arroz com Sardinhas and Windows Into Moral Ambiguity

"So I, Brás Cubas, discovered a sublime law, the law of the equivalencies of windows, and I established the fact that the method of compensating for a closed window is to open another, so that morality can continuously aerate one’s conscience."

Book:  The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria
Recipes: Brazil:  A Culinary Journey by Cherie Hamilton

Bolinhos de Arroz com Sardinhas

(Rice and Sardine Croquettes)

For the croquettes:


4 cups cold cooked rice
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan
6 cans boneless and skinless sardines
3 eggs, lightly beaten
Salt and pepper to taste


For the breading:
2 eggs lightly beaten
2 cups dry bread crumbs


In a large pot, mix the croquette ingredients until combined.  Heat over a low flame, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

When the mixture has cooled,  heat 3 inches of oil in a deep pan, then shape into balls the size of a walnut.   Dip each croquette into egg and then roll in bread crumbs.  Fry in batches until golden brown.  Drain on paper towels and serve at room temperature.  

For this recipe, I used flour instead of bread crumbs; I think that was something of a mistake since it didn't have the same flavor.  I was actually thinking a recipe such as this might even benefit from the added crunch of corn flakes.  Just a thought.  Additionally, no matter how tempted you are to try it while it's still warm, it tastes much better at room temperature.  Naturally, I learned this the hard way.  I would also discredit the urge to add less salt if you think that the Parmesan is already salty enough.  Mine tasted just fine, but the whole time I was eating, I was thinking "this could use more salt and pepper."

About the book:

I have always wondered about the morality of adulterers.  How do they justify their actions?  How do they look the spouse in the face, if they are acquainted?  How can they profess love and cope with the jealousy that their loved one is probably still intimate with his or her marriage partner?  Here's how Bras Cubas decides that he will justify his actions.  On the night that he gets his first kiss from a married Virgilia, he finds a golden doubloon in the street.  His conscience pricks at him, "I felt a certain revulsion in my conscience and a voice that asked me why the devil a coin that I hadn’t inherited or earned but only found in the street should be mine. Obviously it wasn’t mine, it belonged to somebody else, the one who’d lost it, rich or poor, and he might have been poor."  

Still ruminating on his find, he decides to send it on to the police, to return it to its rightful owner.  He imagines himself a great humanitarian through this act, "I clearly saw the half doubloon of the night before, round, shiny, multiplying all by itself—becoming ten—then thirty—then five hundred—expressing in that way the benefits I would be given in life and in death by the simple act of restitution."  It is after this that he speaks about windows.  Essentially, to his moral code, by sacrificing the golden doubloon, he has made up for the selfish act of taking Virgilia.  He returned one man's coin; he can take another man's wife. One window closed; another open to air out his conscience.

Incidentally, when he finds five contos (about $5,000 roughly speaking but most likely worth a great deal more in the 1800's) on the beach, he does not report them.  A golden half doubloon can be returned with equanimity, but the 5 contos he decides to keep and use for the dowry of some poor girl, perhaps.  What he actually does is to bribe the woman who presides over his love nest by giving her the gift of 5 contos retirement money.  In this way, I imagine, he is opening yet another window.  

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 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.