Michele Humes (I live in New York and I write about food.)

In Defense Of Vodka

Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton holding tubes of vodka given to them by Russian cosmonauts during the historic linkup of Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft.

I am going to explain something to you about vodka, which is having a really terrible moment right now. Bartenders are saying it doesn’t taste of anything (which is patently false, as it clearly tastes of a combination of fire, sugar, and nail polish remover), and–according to the New York Post, anyway–substituting gin.

The thing is, vodka isn’t supposed to taste of anything. (Even though we have already established that it does. Perhaps the bigger sin, in a bartender’s reckoning, is that, regardless of what Grey Goose and Chopin want you to believe, there is little in the taste to differentiate individual vodkas from each other.)

Or, rather, the taste–on its own–is not the point.

The reason we have trouble with this relatively neutral liquor is that ours is one of the few cultures in the world (Britain is another) to have completely divorced the act of drinking from the act of eating. This is not to say that Americans never eat and drink at the same time, but there is no cultural imperative that we must. And so we have never embraced vodka in its true spirit: a complement to food.

Look around. Spain has tapas for its sherry, China has xiao tsai to go with its rose-scented sorghum liquor. In Korea, there is no soju without anju. And France, birthplace of such food-centered drink concepts as apéritifs and digestifs, imported the concept of wine bars from us. Likewise, in Russia, vodka and zakuski go hand in hand. To drink vodka without even coarse, symbolic zakuski (a heel of bread, some cucumber trimmings), is, in the Russian understanding, to have reached a special, acute form of alcoholism from which there is no returning.

Meanwhile, America has some sports bars, and sports bars have Buffalo wings, but mostly it just has bars.

A meal I enjoyed in Moscow last summer. We alternated sips of vodka with sips of mors, a rustic berry punch, and an array of pickles, crudités, and Uzbek dishes.

They say that taking food while drinking keeps you steadier longer, and even wards off hangovers. That may be true, but I don’t think the origins of the practice are so pragmatic. I quote Octavio Paz, Mexico’s great poet:

The variety of the meal’s delicacies should be matched by an equal variety among the guests. Wines, liqueurs, and alcoholic beverages are the complement of food; their function is to stimulate the relationships that develop around a table.

He goes on:

Unlike wine, pulque, champagne, beer, and even vodka, neither whiskey nor gin is a good companion for a meal. They are neither aperitifs nor digestives. They are beverages that accentuate withdrawal and unsociability.

Paz is a bit hard on the Americans, maybe. These lines are part of a larger essay titled “Eroticism and Gastrosophy” in which he systematically tears the country (though he really focuses on the Puritan Yankee tradition) a new one. But I agree with him on those points. There really is something solitary and grim about whiskey, and the way we in America drink it, that even beautifully crafted cocktails cannot redress. Think of how rare it is to really drink as a family in the U.S.; here, drinking is something you do with friends or even with strangers, but there is very little sitting around a table with colorful, delicious food and getting joyfully smashed with your kin. There is plenty of getting quietly and inappropriately drunk at family gatherings because of suppressed animosity, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing. The way I see it, tapas and anju and zakuski are physical manifestations of conviviality and rejoicing, sentiments that are not always present in American drinking sessions. (We’re the guys who came up with Prohibition, remember? Culturally, we have some issues with alcohol.)

So yes, if you wrest vodka from its culinary context, where its cool fire slices clean through the fat of cured fish and its almost floral sweetness makes a cucumber pickle picklier, somehow, it hasn’t much to recommend it as the foundation for a cocktail. (Although, should you just want to get drunk on something unassertive that blends harmoniously with tonic water, that is your right, and mixologists need to get over themselves. Anyway, alarmist trend pieces aside, I think most bartenders are over themselves.) But remember that vodka, as it was intended to be consumed, offers as balanced a taste experience as a fine cocktail–only the mixers are spread out on the table, and they’re called zakuski.

Two Fantastic Images Of Women With Baked Goods

“The breadseller from rue Lepic,” Zinaida Serebryakova, 1927.

(Details unknown.)

Food, By Andrei Bilzho

This is a book I chanced upon in the library’s G stacks today. G, in the Library of Congress classification system, is for Geography, Anthropology and Recreation. This book has a bit of all of those things.

And yes, that is a real, metal fork hammered into the cover. You see, now, why I had to check it out of the library, even though it was too big for my handbag and I had to carry it around Manhattan for three hours.

Eda (“Food”) is a book of illustrated memories, by Andrei Bilzho, of all the best dishes of his Soviet boyhood. Bilzho is a well-known cartoonist who lives in Moscow and has a pair of Soviet-nostalgia restaurants called “Petrovich” (named after his most famous character) in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Soviet nostalgia: what’s that all about? As Bilzho has noted, three of his four grandparents were either executed or packed off to the gulag during Stalin’s time, so he’s not at all nostalgic for the Soviet system of government. Rather, his is an artist’s nostalgia for the artifacts of everyday Soviet life.

(I totally get it. It’s like how I get really teary-eyed about any number of silly Hong Kong objects, when in fact my childhood was mostly miserable.)

Shproty/“Sprats”

Each illustration is of a single dish, drawn on a cheap paper plate and accompanied by a short, chatty essay. There are 40 of them, followed by a reproduction of a typical Soviet restaurant menu circa 1977–a time when you could dine for under a ruble.

I love this book.

Russia’s cuisine is so compact and homogenized that–despite having spent maybe seven months in that country, tops–I feel that I know every dish in this collection intimately. (Contrast this with the cuisine of a country like China, where I have spent so much of my life and yet have only begun to scratch the culinary surface.) In my own way, I’m as nostalgic for them as the author is. Our associations are different, of course.

Here is what he has to say about kotlety po-kievskii, chicken à la Kiev:

I drew the chicken à la Kiev wrong. They shouldn’t have sticks poking out of them, of course, but chicken bones–only I always imagined them on sticks, like ice cream bars. These chicken cutlets are pretty tricky; I put them on the menu at Petrovich as “The Tragedy of Optimism,” because if you stick your knife in one straight away, hot butter squirts out all over your shirt and tie or your blouse. With this tricky little chicken cutlet, first you have to strategically puncture it and let the butter leak out, and only then can you proceed. Why they’re called “à la Kiev,” I don’t know, but they go by this name in a number of countries. I’ve heard that in the US, which I’ve never been to myself, they eat them on the go. Like ice cream bars, as a matter of fact.

I wonder how that rumor got started. Did a Russian tourist come upon a particularly greasy corndog?

My own chicken à la Kiev memory would be quite different–a composite of the big old chicken football (the coinage is my husband’s) I ate nearly a decade ago at The Shamrock, an Irish bar in St. Petersburg that was always crawling with ballet dancers from the Kirov across the street, and an even bigger, older chicken football that I once ordered on a date in Hong Kong because I was very young, had butterflies, and had no idea what I really wanted. The tragedy of optimism struck both times.

(All photos cribbed from a Russian online bookseller that has quite magnanimously scanned most of the pages.)