by Lara Vapnyar
3 or 4 fresh beets
3 or 4 potatoes
1 medium carrot
1 medium onion
3 stalks of celery
Olive oil
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
2 quarts beef broth
Salt and pepper
1 or 2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon white vinegar
Sour cream
Chopped parsley and garlic (optional)
Chop vegetables and sauté them right in the soup pot, in a little olive oil and the tomato sauce, for 15 to 20 minutes. Pour the store-brought beef broth over the mixture. When it starts to boil, add salt, pepper, a bay leaf or two, and vinegar, and let the soup simmer until everything is tender, which sometimes takes so long that Young Frankenstein ends before my borscht is ready.
Hot borscht is served with sour cream just like cold borscht. I like to chop some parsley and garlic, smash the two together with a pinch of salt, and sprinkle this over a little island of sour cream in the bowls.
For some reason, it always seems warmer in the trailer when you make borscht than when you simply boil water. And there is another advantage. We don’t have enough space at the table, so we eat balancing our hot bowls in our laps. And the laps get warm too.
Too bad my son won’t eat borscht; he won’t eat any cooked vegetable. But he will eat some vegetables raw, which brings me to the broccoli recipe.
6. BROCCOLI
I haven’t found a way to make cooked broccoli delicious, so we mostly eat it raw. Every Monday, we go to the farmers’ market in Scranton to buy some. The trip itself is an adventure: first up and down on hilly Route 307, then into the maze of Scranton’s streets, where run-down wooden buildings alternate with Gothic churches and Masonic temples. Once we make it to the market, the kids get a dollar each to stuff themselves with cider, doughnuts, and cookies (Scranton’s market is so cheap you can really gorge on a dollar), and I don’t feel guilty because I’m buying a lot of vegetables. The broccoli is wonderful there. The bunches are a bright, sunny shade of green, they are firm but tender, and they taste fresh but not too grassy. My son’s favorite part (and mine too) is the stalk. I just cut it off, removing the tough part on the very bottom, and peel the rest with a potato peeler. My daughter loves florets, but only with a dip, which we make like this:
1 cup low-fat plain yogurt
1 clove of garlic (finely chopped)
Chopped parley
Lemon juice
Salt to taste
Look, both kids are eating broccoli! How I love them!
—L.V.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lara Vapnyar is the author of the novel Memoirs of a Muse and a book of short stories, There Are Jews in My House, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was the winner of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s 2004 Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers. Vapnyar, whose work has appeared in Open City, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, emigrated from Russia in 1994. She lives on Staten Island with her husband and two children.
ALSO BY LARA VAPNYAR
Memoirs of a Muse
There Are Jews in My House
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Lara Vapnyar
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Some of the stories in this collection originally appeared in the following: “Borscht” in Harper’s; “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf” and “Luda and Milena” in The New Yorker; and “Puffed Rice and Meatballs” in Zoetrope: All-Story. “Puffed Rice and Meatballs” also appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories 2006, edited by Laura Furman (Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 2006).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vapnyar, Lara, [date]
Broccoli and other tales of food and love / Lara Vapnyar.
p. cm.
1. Russians—United States—Fiction. 2. Immigration—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3622.A68B76 2008
813'.6—dc22 2007041537
www.pantheonbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-37761-6
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