Tatiana's Table: Tatiana and Alexander's Life of Food and Love

by Paullina Simons

  Copyright

  Harper

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Harper 2007

  Copyright © Paullina Simons

  Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780007241606

  Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008228576

  Version: 2016-10-24

  For my beloved blessed Babushka,

  a wife for 72 years, a woman for 95,

  my grandmother, a cook

  “Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food, the act of eating, is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite—the last natural sacrament of family and friendship, of life that is more than ‘eating’ or ‘drinking’. To eat is something more than to maintain bodily functions.”

  ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN

  “For the Life of the World”

  “Who doth ambition shun

  And loves to live i’ the sun,

  Seeking the food he eats,

  And pleas’d with what he gets.”

  SHAKESPEARE,

  “As You Like It”, II.v.[38]

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Cooking for Alexander

  Chapter Two: Leningrad

  Chapter Three: Alone in New York with Seven Million Others

  Chapter Four: Aunt Esther

  Chapter Five: Deer Isle

  Chapter Six: Aunt Esther’s Thanksgiving

  Chapter Seven: Miami by the Sea

  Chapter Eight: Scottsdale in the Desert

  Chapter Nine: Psalms and Songs and Aykhal Visions

  Index

  About the Author

  By the same author

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Tatiana was making lazy cabbage and the children were crowding around the pot. It made it difficult for Tatiana to stir. She had just fried the onions and was now shredding cabbage. “A little room?” she asked. But still they crowded. The girl particularly. “I’m gonna cook too, Mama. I need to see.”

  The boys tortured their younger sister relentlessly. “You’re gonna cook?” said Harry, always stirring trouble. “Everything you touch you break. I feel sorry for whoever eats your cooking.”

  The girl hit him, he slapped her back, she squealed. Tatiana reluctantly had to intervene. “Don’t make me call your father,” she said. This was her standard threat but today it was a fake one, especially since today the father was not home, was not even in the country, which was the only reason Tatiana was able to make the cabbage—since he didn’t eat it.

  Finally they settled down—which meant they gave her a centimeter of elbow room. Tatiana was stirring and turning the cabbage. In a separate frying pan, she browned minced beef. Janie stated she didn’t like cabbage. The boys said they loved it. Tatiana gave them a glance and shook her head.

  “Um—Mom?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “Uh, what is cabbage?” asked Harry.

  “Does Anthony like cabbage?” asked Pasha.

  Tatiana’s heart squeezed. Her eldest son had liked cabbage once, but she hadn’t cooked it for many years. In his letters to her from Vietnam, he wrote that he ate hardly anything in Kontum but kimchee, the Chinese spicy cabbage. Tell Dad, I’m eating cabbage and loving it, Anthony wrote.

  Dad read all his son’s letters. He had said, “And this he is proud of? This is his little rebellion? Cabbage?”

  “Yes, Pasha, Ant loves cabbage.”

  “Why is it lazy, Mommy?” asked Janie.

  “Because it’s like you.”

  “Mommy! Harry called me lazy!”

  “Harry, stop it.”

  “Mommy,” said Janie, “what is lazy?”

  Around the island the children piled, sitting on bar stools and snacking after lunch. There were four of them in the kitchen that Saturday afternoon in November 1969: the youngest, Janie, who had just turned six, and two boys, Pasha and Harry. Pasha had turned eleven in August; Harry was a month away from ten. They had gone shopping earlier, helped their mother put the groceries away, and now were “helping” her with dinner. Pasha had chopped the onion—he was a pro with the chef’s knife. Harry called his brother’s slicing skills “frightening.” Harry stirred the food as it cooked—because that’s what he was, a stirrer. Janie bounced, salted, tasted, peppered, tasted, retrieved food from the fridge and wheedled for brownies with chocolate buttercream icing or cream-cheese icing or just brownies, or just chocolate.

  While the lazy cabbage was cooking, Tatiana, her longish blonde hair braided, her yellow floral print cotton dress tucked beneath a pink satin apron, made buttercream icing. Harry licked the sides of the bowl (for that was his main contribution besides demanding more sugar, a request Tatiana denied), then asked, “Mom, how come you never refer to recipes? How come you’re always just cooking?”

  “I don’t need to refer,” said Tatiana. “I have it all in here.” She tapped her temple.

  “But you’ve never made this before. We don’t even know what this is. And yet you’re making it like you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do know what I’m doing.”

  Harry skeptically snorted. He was strawberry-haired and freckled.

  Pasha, blond and already significantly taller than his mother, Pasha, who was always the first one in the family to refer to a book to back up everything with concrete proof, shoved his brother and said, “Oh look at you, doubting Thomas. You’ve seen Mom in the kitchen, haven’t you? You know she cooks and has never used books. You know how the food comes out. What are you snorting about?”

  “Snort, snort,” said Janie.

  “You’ve never made lazy cabbage. Too much stuff goes in it,” Harry declared. “You can’t possibly remember all those ingredients and what to do with them.”

  Tatiana smiled. “When I bake I look. The difference between a quarter teaspoon and half a teaspoon is a difference between edible banana bread and raccoon food.”

  “See?” Harry turned triumphantly to his brother.

  “See nothing,” said Pasha, smacking him on the head. “You’ve never seen Mom look inside a book, therefore it doesn’t happen.”

  “That’s what I said! Which is why I don’t believe it. Because I’ve never seen it.”

  Tatiana handed the chocolate buttercream spoon to Harry, and said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and still believe.”

  They w
atched her putter and put the bowls away, taste the lazy cabbage again, check the oven for the cupcakes. Soon they would be ready to cool and frost.

  “So you want me to tell you how I learned to make lazy cabbage?” she finally said.

  The children assented—but not eagerly. It was like finding out how the magician cut the bunny in half and then put the bunny back together. Some things were better left a mystery. They liked the idea of her mining the alluvial deposits but to learn her methods? They had asked, however, so it was too late. They were given.

  Babushka Maya’s Lazy Cabbage

  Long ago, a seventeen-year-old Russian girl named Tatiana Metanova living in Leningrad went across the Neva to Dubrovka when the bridges were down to visit her Babushka Maya—her mother’s mother—and said, “Babushka, tell me how to make lazy cabbage.” She was just learning how to cook and wanted to make something special for someone special. Lazy cabbage was one of Babushka Maya’s signature meals. Every time she made it, it came out exactly the same, exactly right, exactly delicious, and was one of Tatiana’s favorites. She thought it might get to be one of Alexander’s favorites, too. Babushka Maya’s famous, one and only, historically passed-down, impossible to duplicate, replicate or imitate lazy cabbage.

  Babushka sighed for five minutes and finally said, “So what do you want me to tell you?”

  “Um, how to make it?”

  “You’ve never cooked anything in your whole life, now suddenly you’re diving headfirst into lazy cabbage?”

  “Yes.”

  Babushka Maya widened her eyes. “Oh. I see. Yes. Of course.” She nodded wisely. “I understand everything.”

  “No, you don’t.” Tatiana looked away.

  “Oh, indeed I do.” Babushka Maya was nearly eighty. She had lived a long life, been a painter, a cook in a Tsar’s kitchen. She could no longer see out of one eye, and her hands had been crippled by arthritis. She still painted, though, still cooked. Still saw. Everything. She said with a wry, understanding smile, “I don’t make it like I used to.”

  “I know. Tell me how you used to make it. I want to make it like you used to.”

  So Babushka Maya told Tatiana to get some beef, put it through the meat grinder, to chop onion, shred cabbage—

  “How much?”

  “How much what? I don’t know. Enough to make a pot, I guess. Enough for you—and him.”

  Tatiana blushed.

  “Enough for leftovers,” finished Babushka Maya.

  “But how much do you use?”

  “How much do I use of what?”

  “Of meat, of cabbage?”

  “I use what I have. Some ground beef, a cabbage. An onion. A little rice.”

  “How much rice?”

  “I don’t know. A little. And the juice of a few crushed tomatoes, if you have them. Water. Salt. Then cover and cook. It’ll be just like mine.”

  Tatiana painstakingly wrote down the directions. Babushka gave her two onions and one wilted tomato. Tatiana bought cabbage, one more wilted tomato, a little beef. She chopped and minced, cooked and diced, added water and crushed tomatoes, covered, cooked and salted.

  When Tatiana looked inside the pot, she saw the cabbage expanding and the water decreasing. The lazy cabbage was quickly becoming a solid paste instead of a liquid stew. She turned down the heat, and added water, then went down the hall to beg another tomato from her neighbor Nina Iglenko. She added more water, but the cabbage, sponge-like, continued to expand. It absorbed as much liquid as Tatiana poured inside the pot, and grew and grew, until she had to switch to a larger pot, but still the “stew” remained thick and intransigent. At the end of two hours when it was seven o’clock and the entire family was growling with hungry frustration in the next room, Tatiana served it as it was.

  Her mother refused to eat it. Which meant: she ate it and complained the whole time. Her father ate it and complained at the very end. Her sister Dasha complained at the very beginning. Her paternal grandparents kept silent, ate it, but did not ask for seconds.

  Alexander ate it. He ate cheerfully, blinking at her, winking at her, and said, “No, no, it’s good. It’s different from what I’m used to. Slightly. But good. Really.” He pushed his empty plate toward her. “Go ahead. I’ll have some more.”

  Tatiana stormed back to Babushka Maya’s across the river the following day to complain bitterly herself. Babushka Maya, sanguine and unperturbed, said, “Well, what did you do wrong?”

  Lazy Cabbage

  1 cabbage, shredded thin, Julienne-style, as one might shred a lettuce

  2lb (900g) ground (minced) beef sirloin, browned in a frying pan with a little butter

  1 onion, very finely chopped, and fried in butter until golden

  1 garlic clove, very finely chopped

  8oz (225g) bacon, cut up and fried till crispy and crumbled. (In Leningrad they used ham hock instead. Bacon was not easy to come by, i.e. non-existent.)

  1 cup (165g) cooked white rice

  4 cups (900ml) canned tomato sauce or passata

  4 cups (900ml) hot, boiled water

  salt and pepper, to taste

  1 teaspoon sugar

  Optional:

  sour cream

  Fry onion in a large cast-iron skillet with deep sides. Add the shredded cabbage and cook for 15–20 minutes until the cabbage softens and starts to brown slightly. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  Add the bacon to the cabbage mixture, stir well to combine, add the meat, stir. Add more salt and pepper to taste, mix in a cup of cooked white rice. While this is simmering, in a separate pan heat tomato sauce and hot water, add to the cabbage, meat and rice mixture, salt to taste, add a teaspoon of sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatoes, cover, bring to boil, reduce heat to low, and simmer for half an hour or so until it’s all cooked through. It should be mushy like thick stew, but not like oatmeal. If it’s like oatmeal, dilute with more water. Stir in a dollop of sour cream if preferred.

  Many years have passed since that first time Tatiana made lazy cabbage for Alexander. Yet it was still vivid in her mind: her grandmother’s slightly hoarse, quiet voice, the taking of the tram across the river, the waning afternoon, the ache in her limping, broken leg; but above all, the desire to make something for someone, for no other reason than to please him. All this has remained, and was fresh in Tatiana’s heart. Yet over time much has changed.

  Some things have changed for the better: the knives are razor sharp, and the heavy pots are enamel over cast iron. The kitchen is gleaming white, not shabby, and the counters are granite. The gas stove goes on and stays on, and the ceramic dishes bake great pies. There are two freezers and a refrigerator to hold all the food that cannot be eaten this instant. There is the best white flour, the best butter, bacon and minced beef sirloin, no need for a meat grinder. There are fresh tomatoes all year round plus tomato sauce in cans, and sweet Vidalia onions. There is a food processor, a stand mixer, a handheld mixer, and plenty of mixing bowls. And, of course, Tatiana no longer has to take food into the bedrooms with her, for fear of it being stolen if left in the apartment’s communal kitchen.

  There is food. There is abundant bacon. That is good.

  Tatiana learned the arduous way. Cooking was time consuming. Peeling potatoes, boiling them, cooling them, mincing, salting, frying them. Making batter, crusts, doughs, fillings; whisking egg whites; frying onions; simmering soup, grating cheese; kneading bread. It took time, and all in inverse proportion to the time required to eat it. The longer something took to make, the faster the people at her table ate it. She would spend three hours making blinchiki, and they would be gone in twenty minutes. Yes, the food disappeared from the table in an instant, in a blink, in the gulp of a drink. And yet … the children carried the smell of their mother’s kitchen with them wherever they went. The friends continued to call every weekend, asking if they could come over, bring dessert perhaps, if she would make them spaghetti, or tenderloin. Every time she was invited somewhere, she was asked to bring lee
k and bacon stuffing. When her daughter called from Hawaii on her honeymoon, she said, “Mommy, they had banana bread at the Four Seasons, and it wasn’t nearly as good as yours. Can you make it for me when I come back?”

  When given a choice between going to a restaurant and eating at home, the younger children said, “Mama cook.” When they got older, it was not even a question anymore. No one went out. They all came to her house, to her table. Each morning they reached into the fridge and took out the bread she had made the night before, baked it and had warm fresh bread—sweet brioche, or croissants, or muffins. It had all started with one man, a young soldier, who had sat down at her table, but now the children, and their spouses, and their children, and the children’s spouses, came to her house. They sat in her kitchen, and said thank you when she handed them a cup of coffee and a roll, said, “God, this is good. How long did it take you to make?”

  “Oh,” she’d say breezily, sliding the jam across the island, “this little thing? It was nothing. Like it?”

  The food went in a swallow, yet the smell of brownies and blueberry pie in the kitchen lasted forever.

  This is what she does now: she chooses what she knows is good, she maintains form and substance, and hopes everything else will follow. She uses only the finest ingredients; the freshest eggs, the best flour, the sweetest butter. She cooks with ground beef sirloin, the best cheese, the freshest apples, reddest tomatoes, Vidalia onions, sweet carrots, the fruitiest jam. She uses fresh lemons, fresh garlic, fresh lime, fresh oranges, quality chocolate, and half-and-half instead of milk. She hopes her end product will be better if all of its parts are good. Form and substance. She feels that way about many things in her life.

  Happy eating.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cooking for Alexander

  The Metanovs, how they loved to eat. What a ritual it was, to sit down at the table, to drink, to have several courses, to eat until you fell joyously away, completely sated. Everybody in the family made something, everybody, that is, except Tatiana and her twin brother Pasha. He wasn’t required to, and she wasn’t interested. Her father’s mother, Babushka Anna, prepared most family dinners. Babushka Anna had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned from her mother, and so generation after generation of Russian women passed their secrets and their recipes down to their children, who in turn taught their own children—Tatiana’s father and Tatiana’s aunt.