Book Excerpt: The Kingdom of Rye

A Brief History of Russian Food, by Darra Goldstein

Today I am honored to share an excerpt from Darra Goldstein’s The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food.

It’s a slim but rich history of Russian culture though its cuisine, written in evocative and eloquent language, and one of my favorite books of 2022. Given the subject matter, bread of course plays a central role throughout, as this passage from chapter 1 makes plain:

The peasants expressed reverence for their rye bread by holding the loaf close to the chest and slicing it horizontally toward the heart. Wasting breadcrumbs was considered a sin, and even into the late twentieth century, entire cookbooks were devoted to using leftover black bread.

The book came out in May, obviously right in the middle of complicated time for anything involving Russia. Darra shared some thoughts about the war in Ukraine on the UC Press Blog not long after its release:

The war is destroying Ukraine. Though there are fewer news reports about the domestic situation in Russia, it’s fair to say that the war has already destroyed that country, too—if not physically, then morally. It will be impossible to speak or write positively about Russia for generations to come. And although the media emphasizes how many Russians support the war, we rarely hear about are those who are taking great risks to oppose it. Even those Russians who are not activists have been cast into an isolation that, as one friend put it, “has thrown us back into the Middle Ages.” I despair of any positive outcome. Yet, despite the monstrosity of Putin’s actions, I hope people will be able to see nuance and not cancel Russia entirely. As I recently wrote in an essay for The Brooklyn Rail: “’Russia’ and ‘Russian’ hold intrinsic meanings that carry the weight of centuries, evoking rich history and culture as well as manifold instances of evil and cruelty. These words and their associations belong to our collective legacy, as well as our reality. Remembering them represents what Putin wants to obliterate, which is not just beauty but truth.”

Here’s hoping that Darra’s wonderful book can help us all remember that Putin’s Russia and Russia are not one and the same.

—Andrew

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The Kingdom of Rye, The Introduction

Nineteenth-century Russia was overflowing with gingerbread—gingerbread in all shapes and sizes, figured, sculpted, and stamped. If we’re to believe the authors of an 1838 guidebook, the town of Gorodets alone produced a staggering 360,000 pounds of gingerbread each year. Gingerbreads (prianiki) were highly localized, with numerous cities and towns laying claim to the very best. Vyazma prianiki were bite-sized, the dough so sticky with honey that it had to be pounded with wooden mallets and tempered for days—sometimes weeks—until it reached the right consistency for baking. The honey provided flavor, of course, but it also kept the cookies moist for months. Connoisseurs knew not to bite down on them but to let each cookie melt in the mouth to release the honey’s taste. Supersized gingerbreads from Gorodets were baked in large loaves embossed with designs made by pressing the dough into carved wooden boards. These prianiki could be six feet in length and weigh up to thirty-six pounds. So famous was the gingerbread baked in Tver that it was exhibited at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition, where it appeared alongside inventions by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison. This gingerbread won a bronze medal for its many varieties and the originality of its designs.

Russian gingerbread started out simply as a mixture of rye flour, honey, and berry juice that was left to ferment for a few days before baking. Because honey accounted for almost half of the mixture, the cakes were known as “honey bread” until spices were added some centuries later. Increasingly, bakers used gingerbread as a medium to display their artistry. The earliest gingerbread, molded into symbolic three-dimensional shapes, gave way to decorated rectangular loaves. The gingerbread boards used to press patterns into the dough became an important expression of Russian folk art, one that reflected evolving trends in subject matter, from familiar creatures like roosters and sturgeon to complex narrative scenes scored into individual squares that could be broken off. The most extravagant prianiki were decorated with gold leaf.

This progression from simple to excessive, turning the mundane into the fanciful, can be seen as typically Russian. That bakers would lavish so much effort on a food unnecessary for survival is a telling example of the way in which traditional Russian culinary culture responds to hardship—to a harsh climate, repressive regimes, and austere religious strictures—punctuating frugality with flashes of extravagance.

Most of the Russian populace lived their lives on the edge, teetering towards hunger and dependent on an annual harvest that could be destroyed by untimely frosts, drought, hail, insects, or commissars. During tsarist times, the peasants’ lack of capital meant that they couldn’t buy food when their own crops failed, even though grain and bread might be in abundance nearby; in Soviet times, food often rotted in the fields for lack of spare parts for harvesting machinery, or arrived at its destination spoiled because of unreliable distribution systems. Russia has endured far more than its share of famines. In the twentieth century, the worst periods of hunger—the Volga famine of 1921–22 during Russia’s civil war, the brutal collectivization campaign in 1932–33, and the siege of Leningrad during World War II—were caused not by natural forces but by social upheaval and cynical political determinations.

Even in years unmarked by particular calamity, Russian peasants went hungry, or at least went without, and scarcity became the mother of their inventiveness. While ever mindful of the dark historical record, this book celebrates the Russian people’s ingenuity in dealing with hardship and the gustatory delight that can emerge from privation. Adversity for Russians has given rise to a remarkably vibrant repertoire of foods. When I experience the pungency of garlic and horseradish, the intensity of lacto-fermented vegetables and fruits, the sour tang of black bread and the hearty bite of whole grains, the woodsy flavor of mushrooms, and the dusky notes of cloudberries, I am reminded of the Russian ability to preserve and to persevere.

These are the flavors of the land, transformed through fermentation, slow cooking, culturing, and baking into dishes that are greater than their individual parts. If deprived English speakers live from hand to mouth, Russians live “from bread to kvass”—kvass being a fermented beverage made from stale rye bread. Bread, the mainstay of the diet, was considered sacred even into modern times, and none ever went to waste. It was dried and fermented into effervescent kvass or layered as breadcrumbs in a pudding with puréed apples and a little honey. A sought-after confection known as Kaluga dough for its town of origin was made by simmering stale breadcrumbs in spiced honey syrup. Oats weren’t just boiled into porridge; they were dried and roasted and pounded into a flour called tolokno that imparts a nutty flavor to pancakes and dairy dishes, or they were soaked to produce oat milk, more than a thousand years before it became trendy in Brooklyn. Buckwheat groats were mixed with sautéed chanterelles and onions, then garnished with brined lingonberries, in an early Russian version of a grain bowl. Even though the Russian table has been enriched by the introduction of new foodstuffs from both East and West, the flavors that typify the Russian palate have remained surprisingly constant: the tang of cultured dairy products like sour cream and yogurt-like prostokvasha, the bite of strong mustard and horseradish, the zing of fermented cucumbers and cabbage. If we think in terms of the anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s “core-fringe” hypothesis—which holds that a culinary culture’s “core,” usually a bland, complex carbohydrate, is enlivened by bold accompaniments that constitute its “fringe”—we can see the inventiveness of ordinary Russians, who elevate core staples of Russian cuisine like rye, buckwheat, and oats with fringe complements of fermented and cultured foods. These additions add piquancy to starches while also providing necessary nutrients, often in the form of the probiotics we like to tout today.

Frequent famines helped to induce a certain fatalism among the Russian people, which in a cruel irony made hunger easier to endure: If the gods will it, our bellies will be full. If not, we’ll manage somehow. After Russia accepted Christianity in 988, the Russian Orthodox Church shrewdly turned privation into a virtue by designating nearly two hundred days a year as fast days. Prolonged fasts coincided with the agricultural seasons of greatest scarcity. But the Russian Orthodox calendar also evinced awareness of human nature. The stringent fasts were punctuated by feast days, so that there was always something to look forward to. On these feast days a cook might bake a sumptuous pie, or some gingerbread, or simmer a soup with a little meat. For most of the year, though, the peasantry awaited relief, or else dreamed of the skatert’-samobranka, the self-spreading tablecloth of Russian fairytales. Such culinary utopias were common throughout medieval Europe (the most famous being the land of Cockaigne), but Russia’s version was in a way more immediate: if you could just get your hands on the magical tablecloth and unfold it, lavish delicacies would instantly appear.

Dreams of cornucopia weren’t just a thing of fairytales and the past. Well into the late twentieth century, the Soviet government trumpeted abundance to create an illusion of material well-being. Shop windows featured artfully arranged displays of canned goods that concealed the empty shelves inside. Moscow’s handful of fancy restaurants triumphantly presented diners with oversized, leather-bound menus listing dozens of dishes when only a handful were ever available from the kitchen. The nightly news broadcasts ended with images of plentiful harvests playing across the screen, with wheat pouring through hoppers like waterfalls of golden grain—no matter that the government was often forced to import wheat from its political enemies to make sure there would be enough cattle fodder and bread. Foodstuffs randomly appeared and disappeared, and shopping took real talent. Even when virtually nothing seemed to be available, almost everything could be had if you knew how to obtain it. And obtain it people did, putting together some of the most elaborate meals I’ve ever enjoyed—food shortages being a catalyst for creativity.

My introduction to the Russian table came through reading the alluring descriptions of food in Russian literature: Nikolai Gogol’s four-cornered pie, so luscious it could make “a dead man’s mouth water”; Chekhov’s kulebiaka, a layered fish pie that’s “appetizing, shameless in its nakedness, a temptation to sin.” These enticements and others made me long to visit Russia, to taste its grand dishes. But when I finally got there, during the Cold War, I was shocked by the food deficits and indifferent cooking that defined Soviet reality. I tried to reconcile the delicacies I’d savored in my imagination with the everyday fare that sustained me, like stolichnyi salat, a pyramid-shaped potato, chicken, and vegetable salad dripping with mayonnaise. That near-daily salad, one of the few constants on Soviet menus, proved both a comfort and an unexpected rabbit hole. Little did I know at first bite that this “capital salad” was a bastardized version of the elegant salade Olivier first introduced to fashionable Muscovites in the 1860s. Nor did I realize that behind each bowl of borscht, each spurt of butter from artfully prepared chicken Kiev, lay a hidden and often complex history.

Culinary practices are as dynamic as languages, continually changing in relation to the social context in which they are performed. New foods are introduced, old dishes fall out of favor; kitchen technologies change as new dietary trends emerge. Thus the idea of a stable national cuisine can seem contrived. But, as with languages, we can trace words back to roots. We can identify representative ingredients and a unique grammar of techniques, or marked philosophies of dining, or certain distinctive flavor profiles that typify a cuisine. It is tempting to tell the culinary story of Russia in terms of dualities and easy juxtapositions: scarcity and abundance, feasting and fasting, poverty and wealth, restraint and excess, modesty and flamboyance. And such pairings can reveal a lot about social structures and about the way food is consumed. But they can’t begin to communicate what is, to me, most crucial: food’s taste and texture, the technologies of preparation, the aesthetics of the table, and, perhaps above all, its cultural resonance and the emotional value of traditional flavors, how people know who they are by what they eat together.

Writing about food calls for an appreciation of food’s sensory qualities, whether it’s the heady fragrance of Antonov apples in autumn or the visceral smell of pig’s feet simmering into the meat aspic called studen’. What equivalencies are there between an aristocratic table, laden with flowers and shimmering with candles à la russe, and a peasant family’s rough board, upon which a communal pot of wild mushroom and barley soup has been set? Where but in Russian literature can you find that nineteenth-century prototype, the superfluous man, bemoaning the emptiness of life even as he reaches for another piece of pie as if for the embodiment of truth? And who is to say that the superfluous man isn’t right to find truth materialized in sensory delight? This domestic history of Russian food offers a look into people’s daily lives, to serve up a history that originates from the wooden spoon rather than from the scepter.

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Excerpted with permission from The Kingdom of Rye, by Darra Goldstein, published by the University of California Press, May 2022.