Her lover was smiling. “I can’t believe you’re going to order!” he said.
He was right. It was too late. If she ordered what she wanted now, it would be a confession that for almost a year now she’d been eating food she didn’t even like. On the other hand, she felt that she couldn’t eat spinach any longer, not a single bite.
Ru
ena put the menu back.
“We can’t see each other anymore,” she said.
Her excuse was simple and clear.
“Pavel is coming.”
Roundup of Recipes
1. SALAD OLIVIER
Salad Olivier is the Russian’s Thanksgiving turkey. I can’t think of any other holiday dish that would come close to Salad Olivier in popularity. The biggest, most cherished, and most important holiday in Russia is New Year’s Eve, and Salad Olivier has always been the centerpiece of that holiday meal. There are so many childhood memories and nostalgic cravings centered around Olivier that it’s hard to say what really makes it so important, the dish itself or the complicated emotions that arise with it. There are many stories of its origins and just as many versions of an original recipe, so I don’t trust any of them. The core ingredients are boiled potatoes, eggs, pickles, and some kind of chopped meat; the rest is open to interpretation. Here, I’m including two of the traditional class-oriented versions and a third one I created especially for health-conscious Americans, with the vague hope of persuading them that Salad Olivier is well worth eating and can be quite delicious.
PLEBEIAN VERSION
Bologna from a Russian food store
Boiled potatoes
Pickles
Boiled egg
Canned peas
Boiled carrots
Mayonnaise dressing
Lots of mayonnaise is essential; add more and more until the salad makes a wet slurping sound while you mix it, similar to the sound of the snow slush on the streets of Manhattan when you step in it. There is not enough mayonnaise until the salad makes that sucking sound.
The plebeian version is usually served in a two-gallon enameled bowl. The important thing is to pile up the salad so high that it forms a sloppy mound in the middle of the bowl.
ARISTOCRATIC VERSION
Boiled chicken breast
Boiled potatoes
Pickles
Boiled egg
Canned peas
Possibly a peeled green apple
Half mayonnaise/half sour cream dressing
(the same slurping sound is expected)
The aristocratic version — absolutely no carrots — is served in an elegant cut-crystal bowl. There should be the same mound in the center, but a neatly formed one. The mound is shaped with the back of a mixing spoon and smoothed down along the sides as you would do when icing a cake. Most people also decorate their salads. You will find a really nice outlet for your aristocratism and creativity in adorning the salad. There are many elegant ways to lay slices of eggs and/or pickles on top of your salad mound.
SOMETHING-AMERICANS-MIGHT-EAT VERSION
Grilled chicken or turkey breast
(excellent way to use leftover Thanksgiving turkey)
Boiled potatoes
Pickles (very firm and not too sweet)
Boiled egg (or maybe not)
Canned peas (well, you can skip them too)
Possibly a peeled green apple
Mayonnaise dressing
Use just a little mayonnaise, so the salad won’t be so damn high in fat content (don’t even go near the slurping sound), but not low-fat mayonnaise. If you use low-fat mayonnaise, you might as well throw the whole dish out. It will taste a little dry, yes, but your weight won’t go up as dramatically as with the two previous versions. Serving on lettuce leaves will help create the illusion that this is a healthy dish.
For all versions, potatoes should be boiled in their skins, then peeled and diced. Everything else should be diced as well into tiny little cubes (14 inch), although the plebeian version might allow larger and sloppier cubes.
The ratio of ingredients is as follows: for every two cups of diced potatoes, use one cup of diced meat, one cup of diced egg, one cup of diced pickles, one cup of peas, half a cup of carrots, and half a cup of apple. Or it could be whatever you want.
Oh, writing about this made me so hungry. I have a craving for some Olivier. But I’m at a trailer park in Moscow, Pennsylvania. I don’t know why it’s called Moscow, for there are no Russians and no Russian delis here. I have hardly any ingredients at hand. We’re out of eggs, let alone canned peas or pickles, and my car is in the city in my husband’s care, and shopping in rural America without a car is a rough sport. So I’m making myself an extra-simple and extra-plebeian version of Olivier, using what I have in the fridge: two boiled potatoes, three slices of nice bologna, and half a tablespoon of mayonnaise. I know this doesn’t sound too appetizing, but it is, it is, just trust me!
2. SPINACH
This one is going to be easy. We didn’t have spinach in Russia, except the kind that came in jars as baby food, so there is no family recipe for spinach. I tried making some of the spinach dishes I mention in “Slicing Sautéed Spinach,” based on recipes I found in cookbooks, but none of them came out very well. Below is the only spinach recipe I mastered, but since I learned it only recently, it didn’t make it into the collection of spinach dishes that my characters eat.
Baby spinach
Finely sliced red onion
Sun-dried tomatoes
Goat cheese
Balsamic vinegar
Extra-virgin olive oil
Take a pile of baby spinach, put it in a bowl, and add as much of the other ingredients as are needed for desired balance.
3. MEATBALLS
Since two of the stories have meatballs in them, it was particularly important to find an ultimate meatball recipe. I had never cooked meatballs myself, and I wasn’t particularly happy with the family recipe, because it seemed like the main goal of my mother’s and grandmother’s version was to make the meatballs as dry and hard as rye-bread croutons. “Why waste meat?” I would ask them. “Why not just buy croutons and serve them with pasta or mashed potatoes?”
They didn’t answer; perhaps they were perfectly satisfied with crouton meatballs. But I wasn’t. Now and then, at some family dinner or at a restaurant, I would happen upon a real meatball — large and juicy and perfect.
Russian meatballs are very different from what Americans call meatballs. First of all, they are not shaped like balls; they are shaped like a flattened egg, and they are never buried under spaghetti or smothered in tomato sauce but are usually served hot and crispy with mashed potatoes.
I like Russian meatballs so much that I always thought if I ever wrote a story about two women trying to seduce a man with a certain dish, meatballs would be the dish. But where would I find a perfect recipe? Now I have actually written a story about two women trying to seduce a man with Russian meatballs. Neither of my characters is a professional chef, so I searched among families and family recipes. I managed to collect countless versions, but none of them satisfied me. They were all too complicated, too fussy. Meatballs is a very simple dish. I simply couldn’t trust a recipe that required more than twenty ingredients.