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While American restaurant food is now the world's most cosmopolitan, a Russian meal is almost as hard to buy in the U.S. as a Big Mac in Dnepropetrovsk. This vacuum can be filled by the home cook, with lively guidance from Darra Goldstein's delightful A la Russe (Random House; $16.95). The 15 Soviet republics have an extraordinarily diverse cuisine, embracing the cookery of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, representing regions from the Black Sea to the Arctic Circle, reflecting tsarist extravagance and peasant reality. (Goldstein will follow a recipe for sturgeon soup with champagne, a favorite of Catherine the Great, with ukha, a fisherman's broth.) The author learned many dishes from her grandmother, an emigre from Byelorussia; and in her great-grandfather's butcher shop, she writes, "Marc Chagall played as a child." An assistant professor of Russian literature at Williams College, she has also feasted on native fare as a student in Leningrad and as a guide for a traveling U.S. Department of Agriculture exhibit. Goldstein reports that despite numbing food shortages, "the art of Russian cooking is still thriving."
Goldstein's A la Russe brings alive many of the mouth-watering meals of Russian literature, like the robust soups and breads of Gogol's Ukrainian tales. Borsch, the rich beet soup considered typically Russian, is actually native to the Ukraine, which boasts 100 varieties; included here are a Ukrainian and a Moscow version. The spicy food of Georgia is a prized addition to the blander Russian cuisine, notably tabaka (pressed and grilled chicken), as well as the more familiar shashlyk from the Caucasus. Among other dishes well known to the West, beef Stroganoff and Russian salad were actually created by French chefs; chicken Kiev, however, was invented in that city long before Moscow became the Soviet capital; Goldstein provides practical recipes for all three.
Specialties that deserve an honorable place on the American table include kulebyaka, the glorious salmon pie described by Chekhov as "shameless in its nakedness, a temptation to sin"; pirozhki, the more plebeian meat or vegetable pies; kidney and dill pickle soup; Azerbaidzhan lamb patties; veal stew with cherries; Ukrainian honey cake; smetannik, a rich pie of sour cream, jam and nuts; and the celebrated Guriev kasha, a thickened compote of brandied fruits. To round out a Russian banquet, Goldstein provides instructions for a dozen deliciously flavored vodkas, and with them a toast to the meal: Eshte, eshte na zdorovye! Eat, eat to your health! —ByMichaelDemarest