Cooking as Contact Sport
There's a special bread you have to make for Orthodox Easter that my grandmother has made every year since the dawn of time. Approximately *thrice* others - interlopers, poor fools - have tried their hands. The result has always been loaf upon loaf of uneaten bread, and much scorn and derision. Cooking at our place, you see, is a competition. An Olympic standard competition. And my grandmother is the all-time champion, unchallenged and undefeated.
She maintains this supremacy by various means, both fair and foul.
Firstly, the recipes are secret. She tells noone. NOONE! I remember watching her make soup as a six year old, and being told that I was never to tell anyone what I saw her doing.
Secondly, the recipes are incomprehensible. Even if you make it into the inner circle - the rule of two, whereby *one* other person has to know the ingredients, if only so you can be a packhorse and carry the shopping, or a labourer and chop the onions - you can't make head or tail of them. They're inevitably in three different languages, and contain no instructions or quantities.
Sometimes, she outright lies. In fairness, she has never lied to *me*, and I don't think she has really lied to my mother, though my mother swears she has. But those outside the family? Oh the webs she weaves. And yet so sweetly. She lets them lead *themselves* astray, with only a gentle nudge to send them in the right - wrong - direction.
Sometimes she assumes *you*, the recipient of her wisdom, are more intelligent than you are. Or at least that you grew up in the Soviet Union and know various related tricks.
Sometimes she just forgets. She is eighty-five, after all.
And she has finally announced her retirement.
She gave me the recipe yesterday. Well. She gave me a small scrap of brown paper covered in cocoa and oil stains, with about twelve words on it. She then sat on a stool and watched me suffer for approximately ten hours.
The flour was in kilos. The sugar was in cups. The butter was in pounds. The oil was by the glass. "What kind of glass?" I asked in depair. There were apparently 36 eggs.
"Are there really 36 eggs?" I asked.
"Thehrty tou if you can't affohrd," she replied. "Moy fada hed won tousand chickens."
"No wonder Stalin sent you to Siberia," I snapped.
"Vat?"
"Nothing!"
The only reference to butter was: "Put in pot. Dip hands. Knead two hours."
"Do I really need two pounds if it's just for dipping?" I asked. "Can't I just oil my hands?"
The butter actually went in the dough, though of course you couldn't tell by reading. The oil did too. You needed *extra* for your hands.
I kneaded for two hours. I knew that bit. I've done it for her a couple of times before, though the dough has always been pre-mixed in the past.
I left it to rise. I kneaded another two hours. I didn't know about that.
It rose more. It looked like it was going to take over the house. I kneaded another two hours. She didn't warn me about that either.
It went in the oven.
"You very lazzy gehrl, rehly," she pronounced. "Luk da mess on da flohr!"
I flung my arm out to better encompass the mammoth amount of work I'd done. An already overtaxed muscle inside my elbow gave up the ghost.
"Oh god," I whimpered. The RSI in my mouse hand was already kicking in. My lower back was in spasms.
"I yuss to mak vit *sixty* eggs. And den I scrup da flohr."
"Every. Body. Else. Is sitting in the lounge watching tv." I gritted out. "I didn't make thirty loaves for myself."
"And vile I did, you grandfada was playing vit bitches."
"Oh."
"At lest you dontt got dat."
"No. Okay."
She smiled. "You moy best frayend."
"Oh!"
"I gonn to shoh you evryting."
"Everything?"
"Evryting. But you donnt tell you mada."
"Okay."
Apparently my bread was perfect. I have succeeded where all others have previously failed. I'm also now the proud owner of a whole wooden box full of soiled scraps of paper. None of them make sense, we're going to have to go through them one by one so I can translate them... But they are *mine*.
I'm also nursing a taped up arm and have no appetite to actually *eat* today.
And suddenly I understand. My answers to polite enquiry from three sisters and thirty-six cousins are a whole new measure of cryptic.
Happy Easter, one and all.
She maintains this supremacy by various means, both fair and foul.
Firstly, the recipes are secret. She tells noone. NOONE! I remember watching her make soup as a six year old, and being told that I was never to tell anyone what I saw her doing.
Secondly, the recipes are incomprehensible. Even if you make it into the inner circle - the rule of two, whereby *one* other person has to know the ingredients, if only so you can be a packhorse and carry the shopping, or a labourer and chop the onions - you can't make head or tail of them. They're inevitably in three different languages, and contain no instructions or quantities.
Sometimes, she outright lies. In fairness, she has never lied to *me*, and I don't think she has really lied to my mother, though my mother swears she has. But those outside the family? Oh the webs she weaves. And yet so sweetly. She lets them lead *themselves* astray, with only a gentle nudge to send them in the right - wrong - direction.
Sometimes she assumes *you*, the recipient of her wisdom, are more intelligent than you are. Or at least that you grew up in the Soviet Union and know various related tricks.
Sometimes she just forgets. She is eighty-five, after all.
And she has finally announced her retirement.
She gave me the recipe yesterday. Well. She gave me a small scrap of brown paper covered in cocoa and oil stains, with about twelve words on it. She then sat on a stool and watched me suffer for approximately ten hours.
The flour was in kilos. The sugar was in cups. The butter was in pounds. The oil was by the glass. "What kind of glass?" I asked in depair. There were apparently 36 eggs.
"Are there really 36 eggs?" I asked.
"Thehrty tou if you can't affohrd," she replied. "Moy fada hed won tousand chickens."
"No wonder Stalin sent you to Siberia," I snapped.
"Vat?"
"Nothing!"
The only reference to butter was: "Put in pot. Dip hands. Knead two hours."
"Do I really need two pounds if it's just for dipping?" I asked. "Can't I just oil my hands?"
The butter actually went in the dough, though of course you couldn't tell by reading. The oil did too. You needed *extra* for your hands.
I kneaded for two hours. I knew that bit. I've done it for her a couple of times before, though the dough has always been pre-mixed in the past.
I left it to rise. I kneaded another two hours. I didn't know about that.
It rose more. It looked like it was going to take over the house. I kneaded another two hours. She didn't warn me about that either.
It went in the oven.
"You very lazzy gehrl, rehly," she pronounced. "Luk da mess on da flohr!"
I flung my arm out to better encompass the mammoth amount of work I'd done. An already overtaxed muscle inside my elbow gave up the ghost.
"Oh god," I whimpered. The RSI in my mouse hand was already kicking in. My lower back was in spasms.
"I yuss to mak vit *sixty* eggs. And den I scrup da flohr."
"Every. Body. Else. Is sitting in the lounge watching tv." I gritted out. "I didn't make thirty loaves for myself."
"And vile I did, you grandfada was playing vit bitches."
"Oh."
"At lest you dontt got dat."
"No. Okay."
She smiled. "You moy best frayend."
"Oh!"
"I gonn to shoh you evryting."
"Everything?"
"Evryting. But you donnt tell you mada."
"Okay."
Apparently my bread was perfect. I have succeeded where all others have previously failed. I'm also now the proud owner of a whole wooden box full of soiled scraps of paper. None of them make sense, we're going to have to go through them one by one so I can translate them... But they are *mine*.
I'm also nursing a taped up arm and have no appetite to actually *eat* today.
And suddenly I understand. My answers to polite enquiry from three sisters and thirty-six cousins are a whole new measure of cryptic.
Happy Easter, one and all.