Rebekah Frumkina. My menu

My menu
Rebekah Frumkina

Publication date: April 18, 2000

In memory of William Pokhlebkin

The remarkable writer and editor Mael Isaevna Feinberg once told me: “Give me the text, and I will tell you everything about this person.” Figure of speech? But Mael Isaevna was indeed distinguished by rare insight. We talked with her about commentaries and historical and literary texts, and, nevertheless, “everything” implied precisely the personal qualities of the author, and not erudition or talent.

Years passed, water flowed under the bridges, and confirmation of the literal correctness of what M.I. appeared to me almost weekly.

However, I could hardly imagine that I would remember these words while reading the latest book by William Vasilyevich Pokhlebkin. It’s even sadder to think that this book is the last in the truest sense of the word. I was still finishing reading, increasingly burdened by the tone of the book (later it will be clear why), and the author had already been lying in his Podolsk apartment lifeless for two weeks, with knife wounds, among a priceless collection of cookery and other books. Were the killers hunting for them? However, let's leave this to the criminal chronicles...

I still hope to think about cookbooks. In the meantime, let’s talk about the Pokhlebkin phenomenon. Actually, he was quite famous, and I have nothing to add to what is generally known - a Scandinavian historian who gained general love as the author of books and articles about culinary art, completely different from everything that was offered to the mass reader in the USSR. However, in Russia too.

Firstly, Pokhlebkin’s books were interesting to read . Secondly, they were distinguished by their manufacturability - you could actually cook with them. Thirdly, following Pokhlebkin’s algorithm, it was possible to “depict” something very cheap, but also quite exotic. Once, for fun, my friend and I, whose culinary skills were limited to buckwheat porridge, baked excellent carrot cookies in half an hour. The technology was reported in Pokhlebkin’s book “Secrets of Good Kitchen”, published in 1979 in the once popular “Young Guard” series “Eureka”.

This book cost 1 ruble. Don’t think that I bought it - I “got it”, and even then not in Moscow, but in a Russian bookstore in Budapest. By this time, Pokhlebkin was already the author of hundreds of articles and almost a dozen books on Scandinavian studies. In addition, he managed to publish books about tea, about spices and a solid volume about the national cuisines of the peoples of the USSR.

And in this small book, without falling into an obsessively didactic tone, the author not only clearly outlined the basic culinary rules and techniques and pointed out the most important properties of some products. He also talked about his childhood. A quiet boy of four or five years old, sitting in a corner of the kitchen, loved to watch how “raw ingredients made a delicious lunch.” The parents kicked the boy out of the kitchen and did not support his strange, “girlish” interest, which otherwise could have received “brilliant development.” Very modestly, but not without pride, the boy’s opposition to “yard” habits and his conscious refusal to smoke, which later became so useful to him as a cook, are described. Because he will not have bridishness - this is dullness in taste, something like a singer losing his voice.

Like all the young men of his generation, Pokhlebkin went through the war. Living army impressions - the tricks and culinary skills of a talented battalion cook, cleaning porridge pots, eating quinoa soup for the first time, collecting steppe herbs, the aroma of corn cakes stuffed with shepherd's purse and wild garlic.

A young, very vital person who sympathizes with the inexperienced reader and receives obvious pleasure from the opportunity to share with him his knowledge, passions, and skills - this is the author in both 1983 and 1985. His books are published in half a million copies, are decorated modestly, are inexpensive and go to the lucky ones .

Changes in the country have led to the fact that, in addition to Pokhlebkin’s books, many other books about the joys of taste have appeared. Some are purely culinary skills, while in others cooking is only part of general economic skills. Foreign gift-type publications with tempting illustrations also began to be sold: the “co-author” of the mentioned carrot cookies gave me a French book about cheeses for Christmas. But Pokhlebkin is published and sold out - for example, I have never seen his book about vodka.

His new work “My Kitchen and My Menu” ended up in my possession by chance - a friend lent it to me. At first I was surprised why the book, published for the author’s 75th birthday as part of a planned collection of works, was so graphically mutilated and artistically shameful. With a circulation of 10 thousand and hardcover, why print Pokhlebkin (after all, a manual, not a detective story) on newsprint? The spine, cover art, and endpaper so clearly embody poor taste and unprofessionalism that not even an art school student could submit such a layout as a “book design” assignment.

But this is the form. The contents contained truly sad surprises. Everything that was new and curious to me in this book turned out to be drowned in streams of - well, let's say, kitchen slop. The slop poured by the author on representatives of various professions.

He wrote about hygienists that they should be kicked out of the catering departments. About nutritionists of all stripes - that they are laymen and understand less about cooking than a simple worker and peasant. About the naive wife of his old friend, who, after perestroika, despite the high cost, served market cottage cheese with sour cream every day for breakfast - that she actually deprived him of a friend, since visiting him in another city, William Vasilyevich did not have the fortitude to eat such a shamefully monotonous diet.

“Educated” (Pokhlebkin’s quotation marks) doctors, brainless epidemiologists, illiterate scientists who have developed insipid menus for our cosmonauts. Finally, market women who wash vegetables in the toilets of public restrooms to make the beets and carrots look more attractive.

Not only do today's youth hardly eat soups, dooming themselves to gastrointestinal diseases. The consequences of soullessness are much deeper - the ethnic and national identity of the population is lost (who does not believe, open p. 17 and p. 23).

Well, okay, Marcus Aurelius grumbled about young people. However, the people as a whole turn out to be bad - lazy, stupid, illiterate and indifferent to everything. For with herring, which promised the flourishing of Russian fish cooking, he fed the cats - and at the same time (referring to the 60s) “What delicious, exquisite dishes I prepared then! And for just an insignificant 80 kopecks or 1 ruble.” Maybe the author is simply impoverished and today he has nothing to buy raw materials for his work? So, together with the people, whose culinary and spiritual identity he cares so much about! But read on - everything is much more complicated and, alas, scarier.

The indifferent people did not accept the marvelous fish notothenia, being carried away by the more familiar-looking skinny hake (“what idiots!” - sorry, but I’m quoting; here and further, see p. 268). And in the same way, chasing appearances rather than essence (which, according to the author, was purely Russian), the people did not understand that democracy is inherently something “rotten and harmful.” “And it was precisely this psychological trait of Russians at the end of the twentieth century that became the cause of all the country’s troubles: like moths, people without hesitation flew to the bright new, not yet tested (sic! - R.F.) light of democracy and immediately... burned out, and carried the whole country into this fire. <...> So what could be expected from such a people? "

Reader! I will spare your ill-mannered taste, because next, of course, it will be about Yeltsin. And only then again about the fish.

New recipes, invented by Pokhlebkin himself in the 90s, are named provocatively: “Exquisite Poverty”, “Poor Poor Man’s Soup”, “Eve of Collapse”, “The Beginning of the Era of Capitalism”.

However, in order to enjoy this “exquisite poverty”, aka “perestroika autumn soup” (recipe for autumn 1990), you had to have beans, rice or whole wheat (!), half a glass of celery, 2 fresh apples, 2 tomatoes and 50 -100 grams of meat, sausage or brisket.

“Refined poverty” is refined taste with an empty pocket. But in the fall of 1990, it was not the pockets that were empty, but the shelves. Money was worthless. Even the market did not experience the usual autumn abundance. Half a glass of celery greens, given the complete inconsistency of prices, would be ready to be consumed in soup only by those who grew these greens on their six hundred square meters. There were kilometer-long queues for ham. I remember all this especially vividly, because when I returned to Moscow that fall after a two-month absence, I found myself in a completely different country. Like anyone born in Russia in the 30s, I knew hunger in person. It does not go hand in hand with sophistication.

There once lived a man who was curious about everything new, with a clear mind and appetite for life, who thoroughly studied the cuisines of almost the whole world and masterfully mastered the culinary techniques that existed in Iceland and Tajikistan. He loved his reader and spoke to him as an equal. He was ready to address newcomers and repeatedly, with humor, explain basic things to them, calling one of the chapters in the 1979 book “The basics, but not yet the basics.”

I don’t want to say that there is nothing interesting or useful in the essay “My Kitchen and My Menu”. But it was written by some other Pokhlebkin.