Russian secret of the feast

Caviar divides people into two categories: some idolize it, others are afraid

The power of the New Year in its unshakable constancy. Strengthened in a measured change of days, he is a guarantor of that higher order that shines through the chaos of everyday life and illuminates it. This voluntary slavery costs freedom. Having surrendered to the calendar, we exchange anarchist will of arbitrariness for disciplined excitement of the game. Understanding the ridiculous convention of her rules perfectly, we do not dare to break them, because they make up and exhaust the game: if they play football with their hands, then this is not football.

“Man,” Plato wrote in the seventh book of his “laws,” “this is some kind of fictitious toy of God, and in essence this was his best appointment.”

We follow him only when the spirit of the celebration that has come out of the Christmas tree transfers us to the prohibitive reality of the holiday, where atheism without coasts closes with religion without faith. This ancient cult does not require anything and promises nothing, except for what gives: the non -resolved and selfless joy of the New Year rituals.

Every ritual is a game in order. Its irresistibility rests on optional. It is deprived of meaning, but full of meaning. Participating in the New Year's liturgy, we help to come to space changes even when we do not believe in them. All that we do exhaustively, but not seriously, necessarily, but Ponaroshka, knowing when, not knowing why, is called superstition, but is the first previous to all other faith. Baratynsky wrote about it:

Prejudice! He is a fragment / ancient truth. The temple fell; / And the ruin of his descendant / tongue did not unravel.

Once a year, this dead tongue comes to life in a New Year's toast. The vodka gurgles, his champagne hisses, the crackers explode, showing the confetti salads, and we rush the second arrow, approaching ourselves to twelve, and to death, in order to enthusiastically greet the holy moment for the fact that, no different from the rest, allows us to participate in the measured processing of universal walkers.

The world is unknowable, the paths are inaccessible, there is no future yet, but there is a New Year, and we are warming the belief that, wherever he found us, we will meet him with a glass and bite, what God sent. Preferably - caviar. This is serious in America.

Caviar divides people into two categories: some idolize it, others are afraid. The first includes the descendants of Russian Jews, who fled from pogroms, the descendants of the White Guards, who fled from the revolution, and the Persians who fled from Ayatollah. There is nothing to say about these, because they know about caviar no less than ours.

The second is incomparably more. They call the caviar “fish eggs” and often, but only red, use for its intended purpose: as a bait for fishing trout. Unable to resist the Cannibal impulse, salmon rush to their own offspring and devour it like a crowns, but along with a hook. Therefore, red caviar is sometimes sold next to worms.

With black - more difficult. The simple -minded people believe that she was blackened by old age. Others still eat, but with horror.

I am sure that only by them, horror, can you explain the monstrous custom to sprinkle black eggs with grated raw bow that completely neutralizing its delicate taste. For the first time facing this barbarism at one fashionable reception, where fate accidentally brought me to me, I could not believe my eyes, for they were covered with tears of resentment.

The famous Wolfgang Pak, famous in Los Angeles, is no better when serving pizza with black caviar. Then it is better to throw it away immediately, as (not hiding contempts about this, they write in Brockhaus and Efron) pioneers acted, burning California rich in sturgeons. Soon, enterprising Germans began to export this caviar to Europe, from where it returned to the more civilized centers of the New World under the proud, but by the false pseudonym of “Russian caviar”. When, by the beginning of the twentieth century, American sturgeons were naught, Russian caviar became really Russian and insanely expensive. Few people ate her, but most know about her.

The odious delicacy, the caviar is surrounded by a flickering aura of unrighteous wealth and criminal wastefulness: not so much delicacy as a myth. Made in Hollywood, he became part of the traditional Russian cocktail along with vodka, which is natural and furs, which is unnatural. In bad films, this myth is diluted with a balalaika, in expensive - Rachmaninov, in monstrous - gypsies. And in Eastern Promises', the worst of all Western paintings on a Russian theme, the villains have dined with one caviar, but Kabachkova, according to the Russian menu written on the wall, written, I decided, with a playful hand of an offended statist-sob. However, no matter what company the caviar caught the Americans, its role is the same.

The symbol of luxury, but not simple, but decadent, unjustified, carbon monoxide and, of course, useless, like eggs Faberge, only worse. The scary, like Cleopatra, and the seductive, as it is, is associated with the last rampant. The heiress of the fallen monarchy, the culprit and victim of historical shocks, she is the relic of the Russian Ancien Regime, the useless fossil, as old as the sturgeon that gave rise to her. Like Karamazov in wet, she scribbles to squeeze her, alien and necessary. The Russian soul greased with black caviar opens up and winks ominously. Not lunch, not a feast - a dance, and caviar on it is a ramut of a feast. But still, despite the bad fame, caviar is too good to resist her. Like a magical metal from the "telluria" Sorokin, it allows you to buy happiness for money. The miracle of caviar is that the holiday is concentrated in it.

Once, tired of my native and wild custom to start a New Year's feast at midnight, I arranged a slight elegant dinner that was supposed to complete - not to open - the Cliko glass. With the last blow of the watch, however, an old friend from Moscow burst into the door and, like Santa Claus, slapped a kilogram puck of caviar on the table. Having brushed off the duck paste, the Anjou pears and the British Stylton British cheese, I took out clean plates, unchanged vodka, and the holiday ended, as it was supposed to, a day later with callous names.

Today, when the Russian caviar is under the environmental ban, in America it can only be bought on Brighton, from under the floor and false. The real one of my Moscow acquaintance tried to bring to New York in a heating pad. Having laid it in dry ice, he explained to everyone that he was lucky for a living kidney for transplanting a dying relative. The stewardesses sobbed on the plane, the pilot was in a hurry, but the customs officers had stone hearts, especially in the Bigla, who sniffs the forbidden edible. The caviar was selected and thrown away (!), Without even trying.

Waving his hand to the Caspian Sea, now all countries are already mastering their own production. There is French caviar, there is Israeli, there is American, from the same California where it was once considered a production retreat, and now they are exchanged for our golden sand. Without regretting costs, I somehow bought a jar-and was disappointed.

“When everyone forgets the taste of Russian caviar,” they answered me with a claim, “this one will like this.”

The trouble is that I still remember. White, gray, almost without salt, with a delicate nutty, precious, like ginseng, which should be eaten from a crystal caviar with a pearl spoon, not being distracted by bread and even - vodka, except perhaps the same “Beluga”. And brilliant, like fuel oil in a pool, which must be generously smeared with hot kalach, so that he boldly bite into a sandwich after a naughty pile. And fresh steril, home salting, and an invaluable gold sturgeon-albinos, which gets only monarchs and poachers. And young green from the Aral Sea. And the standard that lived in the blue banks of my childhood and seemed to disappear with him.

New York