Alexey Zimin about gastronomic wise men and fools

The ideals of traditional culture are ambivalent. Contrary to the idea of immanent moral laws and spiritual bonds of peoples, the bottom there is intertwined with the top, the corporeal with the incorporeal, and the higher with the lower. To understand this, it is not at all necessary to read the studies of Mikhail Bakhtin; it is enough to go to a village wedding or wake - or just watch the film “Bitter”.

Photo: Valery Melnikov, Kommersant / buy photo

Traditional culture is not an order, but a dialogue. A smart person and a fool are not different people, but something like Janus, two faces of one person. Cunning is valued more than intelligence; it is not for nothing that in most international fairy tales, fools win.

Language is a mirror of popular ideas. In Britain, for example, there is an expression “Gotham fools” and a similar expression “Gotham sages”.

According to legend, King John the Landless was planning to set up his hunting camp in the vicinity of the village of Gotham, and the villagers, frightened by the prospect of maintaining a royal court, pretended to be idiots. In front of the royal quartermasters, they drowned eels in a puddle of water, dragged a cart onto the roof of a barn to protect the tiles from the sun, rolled heads of cheese down a mountain so that they would roll to Nottingham, built a fence around a cuckoo that had landed on a bush, and so on. same spirit.

All this together gave birth to the persistent conviction among John’s servants that the village was inhabited by fools, and the royal court set off to look for a new place for a bivouac. And the satisfied residents of Gotham moved on to other things.

Modern mass culture and representative power are popular exactly to the extent that they use forms of idiocy, often forgetting about ambivalence, the stupidity of the mind and the mind of stupidity.

There are similar manifestations in gastronomy. For example, Soviet canteen cuisine with its representation of national dishes was a kind of Gotham without a second thought. Take, for example, one of the most common dishes in public catering - Tatar azu. Most of the time, it was a nondescript mess of coagulated beef protein, the sour, tinny taste of tomato paste, and a sharp note of pickled cucumber.

Meanwhile, this is a very simple and clear expression of the basic gastronomic laws, the idea of balancing tastes, proteins, carbohydrates and textures.

The trick here, as is most often the case, is not what the story is about, but how it is told.

The meat must be cut into thin strips across the grain so that it can be quickly fried and so that during the frying process the muscle cannot curl into a tight spiral and become tough.

You need to fry the meat in a small amount of vegetable or animal fat, in a very hot frying pan. In order for the meat to have a fried taste, the Maillard reaction occurred, amino acids and sugar turned into caramel - and this taste then gave body to the sauce.

Tatar basics in Soviet canteen cuisine are a nondescript mess of coagulated beef protein, the sour-tinny taste of tomato paste and a sharp note of pickled cucumber

In a separate frying pan with vegetable oil, you need to fry, without overcooking, finely chopped onions, add grated or finely chopped tomatoes to it (not tomato paste: tomato paste should generally be used as a coloring and flavor enhancer, but not as a building material for a dish, - that is, homeopathically). Simmer the onions and tomatoes together for another 5-7 minutes so that the excess liquid evaporates and the vegetables form a unified flavor. A tomato is a berry, but its fruitiness disappears when fried, and to develop this theme, you can add some finely chopped cherries (fresh or frozen) to the tomatoes. For spice - cumin and coriander on the tip of a knife and a pinch of hot paprika. Next you need to add the fried meat, a little meat (beef or chicken) broth and simmer together for 5-7 minutes, then add finely chopped pickles and simmer for another 2-3 minutes. Add salt to taste. The taste of pickled cucumber is good in this dish when it does not take over it entirely, when its tentacles are only slightly launched between the meat and tomato folds. Finally, you need to mix in the chopped green onions and dill. And serve with fried potatoes.

Here, by the way, there is an excellent point for variability. Instead of potato chips or regular fried potatoes, you can make sweet potato or carrot chips by cutting them into thin slices on a mandoline, grater, or with a knife and quickly frying them until crunchy in hot oil.

From the outside, perhaps these efforts seem unnecessary and even ridiculous, like dragging a cart onto the roof of a barn. But this is not so - and the entire history of human success can serve as confirmation of this.

Azu in Tatar

1 beef fillet (400 g)

2 Canned skinless tomatoes, diced (400 g)

3 Onions (1 pc.)

4 Vegetable oil (60 ml)

5 Ground cumin (to taste)

6 Ground coriander (to taste)

7 Frozen cherries (100 g)

8 Hot paprika (1 pinch)

9 Pickled cucumbers (150 g)

10 Green onions (20 g)

11 Dill (20 g)

12 Salt (to taste)

13 Carrots or sweet potatoes (400 g)

Alexey Zimin - editor-in-chief of the Afisha-Eda website

Three wise men in one basics