"I'm a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy," both my grandfathers would
say. This excused them from their reluctance to try the jelled,
baked, sautéed and marinated creations family members brought
to reunions. They preferred to stick with the timeworn and tested
comfort foods. The stick-to-your-ribs kind of food that will load
your arteries with fat and give you an extra dose of carbohydrates,
but keep you full all night long.
I was never a meat-and-potatoes kind of girl. I had nothing
against either meat or potatoes and would eat them gladly when
they were set in front of me. But I had never prepared a steak
in my 10 years of independent living, much less a hamburger or
a meatball. I had just about eliminated the good old bloody stuff
from my diet.
Then I moved to the Agin-Buryat Autonomous Area in southeastern
Siberia. Populated by the descendants of Genghis Khan's Mongol
hordes, this clan of Buryats in the midst of the Siberian steppe
is a meat-and-potatoes nation.
On my first day living in the capital, Aginskoye, a small town
of 14,000 nestled among stubby mountains, I met with the director
of the school where I would be teaching. It was a chilly mid-January,
and she wanted to make sure the town's first Western resident
survived the winter without incident. As we scrunched with three
others in the closet-sized director's office, she scribbled a
list of problems that needed to be resolved.
"We've got to get you some meat and potatoes," she said. "You
can't even buy potatoes in the stores now -- everybody has his
own stock. And while meat is available, it's too expensive."
"Actually, I don't eat all that much meat," I said.
"It is very cold here, and both meat and potatoes are obligatory."
She said this in the same caring but staccato tone in which she
instructed me that I must wear boots and a fur hat every time
I stepped out of my home. "You can't get through the winter without
meat and potatoes."
I had dealt with much worse problems than a free supply of meat
and potatoes when I resided in another area of Siberia, and I
was anxious to integrate into the local culture. Okay, bring
them on! I thought. And she did.
But first my roommate, Ayuna, a 28-year-old Buryat administrator,
built her own stockpile. Her parents pulled up in a puttering
two-seater Moskvich and dragged into our apartment a giant sack
of red potatoes and several slabs of meat gathered from their
rural farm. Ayuna placed the potatoes in the kitchen and initially
stored the meat out of sight on our balcony, where the weather
was cold enough to keep it frozen. A few days later, when I came
home from work, I found the basin that I usually used for bathing
(we had no hot water) on the kitchen counter. Inside was a large
pig's foot with the hoof still attached. It was thawing for dinner.
I was disgusted but remained silent. We'd been living together
only a few weeks and had developed a pattern of cooking dinner
on alternate nights. Whatever was going to come of this foot,
I knew it would appear on my dinner plate.
By the time I came to help cook later that evening, she had
already removed the skin and hoof. She ground the meat, added
some ground-meat fat, and then we made pelmeni, small
meat- and fat-filled ravioli.
The soft dough was deceptive, for, underneath, my teeth often
became stuck on chewy tidbits I couldn't swallow, little chunks
of meat resembling plastic mauled by a dog. It was difficult to
remove the image of that hoof from what I was eating. I carried
on though, building up a small pile of what I found inedible at
the side of my plate. Ayuna had no such pile.
One morning, I woke up late. As I opened the refrigerator to
pull out a small carton of yogurt for a quick breakfast, I exclaimed
in horror. Everything was bathed in a sea of blood. Our poor electrical
system meant that the slightest puff of air could interrupt the
current and disconnect power. Somehow this happened to our refrigerator,
and everything from the freezer had thawed.
Ayuna had stuffed the freezer with the raw, unbagged beef and
pork she'd received from her parents. The butter sat helplessly
in a pool of viscous blood. The blood seeped into the honey jar,
forming a sweet red conglomeration. My cheese dripped blood, and
all of the fruits and vegetables I'd carted from the city were
dewy with droplets.
Disgusted and fearful of all the bacterial diseases we could
contract, I pulled everything out and frantically tried to clean
before I had to leave for work. Blood dripped onto our floor,
our kitchen table, our counters.
I put everything into plastic bags so such a catastrophe would
never occur again. Still, blood became a common sight. It could
be a chunk of meat bathed in blood that would greet me when I
came home or the more innocuous yet still disturbing spatters
of blood I'd come across everywhere, from the floor to the windowsill.
One afternoon, my supply arrived. A wizened man sent by the
school director appeared at my door with a sack of potatoes that
reached my waist and several crimson prime cuts of meat. "Storing"
the potatoes by the door, I began the intimidating process of
reducing the supply, day by day. Mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes,
baked potatoes with mayonnaise (called potatoes a la francaise),
even french fries. Even before I noticed any noticeable drop in
the supply, I found that many of my potatoes were going bad.
"We need an underground storage place, but we don't have one
here," Ayuna told me.
"We can't put them outside?"
"No, they ll freeze and won t be good any more."
Although we had rice and macaroni as well, I frantically tried
to get through the bag of potatoes before they rotted. With the
average local surviving on a salary of less than $100 a month,
I was loathe to let anything go to waste.
On the alternate nights when I cooked, I tried to make the most
exotic things I could from local ingredients, supplemented by
a few bottles of black bean sauce and spices I had brought with
me from overseas. Chicken-vegetable stir-fry was a favorite, as
was homemade applesauce. Every night I cooked, Ayuna looked at
my creations with wonder. "Wow, I've never seen that before,"
she'd say in simplified Russian to ensure I'd understand. "I've
never thought of that!"
Her meals were always a variation of meat and potatoes. There
could be pelmeni or maybe it would be buzi,
steamed meat- and fat-filled dumplings that are the Buryats' national
food. On other nights, I might find a soup made of meat, potatoes,
fat and noodles, or meat fried with potatoes, onions and eggs.
I wondered if she would consume any vitamins at all if it weren't
for the things I made.
As the weeks went by, I noticed that we were starting to incorporate
the ideas we'd learned from each other into our own dishes. She
began to add carrots and cheese to her fried eggs and meat. I
learned how to cut meat and started adding beef to my vegetable
and potato dishes.
When our neighbor received some frozen slabs of meat from her
rural parents, Ayuna and I went over to help her prepare the meat
for storage. I diced the fat into tiny squares while Ayuna placed
the meat chunks into the grinder. While we worked, we chatted
about our lives, who was dating whom, and who was going to win
The Last Hero, the Russian version of Survivor. As
we left, our neighbor gave us a bag of ground meat and diced fat
so we could make our own pelmeni.
Recently, I was preparing to go three hours north, to the closest
city to our village. I asked Ayuna if I could pick her up anything
in Chita.
She gave me 100 rubles ($3.10). "Could you please get some frozen
broccoli or some of the green peppers you buy?" she asked. "When
my boyfriend comes over, I'd like to make something unusual."
I added to my shopping list vegetables for Ayuna and meat for
me. I'm learning to be a meat-and-potatoes kind of girl.
* * *
Jessica Jacobson is a graduate student of international development
at Princeton University. She spent the last 18 months in southeastern
Siberia as a National Security Education Program Fellow and is
working on a book about her experience.
July 2003
