March 5 2003

IN A POST -, or post-post-, cold war world, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember that the Russians were, not so very long ago, our mortal enemies – the scowling nemeses of John Le Carré novels and James Bond movies, the fur-hatted inhabitants of a nation that was similar to, and yet somehow the very opposite of, our own sun-kissed republic, the land of the free, etc. But these days one is far more aware of the similarities between the two countries than their differences. Like the United States, Russia is a northern power deeply rooted in Christendom, with a continental scope that includes an often fractious wealth of peoples, languages, traditions, faiths – food, too.

Russian restaurants accordingly serve everything from salads of tomato and feta cheese to dolma to curried chicken – all reminders that Mother Russia's borders run from the Black Sea (Sevastopol was in origin a Greek town) to south Asia and beyond. But just as there is a core American cuisine (burgers, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob), so too there is quintessentially Russian food. I was reminded of this truth last week at the annual Russian Festival, a congeries of art displays, musical performances, socializing, and of course a buffet of the classic Russian delicacies: piroshki, beef Stroganoff, and borscht, among others.

To eat an entire meal of these dishes is to be struck by the Central Europeanness of them. Piroshki are stuffed with cabbage or ground meat. Borscht is a beet soup made with beef broth, with shredded onions and carrots (root-vegetable city!) and healthy dabs of sour cream and sprinklings of chopped dill. Beef Stroganoff – in America perhaps the best-known of Russian dishes – combines chunks of beef and a sauce of mushrooms and sour cream into a beef burgundy-like stew to be ladled over a mound of barleylike kasha (buckwheat). Russian pastries are pure fin de siècle Vienna; we simply inhaled a huge block of coffee crunch, a miniature high-rise of cake, frosting, and bits of coffee candy. And vodka? Oh, a Yeltsin-esque abundance, in every imaginable flavor.

Although I treated myself to only a tiny thimbleful of vodka ($2.50, cherry flavored), I found myself quite mesmerized by the spectacle of it all: the abundant iconography of the Orthodox Church (many Jesuses and Marys of gleaming porcelain on display); the troops of uniformed grade-school children moving politely through the dining hall, clearing dishes; an extraordinary figure in a tiara who could easily have passed as Seinfeld's nefarious postman, Newman, in drag. Do they show Seinfeld in Russia? Now that James Bond walks among the undead, I would guess they will have to start soon.