When the summer speaks

My mother used to call the weather like today 'whispering' - it is not just its warmth and sun, the atmosphere is almost like a light blanket enveloping you, making you feel wonderfully cosy and relaxed. They call it here an Indian summer - in Russia they say babye leto, a woman's summer, or, to be precise, a summer of a woman who's glancing goodbye to her youth but is still in her prime, still wishing, but maybe not willing...

The days like that make you comfortable, at the same time as gently forcing you to reflect - not in that wintery way, when you are happy to tuck yourself in under a fluffy duvet and melancholicly watch the rain go by - no, the sun and stillness of the late summer days put you in the right mood to look forward to whatever the leaves, the trees and the wind have under the sleeve just behind the corner...To remember this sparkling day, to have something to savour over the long winter nights, here are a couple of pictures...

A classic tri-colour salad

Not often that I make a conscious effort to buy specific products for a specific recipe - in advance, with a pen and paper in hand - especially when the recipe is beyond the simplicity itself. But a few days ago, on another disappearing summer day I really felt like making the best tri-colour I could ever have! The obvious choice (or maybe not so obvious!) was the Borough market and its main veg patch in the centre: I went for three bulbous almost-orange beef tomatoes, a couple of cute bright yellow ones and a little tigery-green one. The Parma Ham Company provided the snow ball of the naturally sweet buffalo mozzarella. I added my own, window-still-grown basil and dill (a slightly Russianised tri-colour) and voila! Sun, cheese and tomato - a modest celebration of the summer at its pick!

Breakfast in bed

And this is a lovely way to greet the Fall - in bed, lounging on a fluffy blanket with a mug of hot coffee and a thick layer of milk.

I was ravenous that Saturday and considerably hang-over. The hunger won over the laziness and I got up to slice my own soughdough, chop the salty, wrinkly gherkins, take out the peppery smoked mackerel and then came the piece de la risestance - a pouched egg (incredible what a bit of boiling water and a dash of vinegar can do to a humble egg). The mood had become all yellow - the sun on sheets, the yolk gashing over bread, the laughter - all warm and carefree - as if there is no winter to come: just us, beautiful light and... the Guardian!

Noordermarkt, Amsterdam, or a hymn to herring

For most people living in Britain today who are even vaguely interested in food and how it comes to being, tomatoes from Holland stand as an epitome of all that is wrong with today's intensive agriculture - tasteless and unripen 'vegetable-things', grown fast and too clever into a uniformity of perfectly-made 'products'. And this is not just an overgeneralising misconception - a weighty percentage of fruit and veg sold in the UK is in fact imported from Holland, from the fields of glasshouses and factories. My usual anticipation of wonderful new markets and fresh produce was therefore slightly blemished in anticipation of my recent trip to Amsterdam.

Ironic really, considering that the 'Low Countries' (the lands roughly comprising the present-day Holland and parts of the surrounding countries, so called because of their complete, pancake-like flatness, lying below the sea-level) pretty much caused the agricultural revolution in England in the 17-18 centuries! Holland and Flanders were eating well in the 17th centuries, thanks to their naval prowess - and as a consequence the wealth of spices, exotic fruits and everything that could be appropriated from the far-away 'primitive' lands; and engineering intelligence, allowing them not only to build big and lasting ships (in the meantime 'inventing' sauerkraut with its ample C-vitamin content that would allow sailors to be in the sea, scurvy-free, for more than 4 weeks), but also drain half of their country, leaving behind rich and fertile soil. The Dutch - Protestant and prosecuted - immigrated en-masse to the friendly England, taking their brains and hands with them. They brought along with them the new ways of cultivating land (planting clover and humble turnip on an empty land in rotation), all sorts of new vegetables (such as a 'normal' orange carrot, virtually unknown to the English before) and, of course, flowers. Holland still grows and buys more flowers, it seems, than the whole of Europe bunched up together. It makes sense (commercially at least), what else would you grow on the land so hill-free and so human-populated - tulips, veg and cows seem a good answer (the legend has it that the hormones that used to be added to milk are responsible for the improbable height of the Dutch - I'd rather think it's the liberal thinking or the pot, allowing for the democratic mix of genes).

The flowers are indeed a craze, even at numerous 'ethnic' markets spreading out across Amsterdam. Tulips and the well-familiar boxes of factory-produced tomatoes and pointless iceberg lettuces. One such market is on Mauritskade street, near the big and empty Oosterpark and by the curiously located Tropenmuseum that is dedicated to Holland's colonial successes. A fascinating, never-ending stretch of stalls: Moroccan-Turkish-Indonesian snacks mixed in with all for a euro offers and tables filled by freshly-arrived immigrants filling up with breakfasts after night shits. It felt quite familiar - young dark-skinned mothers exchanging phazes in Dutch with stall-holders with the same ease it happens in London in English; imported packages of food with signs from all over the worlds and a myriad of made-in-China's. But the market somehow also felt more 'real', more needed, perhaps because the surrounding area is mainly populated by immigrants, unlike in London where every district is broken down and interpopulated, allowing poverty to co-exist with relative wealth.

But then, of course, there's another side to Amsterdam and, just like in London, the desire for 'local, seasonal, organic' is making its strong mark. Some half an hour walk north, near trendy, Notting Hill like Joordan, there's a Noordermarkt. According to a guidebook, the market is 'unbeatable for second-hand clothes and accesorices'. That was all there, but more importantly, the whole area is taken by by an enormous organic farmers' market every Saturday. It is insanely popular by all sorts of crowds, partly perhaps because Amsterdam doesn't seem to have many other (if any) farmers' markets, partly because the mix of antics, second-hand finds, artistic finds and stall of local artisans and farmers creates an irresistible atmosphere of carnival and joyful matter-of-factness. The word 'bio', or organic, to me seemed quite a stretch applied to this place, since only about a portion of stalls were selling organic (or at least identifyable certified organic), however, the combination of bric-a-brac, quality hand-made titbits (I had to be dragged from an adorable scarf made out of a sleeve from a man's jacket) and small-scale producers were justifying the hype.

Then there was food: huge fluffy wild mushrooms, the yellow insanity of bulbous Dutch cheeses, Dutch pigs happily hanging on crooks and kranies. I particularly liked the flat tubes of dough made out of spelt flour, filled with dried strands of seawood - felt like eating up an essence of Holland! An earthy, down to earth layer of pastry filled with a salty, mineral-rich core - what if not a metaphor for the sturdy nation beating the force of sea!



My main reason to come to the market was to try what I miss so much from my blondy days in Estonian pastures and what the Dutch seem to be happily swallowing up any time of the day - herring. Actually, it is better described as herring sachimi, because the fish is not cooked or, in most cases, even marinated. It is simply spankingly fresh, briefly salted and served with bread, chopped onions and sliced pickled cucumbers. The taste of this oily, fatty, meaty fish can only be described as delectable. But then there's the texture - slivering flesh, round and tender, just sliding down your throat. Heaven. Especially when eaten cross-legged, on a pavement, by a canal, helped by a glass of fridge-cold sparkling wine, whilst eyeing up the passing-by boats and cyclists. A pity really that Brits have chosen to import the stale sameness of peppers and cucumbers, rather than the the fleshy beauty of a plump herring. The fish is plentiful, healthy, delicious and cheap - perhaps, we need another wave of the crafty Dutch to show us the way!

Russians in statistics and gherkins

Ever wondered what lurks behind the ubiquitous banner of 'Eastern-European products' above some Cyrillic looking but mainly Asian shops around the capital? My findings in pictures:

Russians are as famous for drinking vodka three times a day, as for walking bears as pets and eating pickles as staple food. But as opposed to Indian cucumber pickles, which are normally made out of long and smooth varieties sliced into slick rounds, Russians would not dare to use anything but the little, prickly type - as above. Acclimatisation of Russians in the UK is particularly troublesome therefore, as one would not find this type anywhere in Britain. Hence my heart lipped the other day when I came across a modest box of wrinkled gherkins, in a gleaming beauty of all-import Eastern-European shop called 'Smak' in the otherwise Ottoman vicinity of Green Lanes.

'Corned bird - Eastern variety'
Corned meats were particularly popular with the Soviet folk, not only as a useful staple taken to camps (pioneer type, not the concentration, although the latter most probably too), but often stirred into noddles to make vermishelli po-flotski, noodles a la navy (presumably because the dish was easily assembled on ships and boats across the USSR). The dish is a Soviet equivalent to the Shepperd's Pie, and as such much loved by kids everywhere in the 1/6th of the universe.
Clearly the 'bird' variety is a more exquisite offer, more appropriate for the Russian emigree.

'Sunflower seeds - selected'
Called 'Amusement' - one almost wonders if the healthy snack is used to sell other, less virtuous, and slightly less legal seeds. A London equivalent to an Amsterdam coffee shop!

'Male jam'
No jocking, this is an exact translation. If you think this is some kind of alternative medicine to treat 'male problems', you are understandably, but seriously mistaken. This is a Russian alternative to a 'Gentleman's Relish', essentially a tomato marinate or a sauce aimed specifically at men. I have not tasted this delicacy, but assume it has some chilly, less sugar and is quite chunky - this is what a real man is like of course.

The trail of memory: stewed plums

The end of summer is often the time when, in a desperate attempt to capture the fleeting sun, one spends even longer outdoors, breathing in the increasingly fresh air of still green leaves and fruit in prime. Bottling the essence of the escaping warmth and approaching days of trumpeting water on a roof is a process of prolonging the pleasure of the summer season. It is also about building of future memories, moments of looking back and enjoying the nostalgia. Be it oversized strawberries, tiger bodies of enormous courgettes or your own memory of the days that will never come again - August is the time of melancholy; that mellow and slow feeling of time trickling away, and you being on the verge of both laughter and tear. The making of the future memories therefore becomes remembrance of the things repast…

Most of my summers when I was little were spent in Crimea, in the South of Ukraine, on the Black sea, in Feodosiya, the town popular with hippies and Soviet burokrachiki. My grandfather Dmitry Vladimirovich, having retired from the tiresome role of a KGB major, had built a wooden house there; and my brightly ginger grandmother Polina had grown a beautiful and wild garden around the house, full of overgrown flowers, peach and cherry trees, chickens and lots of spindly spiders hanging between trees and forgotten corners. There was a little wooden hut amongst the trees, stuffy with lots of dump and communist magazines, poetry volumes and ship-building manuals (my dad was a ship engineer). There were a couple of springy single beds there and a drawer which always held a bottle of portwein or a ‘good Georgian cognac’ – my father liked a tumble or two (or three) in the evening, before going off to see his friends - captains of small tourist boats; to me commanders of huge ships.

My grandfather had long been gone by the time I remember my dad taking me to Feodosiya for my 3-month summer holidays, although my grandma Polina – a stern women with lots of energy – was still around, looking after the house, making me scared with her steely manner, but also making lots of wonderful jams in her little, cool kitchen. She would lay out mountains of fruits on a table outside her house and use huge, enamel basins (normally used for washing up) and a small stove to preserve the summer: the wonderful fruity mess would slowly change its colour from dark red, to bubble-gum pink to pale innocent pink. The intoxicating aroma of sugar and fruit is still imprinted in my mind (and my belly). To this day I think she must have been quite a lonely woman, with a quietly tragic life of a wife of a KGB employee, a man who held tough principles on child-rearing and liked younger women. I would like to think that Polina’s jam making was a way to show love and care to the world, to preserve the heavy and impossibly beautiful fruits of her labour in the garden, and to give her a moment of eye-squeezing happiness in the middle of very severe Crimean winters: I can imagine her sitting a table, covered with a bright plastic cover, the room only lit by a small table lamp, slurping dark, hot tea with little spoonfuls of summer-laden sweet fruits preserved in their youth and virginity. Dad and I would often carry the heavy jars of crimson and yellow all the way back to cool and flat Estonia, store them in our little kladovka, next to my mum’s creations, to be open and enjoyed for ‘special occasions’ (the first one almost always being my birthday just a couple of months later) and cold, white nights, when only sweet and canned would do.

I remembered my grandma Polina’s jam-making sessions today, when impromptu I decided to stew a few forgotten plums in the fridge. They were tiny, very tart and impossible to stone, but once put together with a bit of sugar and water, the magic begun. The fruits had quickly lost their shape, became slushy, bubbled up into a pretty fury of white and pink syrup and just a few minutes later re-appeared as a beautifully dark and nourishing soup - quite far in taste or texture from Polina’s perfectly formed jams, but nevertheless immensely smoothing, relaxing in its sugarness and languid consistency – a beautiful and melancholic link between the things long past and the things soon to come.

The beauty of pig trotters

Arent’ they fun?! A test to an omnivore kinda dish, I say. Yes, not only did I buy these pink creatures quite on purpose (the all organic tootsies of a - hopefully! - happy piggy), but cleaned them, boiled them until no more, dismantle them and put them all together into a glorious Soviet grandmotherly dish of kholodets, or pork in aspic, or ham and chicken terrine.

The name Kholodets stems from a Russian word meaning cold, frozen or chilled. The dish basically consists of shredded boiled meat (which can be anything from chicken to rabbit to beef), jellified by the means of a pork stock, made out of pig trotters (the bones and other tissue in the feet make the liquid go jelly-like when chilled. In fact – read closely, my vegetarian friend - all jelly like treats are made with at least some use of a pig essence). I believe the must have it roots in the Fresh obsession with everything jellied in the 18-19 centuries (and as everyone knows Russians were bonkers about the Fresh in those far away days). The wobbly and transparent texture must have signified something bizarrely sophisticated and - yes - fun.

I'd been dreaming of re-creating this dish of my childhood for years, battling the seeming impossibility of sourcing the named tootsies from local butchers. Kholodets could in the past be found in any canteen or restaurant throughout the Communist kingdom - in different shapes and disguises; but I always remember the long evenings at home, in our kitchen, when my mum would slowly go through buckets of just-boiled meat, carefully separating the edible tasty bits from not so. Her utilizing all the possible plates, cups, bowls and saucers in our house to make the little individual portions of kholodets - a bit of meat on the bottom of a plate, some crushed garlic, then goes the stock and in the fridge for 12-24 hours. My mum almost always used chicken meat and put lots of garlic, so the result was incredibly tender, delicate and flavoursome at the same time. We ate out little kholodets (ki?) out of the bowls where it’d been chilling, with some nose-bitingly Russian mustard or grated horseradish and, of course, black Russian rye bread.

Well, I repeated the experiment the other night, freakily enjoying the sweet and meaty smell of chicken and trotters boiling my kitchen away for good 4 hours (take the trotters and bony joints of chicken, add cold water, a few spoons of vinegar, onion, carrots, lots f salt and spices - basically chuck the ‘left overs procedure’). And this is the initial result:



I felt like a villain – a wonderful, life-affirming feeling!

My kholodets was more of a fresh terrine - an ample amount of meat in each bowl (with added parsley, cracked pepper and garlic, which I mistakenly omitted) and only enough stock to cover the filling (no more than a cm or so).


Voila! (sorry about the amateur-ish photo)

Have your pig trotter concossion with some pickled cucumbers (mine were very spicy with lots of chillies), a lovely fresh salad, soughdour (home-made in my case, but this may be optional) and - an absolute requirement which was refused to me in my years of pioneer youth - a shot of very, very cold vodka.
Na zdaravye, tovarishi.

On conquering an eight-legged monster

Octopuses are generally sold dead, but you feel you struggle a powerful, living sea-creature when immersing its foot-long muscular body into a saucepan of boiling water. The way it curls, spasms and turns from milky-grey to crimson makes you feel both powerful and cruel; in awe of the nature, how it allowed you to evolve and develop skills to conquer such animal.

We spent blissful two days on the island of Vis, Croatia, totally occupied by this many-legged creature. The octopus adventure started with an early morning trip to a little local fish market - a quiet covered space right on the sea front, with a handful of fishermen carefully laying out their catch on the smooth, stone tables. Feeling just a tad self-conscious (predatory white shorts and large sun-glasses) I breathed in and walked in...The men weren't particularly bothered either way, probably not quite believing that a young laaaady like me (remember, Vis is a 'luxury' island, full of yachts and London priced restaurants) would actually dare to buy a whole fish and cook it in her rented apartments. Well, I went for the weirdest and most daring (and, yes, the most dear! although peanuts compared to the prices in near-by taverns). I didn't even see its size when buying - the wrinkley paunchy fisherman just pointed towards a blue plastic bag and grumbled 'this, octopus!'. I accepted the unspoken challenge, internally steadily telling myself that if it all goes pear-shaped, it's only about 15 quid down the drain. The man must have spotted an octupi novice in me and offered to clean the mollusc (for a fee). Thank God I said yes, because, firstly, I realised I'd bought two octopuses; and secondly, that the amount of ink that came out of the creatures would swamp our entire 'euro-furbished' kitchen! I left the cool market room feeling adventurous, if slightly terrified.

My next move was therefore wise - checking how to cook the inky, slimy thing (I wouldn't normally go into such preparations, relying on my general sense of cooking requirements). Unlike a tender little squid, octopuses need to be cooked for good (aa!) 2 hours before being fried or grilled (apparently, octopuses live for a lot longer than the squid for example, hence having time to toughen up. They die, by the way, within just a few weeks of conceiving their off-spring: endocrine secretions are the cause of genetically-programmed death). So, our dinner had to be improvised whilst we got to the task of 'tenderising' the octopus’s meat. We spent the whole evening in the sweet vapour of the cooking octopuses. The oven was electric, and so I just couldn't find the way to keep the temperature constantly low, so the monster just lied there, bathing in a pot of very hot water. Eventually, around midnight, we made a decision that the folk could 'easily go through the fresh', poured out the water and let the two leggies rest.

I dreamt all night of legs, suction cups, corals...

The morning felt like a Christmas day to me. I jumped out of bed, sprinting to the kitchen, as if expecting that something magical would have happened to the cooked molluscs! They just lied there sleepily, very tender pale pink colour all over with darker, almost indigo-coloured thin layer of skin on top. They looked beautiful and humble to me.

Our second octopus day started with a delicate operation of taking some of the darker skin off the octopuses together with various fatty tissues in between, carefully trying to keep all the succulent suction cups intact. I then sliced all the 16 legs in one inch pieces: half was kept for our grandiose lunch, another half was marinated with just some olive oil and lots of lemon (this was mainly from the smaller octopus, who we, quite rightly, expected to be tender). The main feast was prepared like this:

Octopus a la Vis

glugs of (Croatian of course) olive oil

sliced onion

crushed garlic

all the sliced octopus legs

cubes of boiled new potatoes (4-6 depending on their size)

juice of one squeezed lemon (and some rind if you like a bit of extra zing)

a few table spoons of white wine

lots of finely cut parsley

(chilly flakes would go very nicely here, but I didn't have them in my rented kitchen)

Sweat onions and garlic in some olive oil, until tender and just a little brown. Add the octopus and potatoes, fry on a gentle heat for a 2-3 minutes, add the wine, let it evaporate for a minute or so. Chuck all the parsley, and stew for a few more minutes with a little bit of water if necessary, so that the whole thing comes together in a glorious and messy pink-yellow-green stew.

Eat with more chilled, crisp white wine and chunks of fresh and crusty baguettes.

Our verdict? The sweet and slightly citrusy flavour of the octopuses is unforgettable: fresh, meaty and juicy; it felt like sucking and chewing on the essence of the Mediterranean. If only I’d insisted that the stove the previous evening did it job properly – the bigger mollusc definitively needed an extra half an hour in the pot, as we needed at least a couple more jaws to chew through all the legs (a surprisingly pleasant meaty chewing gum of the octopus I fact!). I know this because the smaller legged creature had just the right texture of chewiness and melt-in-your-mouth tenderness… Perhaps the octopuses did have its upper hand (leg?) on us at the end. We were equals in the fight. I take my hat off in respect and… sharpen my knifes in preparation.

On communist idiology and erotic fruits

I have come to a conclusion that one of the main criterion (let’s be honest, THE main criterion) in choosing my future place of residence ought to be its proximity to a good farmers’ market. And by ‘good’ I don’t mean a bijou type of a market, with a handful of artfully set up stalls of organic burgers and couscous with sun-dried tomatoes. I am after gluttony of shackled tables, all offering the same, all offering something different...

I have come back from a week in Croatia, you see. I am a new person, with a renewed belief that a (post) communist space, sea and sun can work together, even if the first few days you are in a haze of (seemingly) incompatible sensations - clean and luxurious sea, rude and haughty service, lightly (as opposed to Northern European 'cook to death' method) fish and vegetables, uninterrupted kind sun and a rumble of Slav sounds all around. I felt on the edge at first, not being able to put my finger on my feelings and the surroundings - a sense of displacement, disbelief and even envy that the hoards of Slavs managed to settle in this Adriatic paradise some many centuries ago - well done, bro! My predecessors in the not-so-far-away Ukraine chose steppes and sub-zero winters. The territory of Croatia was part of the Roman empire, and invaded by everyone from Turks to Venetians - the Italian influence is particularly strong here, with many local Serbo-Croatian dialects (a language so close to Russian that I could almost read newspapers) sounding positively Italianised - ciaos, sing-song rhythms and energetic gestures added to my overall Slav-Latin confusion. But it's Croatian markets (surprise-surprise) that made me feel if not at home then definitely homey.


The nearly orgasmic feeling of being able to just pop around a corner and have a selection of 10, 15, 30 little stalls all offering the same basic, beautiful, fully ripen products; all differently priced depending on their size and purpose (eat now or can for later); all having their customer and making a small but a buck. I aimlessly dreamed of organising guided tours here for the English farmers and producers, to show how selling the same product can still work in one market...

Unfortunately, we know well that the underlying structures of the markets in Britain are too different for us, on the Island, to even dream of having a market culture (things are changing, but the result is still uncertain). The Continent (and in my view ex-Communist countries in particular) still have masses of people with their allotments, growing a little bit of this and that, some for their own bellies, some to earn an extra coin. In Croatia it is a combination of a fertile land, mild climate and many years of Soviet food shortages that result in proliferation of markets. In the olden days growing your own was almost a necessity, even for the city dwellers. My own theory is that for many people under the Communist rule of no private property having an allotment meant having space for that Cosmo-induced 'me' time, freedom to have different conversations with your friends, creating something of your own, for yourself, getting away from the concrete reality of party-enforced limits. Perhaps it was all a lot more relaxed in Yugoslavia (I still remember my parents dreaming of a Czech 'garniture' - Yugoslavian furniture was highly desired for the unknown to me reasons), but things are clearly different here now. Even in food-phrensied countries like Italy and France markets are more professional than here it seems... But I'm transgressing away, here are the highlights of what you should try:

Figs - the freshness, light perfume and obvious eroticism of this large and squishy, lime-coloured fruit with its pale purple inside is unbeatable consumed with lashings of (local, lavender)honey and morsels of very mild (local, goat) cheese or just devoured as it is, lying Emperor-style by the sea, gazing leisurely at the surrounding female bodies.

Cherries - tiny, intensely sweet and sour jewels, the colour of a gypsy girl's eyes (and why not??), are surprisingly refreshing in the heat, especially when chilled and swallowed first thing in the morning after a thirst-inducing night. I kept dreaming of having them with peeps and all sunken in an almost-frozen vanilla ice-cream (note, NOT of local variety - overly-creamy and sugary - but hard and Italian, to sunk your teeth into).

Prošek - sweet dessert wine made out of dried grapes, syrupy in texture and blood-coloured. Highly recommend the kind produced in the isle of Vis (the island was closed to public until 1990's being a military post and the main hideout of Tito). Drink it cold after the abundant dinner of fish and molluscs; it gives energy and sweet dreams.

And of course, THE fish, on which just a bit later...