Monday 16 May 2022

Literary Meals - A Continuing Series: "The Ukraine" by Artem Chapeye, a short story in The New Yorker

There is a lot to eat in The Ukraine, a vivid short story published in the New Yorker in April this year. Reading it this morning in Bristol, the story's multiple references to food make me homesick for the other end of Europe, where I usually spend a lot of my time. 

This reaction is partly because I am greedy and partly because the dishes that are mostly available these days in that more eastern region of Europe are, despite the best efforts of globalisation, generally the dishes that have been traditionally part of the lives of the people who live there - dishes that often do not seem right when served in other settings than their homelands. 

People talk about the "flavour of a place",  intending to refer to more than simply what one eats, but if there are things you've only ever eaten in one region - karagorgeva snicla, for instance, in Serbia; bableves, in Hungary - then those things become part of the more general local flavour and the thought of them makes you nostalgic not just for the thing itself but for the place you ate it in. 

To an extent this is even true of Austria - which means, given how prosperous Austria is, that the habit of sticking with tradition in the kitchen must be a function of demand as much as supply. Rather than plunging themselves into world cuisine as we have done in the English-speaking world, (or at least in Bristol and in Australia), in Austria and the countries eastwards (even in Germany, come to that), if the dishes you usually encounter when you go out for a meal are anything to go by, people are happy with things as they have always been. 

And even in the former Communist-led countries of central and eastern Europe, although they remain less wealthy, food availability is no longer subject to the same level of seasonality that I recall from the eighties. I lived in Belgrade then and I remember how each autumn, in what were known then as the "peasant markets" but I suppose would now be called "farmers' markets", black grapes would suddenly appear in extraordinary abundance. Although they often looked identical, to the uneducated shopper, the market people could tell you about the minute variations in flavour and texture between each type. 

Back then, tomatoes, something I regard as a staple, would completely vanish each year, around the same time the grapes appeared, and none would be seen again for many months. At the start of May 1986, I am ashamed to admit I found their return to the markets so exciting that, when I was told that Chernobyl had happened and I ought to take my small child out of the area immediately, my idiotic reaction was to feel aghast because I had just bought tomatoes for the first time since the year before - my vision of a weekend lunch on our sunny balcony with a tomato salad seemed far more urgent than the prospect of avoiding a spot of nuclear radiation. Recently, when I met a Hungarian woman who told me she had missed the 1956 window of opportunity to escape the country because she had wanted to finish helping her mother to bottle her tomato crop first, I was comforted that someone else had priorities as muddled as mine . 

These days, at least in Budapest, grapes and tomatoes are available all year round, flown in from Holland or South Africa or who knows where. But, if you buy from the market stallholders who come in from the country to sell their garden produce, you still get a sense of the seasons coming and going. Asparagus, blackberries, peonies, (no, I don't eat them, but they also appear only briefly, in season), all are annual, fleeting pleasures.

Most importantly, what you get, when you exchange constant availability of everything you could possibly want for seasonality, is flavour - such flavour. Perhaps that is why I respond with such delight to this meal description from the New Yorker story; simple though it is, I am imagining that all the ingredients in it have been brought in from a local small holding and that therefore each item is more delicious than anything, however skilfully presented, from any of Sydney's latest restaurants of note:

"We had a meal there—for less than a dollar, if you add it up—of mashed potatoes with a sun of butter melted in the center of the plate, pork chops fried to a crisp, and homemade sour-cherry juice in tumblers."

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