Gastronomic Excess

Gastronomic excess is well documented in travelers’ accounts of Russian life, so it’s not surprising that Russian literature is also filled with scenes of gourmanderie. One of the most memorable features of Chichikov in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is his capacity for blini, which he dips three at a time in melted butter. Such immoderation followed naturally from an abundant land with black, rich soil (the famous chernozem of Ukraine). In an autobiographical sketch, the artist Kazimir Malevich, an early practitioner of Futurism in Russia who subsequently founded the abstract Suprematist movement, vividly describes a typical Ukrainian market from his youth: 

Oh, the whole glorious town of Konotop glistened with fat! At the market and at the station, behind long rows of tables, sat women called ‘lard-sellers’ who reeked of garlic. Heaped on the tables were mounds of lard of all different kinds – smoked and unsmoked with a good rind. There were rings of sausage: Cracow-style, stuffed with large chunks of meat and pork fat, blood sausage, and grain sausage with a smell so strong it inflamed a man’s glands. There was ham rimmed with fat, kasha cooked thick with lamb suet and cut into rounds to resemble buns, and country sausage with gristle. The lard-sellers glistened in their greasy clothes, reflecting the rays of the sun. In Konotop, among this Ukrainian fat and garlic, I grew...

Such marvelous abundance can easily slip into grotesquerie. The onetime Futurist poet Benedikt Livshits tells of his 1912 visit to Chernyanka, the estate of the Burlyuk brothers in southern Russia near the Black Sea. There he, David, Nikolai, and Vladimir Burlyuk created the Futurist association “Hylaea.” They were soon joined by Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Alexei Kruchenykh, ultimately the greatest poets and theorists of Russian Futurism. Chernyanka’s bounty astounded Livshits. Upon arrival, as he tells it in his memoirs, he found himself an “object for fattening up.” Livshits’s resistance to this “baconization” was overcome by the local veterinarian, who was called in to prescribe “some kind of powders in doses capable of easing not only peristalsis, but quieting once and for all the rumbling of drainpipes.”

Livshits goes on to say that:

Everything in Chernyanka took on Homeric proportions... Monstrous piles of edible goods, filling to the brim the separate larders, where hams, sausages, dairy, and other products were stored, offered the opportunity to ponder the very essence of the phenomenon. This was not food, not human victuals. This was primordial matter, the juices of Gaia, extracted there, in the steppes, from millions of swarming four-legged creatures. Here a mad flood of proteins and carbohydrates took the form of hams, cheeses; it strained the human body with meat and fat, it overflowed with ruddiness in the cheeks, it burst open like a fat intestine or a foot-long  tube of paint; and unable to contain this Rubenesque superabundance,  Chernyanka, contorted on all sides by the never-ending feasts, overflowed.

Woe to anyone not up to the task of consumption. Livshits nevertheless survived the summer, and in the fall he and the Burlyuks dispersed to Kiev, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, becoming important contributors to the flourishing avant-garde. The poets used the name “Hylaea” for over two years before beginning to refer to themselves as Futurists. 

In 1914 the founder of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, visited Russia. He was met with adulation from the Russian beauties who threw themselves at his feet, but disdain from the Futurist poets and painters who vehemently asserted their independence from Italian influence. Tellingly, they called Marinetti “that Italian vegetable.” To prove he was no limp vegetable, Marinetti agreed to a drinking contest with the merchant Mantashev, host of a three-day-long party held in his honor. Marinetti later wrote that, thanks to his “iron will power” he succeeded in defeating the Russian on the tenth brimming glass. Sweet as this victory may have been, it did not prepare him for the culinary ordeal that awaited him in Saint Petersburg. As he explained in his liberated syntax (the famous parole in libertà he had proclaimed in 1909), “Vodka served in teacups or blinis of caviar melted butter sour cream enclosed in scalding hot napkins and a contest among the eaters ‘I’ve eaten fifty and my wife has eaten fifty-five’.”

The recipe at left offers a piquant taste of Ukraine’s legendary abundance, served in small bites on bread.

Bacon Spread

2 slices regular (unsmoked) bacon, uncooked, coarsely chopped

8 slices smoked bacon, uncooked, coarsely chopped

3 cloves garlic

Cayenne and freshly ground pepper to taste

Rye bread

Place the bacon and garlic in the bowl of a food processor and process to a coarse puree. Season with the cayenne and black peppers. Chill overnight before serving, spread on thin slices of rye bread.