Every Russian who grew up in the Soviet Union has a special relationship with sausage. Russian sausage is, after all, more than just sausage.
The Russian word for sausage, kolbasa, has made its way into proverbs, sayings, anecdotes, movies, and works of literature. And kolbasa was one of the products that Russian immigrants craved and missed once they left Russia.
Ukrainian immigrant Alec Mikhaylov decided that, instead of shedding nostalgic tears for a lost delicacy, he would recreate it in his adopted home. He started out by making several kilograms of sausage in his kitchen, and within ten years had turned his passion into a company that today is a major provider of Ukrainian- and Russian-style sausage to outlets in the US and Canada. Mikhaylov’s Alef Sausage Company makes over two million pounds of sausage per year.
As I walk into Alef’s production facility in Mundelein, in Chicago’s northern suburbs, I am immediately overwhelmed by the smell of sausage. The air is filled with the delicious aroma of spices and cured meat. I feel like a child again, watching my mom open her bag to reveal a stick of sausage she bought in a local grocery store.
Back in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, sausage was a luxury, an object of desire. Almost all food products of value disappeared from store shelves; there were only endless loaves of bread alternating with lonely bottles of mineral water. Getting good sausage meant standing in endless lines (dubbed “sausage lines”; the phrase became idiomatic, and is still used whenever a long line forms), often for hours, just to obtain a precious few rationed grams of the delicacy.*
Meanwhile, bad sausage was more frequently available, and was a popular object of satire, with anecdotes making the rounds about sausage producers who added toilet paper to their cooked bologna, or how the Japanese, who lacked trees for cellulose production, were buying our sausage to process it back into toilet paper.
One thing was certain: Russians have never been indifferent about their sausage.
I walk down the factory hall and enter the office. Alec Mikhaylov is sitting at a table cluttered with papers and dominated by a large-screen monitor. The computer is modern and shiny, but the papers spread across the table are filled with the almost-forgotten (to me) sight of handwritten Cyrillic. He reminds me of Santa Claus, with his big mustache and the bright boxes of unpacked Christmas presents piled next to his desk. Yet his robe is blue, not red. Actually it is just the standard lab coat of food factory workers, worn over regular city clothes.
“I came to the United States almost 21 years ago,” Mikhaylov said. We speak Russian, but from time to time he inserts English words or whole phrases into his speech. “Before that, I lived in Donetsk, Ukraine, and worked as a civil engineer at a big enterprise. When my brother emigrated to the US, I decided to follow him, bringing our parents along. The early 90s was a period when many people left the country to try their luck abroad. For me it was not a planned action, but more of an adventure.”
Mikhaylov did not have much money at first, and he recalled frantically taking any job he could find, including working as a hired construction worker for six dollars an hour. He was later hired as a driver at Domino’s Pizza, where he worked for seven years, eventually promoted to a managerial position.
“In my past life, I liked cooking at home, and I loved sausage,” he continued. “Here in Chicago, there was nothing like the sausage I could get back in Ukraine, and I felt nostalgic for it. A friend suggested that we make our own kolbasa, and so we did. In my kitchen, we hand-ground some 10 kilograms of meat, stuffed it into casings, added some spices and a splash of cognac. We made some pretty clumsy sausages that day, but now I think that they were the best of the best.”
After his first experiment, Mikhaylov did not start sausage production right away; first he needed to earn some money, so he saved money on the side until 2000, when Alef was founded. At first it was just a deli that sold Russian and Ukrainian products and had a back room, where the sausage was made. But Alef’s kolbasa quickly became popular among Chicago’s sizable Russian and Ukrainian immigrant populations. Production took off.
“We were the first on the market,” Mikhaylov explained. “If you went to an American store, you wouldn’t find any sausage like ours. The choice here is very limited. Even today we are the only company that makes such a wide variety of Eastern European sausage, and we sell it throughout the country and in Canada.”
I taste some dry salami, and it immediately reminds me of my childhood. How has Alef gotten it right? Is it genetic memory, or some recipe inherited from his grandmother? The answer is far more mundane.
“In Ukraine I had a friend who worked as chief mechanic at a meat factory,” Mikhaylov explained. “He gave me all the recipes for Russian and Ukrainian sausage produced at the factory. That’s what we are using now. There have been some changes made to the ingredients: I started adding less fat, modified some of the spices, but most of the original recipes stayed intact.” Alec said he sometimes experiments with recipes, and, if a new idea occurs to him, he creates a new type of sausage by changing the proportions of meat and spices.
Despite the fact that he is the owner of a factory that produces millions of pounds of sausage each year, Mikhaylov personally controls every step of the production process. The former engineer claims he knows every machine at his factory, and when he takes me on a guided tour of his factory, he explains in elaborate detail how everything works. At one point he presses the proper combination of buttons on a rather large, menacing-looking machine, and it starts spitting out dozens of small sausages per second. “At any moment I can substitute for any of my workers,” Mikhaylov said. “I think that it is not fair to ask your workers to do something you cannot do yourself.”
Mikhaylov also claims to know his sausage so well that he no longer even needs to taste it to know if it is good. “There are many tricks, but you can tell if it is good quality just by the way the sausage looks,” he explained. “For instance, when you cut a sausage, you want to look to see if there are any air bubbles inside. If there are, the sausage is not well made: air incites bacterial growth, and the meat spoils faster.”
Whenever Mikhaylov produces a new type of sausage, he personally delivers it to his deli, the same place he began production years ago, and offers samples to customers. “I listen to what they say, watch their reaction, and make a point of changing things they don’t like,” he said. “For instance, if a lot of people say it’s too salty, I add less salt. It’s that simple.”
The majority of his customers are Eastern Europeans, and his production primarily targets that ethnic market. He wants to sell to the wider American market, but knows it won’t be easy. “All my American friends who try Alef sausage like it, and always come back for more,” he said. “But we are all people of habit. Americans are just not used to our sausage, they do not know what it is, and it will take time and effort to win their hearts.” One thing Mikhaylov is sure of, however, is that “if you want to achieve something in America, you can do it; the main thing is just not to be lazy.”
Even though Mikhaylov listens to Russian radio stations, hires mostly former citizens of the USSR to work at his factory and deli, and writes his work notes in Russian, he has acquired an American work ethic: work hard, and if you want something done, do it yourself.
Actually, Alef is successful enough that Mikhaylov could have retired by now, yet he keeps working long hours, out of a love for his work. “Business is like a train,” he said. “If you disconnect it from the locomotive, it will keep going for a while due to inertia. But eventually it will stop...” And he is philosophical when it comes to money: “I don’t really feel like I need money. I don’t do things for the money, I just do what I like, and the money follows as a side effect. In my other life, in Ukraine, I had moments when there was no money to buy bread. I remember searching my pockets, desperate to find a few coins. And you know what? I was happy then. So, it might sound banal, but I don’t think that happiness is about money. It’s about something else altogether.”
Money may or may not bring happiness, but sausage definitely helps. Inhaling the aroma of Alef’s cured meat, testing samples of sausage that I last ate as a child, or, as Mikhaylov likes to say, “in my past life,” I am certainly happy.
Or maybe it’s not the sausage, but the memories it brings, and the forgotten past it helps to revive. It’s not nostalgia that matters, but your approach to it: you can shed tears over the lost delicacies of your motherland, or you can recreate them in your new home. RL
* There was also the slang term “sausage train” – колбасная электричка – via which Russians rode back to their suburban regions from Moscow, loaded down with goods available only in the capital.
On a piece of bread with butter The most common way to eat sausage in Russia is to slice it thin, and stack it on top of a piece of buttered Borodinsky or other rye bread (known as buterbrody). A slice of cheese on top also doesn’t hurt.
In a salad Cooked sausage is an important ingredient in one of the most popular Russian salads, Olivier (some recipes, however, call for chicken), which is a must at every New Year’s dinner table. It’s easy to make:
With scrambled eggs Adding pieces of sausage to scrambled eggs is a common recipe for a Russian breakfast. Most often cooked bologna is used. Or skip the eggs and just fry sausage in olive oil.
In Okroshka A cold soup made with kvas, fresh vegetables and cooked sausage. The ingredients may vary, but the most common recipe requires kvas, boiled and chopped eggs, fresh chopped cucumber, boiled potatoes, green onions, and sausage.
On hot sandwiches Put a slice of sausage on a slice of white bread, top it with a slice of cheese and a slice of tomato, then put it in the oven to melt the cheese – your hot Russian sandwich is ready. This is a common go-to dish when there are lots of unexpected guests and little time to cook.
For more information about Alef, visit alefsausage.com. The company’s sausages can be purchased via mail order online at eurasiafoodonline.com.
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