One thing that stands out in my mind when I think back to my 1980s childhood is the tea-drinking that concluded any sort of festive gathering at our place, or at friends’ homes. But mostly at our place, as my Mom was an avid cook and baker who could do wonders with the meager range of foodstuffs that were available to us in those years.
Other families might have been buying packaged biscuits and crackers that were sometimes available in the stores, but we rarely did, because whatever could be bought in the store didn’t come close to the stuff my mother baked.
And her jams and preserves! I was no fan, but I was in the clear minority.
All of this meant that, once the Iron Curtain was lifted and foreign guests (astronomers and students) started coming to our observatory in the Caucasus, they were invariably brought to our apartment for tea.
My parents would pull out the wedding china, and place small jam dishes and silver teaspoons next to each cup. The table would be covered with a linen tablecloth, the big brewing teapot was brought from the kitchen closet, and the ceremony commenced. The tea itself, of course, wasn’t anything fancy: a simple, black looseleaf tea from India, in paper packages decorated with an elephant, if you were lucky; Georgian No. 1 most of the time.
What the guests really came for were the treats.
We lived far from Moscow, and things like chocolate truffles, cakes from confectionary shops, or marshmallows, were rare occasions when someone brought them from the capital. But we made do.
I remember making homemade truffles long before that culinary trend was picked up by the Western food bloggers. We used baby formula as a base, but it couldn’t be just any baby formula, only a specific brand name. Otherwise, the taste of the truffles was off.
When we bought biscuits, it wasn’t to consume them as is, but to make chocolate salami, a treat that I found many years later in some local fancy food shop in Italy.
The recipes were collected from women’s magazines, then passed to us from friends and family. My mother’s cookbook still has a recipe for a plum cake written in my eight-year-old handwriting, and one of my absolute favorites goes under the name of “Aunt Ada’s cake,” even though Aunt Ada herself hasn’t baked it in decades.
But my favorite of all was “Bird’s Milk” cake, a riff on the chocolate and soufflé candy and cake of the same name that were only available in large cities. It was what I requested for birthday parties, and it was often served to the guests.
We lived in a world of substitutes, pretending to eat chocolate truffles and other fancy deserts that were made from whatever the Soviet planning economy was able to send our way. Thinking back at the ubiquity of tea-drinking in those years, I’m tempted to think that it was also a sort of a substitute for other things — for cocktail parties that our parents couldn’t afford to hold, as the already poor selection of spirits and wine was made even more meager after 1985 and Gorbachev’s temperance campaign, or for the restaurants that were either unavailable where they lived or off limits for other reasons.
Tea-drinking was the pastime of those slower years, when friendly visits were paid on a weekly if not a daily basis, when the fresh tea would be brewed over and over as hours around the table stretched into the night, when visiting other people was the only entertainment readily available.
Now that my friends and I are the same age as our parents were back then, the tempo of our lives makes it difficult to regularly sit down around the table for a few hours at a time. When we do, we mostly drink fancy Chinese teas, the ones that should be drunk without the sort of sweets that accompanied the tea-drinking of our childhood.
I do still make Bird’s Milk cake, though. And of course I brew some black tea to go with it, whenever friends come over.
5 egg yolks ¾ cup sugar ½ stick butter, melted 4 tablespoons of cocoa ½ cup milk ½ teaspoon of baking powder 1 cup flour
Preheat oven to 350º F.
Mix all the ingredients together and then pour the batter onto a buttered 9-inch springform pan (larger can be used if you want thinner layers) dusted with flour (or cocoa, for a better appearance).
Bake for 18-20 minutes, then allow to cool and settle for 5-10 minutes.
5 egg whites ¾ cup sugar
Beat the egg whites on medium speed, slowly adding in the sugar, until stiff peaks form. Be careful not to overbeat, or else you’ll have a real soufflé on your hands, which is good, but un-spreadable.
Spread the mixture on top of the slightly cooled chocolate cake, being sure to smooth the top of the egg whites so that they are as flat as possible.
Bake at 350º F oven for 10-15 minutes, until golden brown on top.
3 tablespoons sugar 4 tablespoons milk 3 tablespoons cocoa (for a hard chocolate crust, melt baking chocolate instead) ½ stick butter
Melt all the ingredients together, whisking to prevent any clumps from forming.
When the cake is finished in the oven, take it out and allow it to cool for a few minutes, then carefully cut the egg mixture away from the pan where it does not recede on its own. Remove the sides of the springform pan and allow cake to cool to room temperature. The glaze should also be cooled to room temperature (unless you used baking chocolate). Carefully spoon the glaze over the top and sides, spreading gently not to damage the soufflé.
Serve with hot tea.
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