Letters to the Editor

To the Editors:

Greetings!

A question for Darra Goldstein: Why is Russian chocolate the worst I have ever tasted? Every chocolate of Russian origin I have ever tasted, in the U.S. or Russia, tastes awful. Was it always this way? Is there a story behind this? Was chocolate better before the revolution? I mean, us Russians love chocolate...

By the way, that is a great borshch recipe in the last issue, and we love your cookbook!

Take care.

Sincerely,

Michael Zavarin

Darra Goldstein replies:

Russia’s beautiful candy wrappers always make me hope there is going to be something equally good inside but, as you’ve pointed out, the chocolate is generally of poor quality. In the 1930s, Stalin made a strong push for making chocolate accessible to the masses as a luxury item, and throughout the Soviet period the emphasis was on quantity over quality. No small chocolatiers could practice their art, and there were real difficulties procuring high-quality cacao beans. Production was controlled by the State, which bought poor-quality cacao in bulk. The other problem is the national sweet tooth. In response to consumer preference, chocolates were highly sweetened, and dark bitter chocolate wasn’t produced in much quantity at all. Because I don’t have any Russian chocolate in my pantry, I can’t tell you for sure, but my guess is that, instead of using natural cacao butter, the producers are substituting a small amount of vegetable oil to achieve smoothness in the bars, and that they are substituting dried whey for powdered milk. When you consider that Mars and Kraft hold two of the three largest shares in the Russian chocolate market, you can understand why Russian chocolate hasn’t yet entered into the artisanal age. But I hope it will soon!

To the Editors:

As a British Russophile I found “Moscow on the Thames” [Sep/Oct 2010] illuminating. You couldn’t cover everything, but it’s worth noting the substantial 1970s Soviet Jewish immigration (courtesy of Senator Henry Jackson’s fight over Detente), whose high-grade and (vitally for Sovietologists) up-to-date expertise was welcomed into London academia and especially into the BBC Russian Service, where they greatly enhanced one of the most powerful “voices” penetrating the USSR. Their influence in the later stages of the Cold War was, as in the USA, out of all proportion to their numbers.

Malcolm Gilbert