December 01, 2019

Dumplings Fit for a Surgeon


Dumplings Fit for a Surgeon
Pozy, from Buryatia

“So I’m in surgery with a patient, and when I come out I receive a phone call: "Do you make pozy (steamed dumplings from Buryatia)?" “Yes, sure, let me take your order.”

Tuyana is sharing her stories, and we’re all laughing. We met just minutes ago, as this is our first distant relative gathering, but just one khinkali each into the night, we've bonded like we’d known each other for ages.

It was Tuyana’s idea for us all to meet. She is from Ulan Ude and has lived in Moscow for 23 years, but still keeps in touch with her entire extended family, helping them with health issues and feeding them pozy. I met her through a colleague of my husband: they worked together for seven years, until he came for dinner at our place in Tbilisi, and while chatting we discovered that we were related through my grandfather, who was from Buryatia.

Siberia Pozy
A second close-up view to whet your appetite.

Buryatia is a republic that borders Lake Baikal, in Siberia. Mongolian by ethnicity and culture, its cuisine features mainly meat dishes (“a Buryat who doesn’t eat meat is not a Buryat”, Tuyana says), pozy being the most famous of all. 

Tuyana came to my place on her day off from her work at the hospital. She was carrying a meat grinder, chocolates, champagne, slippers, and some cash for my son (it’s traditional in Buryatia to give cash to children, especially on a first meeting, as I learned, not unhappily).

She’s been making pozy for as long as she can remember: at home with her mum and baba (grandmother), every time she visited a relative in Moscow or other cities in Russia, and now “a lot, because I just love pozy.” In fact, she loves them so much, that once at a poznaya (pozy cafe), she and her cousin, who were both out of work at the time, decided to start a pozy delivery business. 

Tuyana's grandmother Maria
Tuyana's grandmother Maria

 She still receives orders today and makes pozy on her days off. People seem to want their pozy delivered already steamed. “I say to them – are you from Buryatia? Then surely you know the juice is the main part. If I bring the pozy already cooked, there’ll be no juice anymore.” She has figured out how to deliver pozy steaming and juicy, she said, and it’s quite an ingenious technology (and a commercial secret, naturally).

Despite working all week as a doctor, Tuyana loves rolling her sleeves up and spending a couple of hours making pozy with her mum, a “pozy perfectionist”.  And she loves teaching others to make them, too. I was a very grateful student.

Tuyana with her father Valery and mother Valentina
Tuyana with her father Valery and mother Valentina.

After dinner, Tuyana began talking about her main passion in life: medicine. “I always wanted to be a doctor, ever since I was tiny," she says. "If there was an accident nearby, I’d be there – getting used to the sight of blood and watching the doctors do their jobs.”

She pursued her dream and has now been a doctor for 18 years. “I’d love to open my own clinic,” she says. “It would have a cafe with healthy food, so that the patients could wait in comfort. I would serve pozy there, too.”

Tuyana advised me to get a round table for more kitchen (I am choosing a new one): “At our place, the table is round and we can easily fit one, two, three or more friends or relatives who come over for pozy,” she says. I think I will, and I will definitely add pozy to my diet, especially since my three-year-old son seems positively enamored by them.

See Also

Saving Baikal

Saving Baikal

You would think it would be easy being the deepest, cleanest, most ecologically diverse lake in the world. But Baikal has had a rough go of it this past century. We report on how a handful of non-profits is working to reverse civilization's assault.
Searching for Shambala

Searching for Shambala

Russian painter Nikolai Roerich was as controversial as he was prolific. John McCannon leads us to a deeper understanding of this gifted artist.
The Ghost of the Mountains

The Ghost of the Mountains

Editor Maria Antonova headed off to the mountains of the Altai to learn about a project that monitors rare snow leopards. We get to tag along.
The Siberian Tea Road

The Siberian Tea Road

The Great Siberian Tea Road, a historic and legendary route that once connected China and Siberia with European Russia, was one of the world’s longest trade arteries. We retrace its path, geographically and culturally.
Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

Murder at the Dacha

Murder at the Dacha

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.
The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas

The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas

This exciting new trilogy by a Russian author – who has been compared to Orhan Pamuk and Umberto Eco – vividly recreates a lost world, yet its passions and characters are entirely relevant to the present day. Full of mystery, memorable characters, and non-stop adventure, The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas is a must read for lovers of historical fiction and international thrillers.  
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.
Jews in Service to the Tsar

Jews in Service to the Tsar

Benjamin Disraeli advised, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” With Jews in Service to the Tsar, Lev Berdnikov offers us 28 biographies spanning five centuries of Russian Jewish history, and each portrait opens a new window onto the history of Eastern Europe’s Jews, illuminating dark corners and challenging widely-held conceptions about the role of Jews in Russian history.
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
Survival Russian

Survival Russian

Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.
Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography

Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography

This astonishingly gripping autobiography by the founder of the Russian Women’s Death Battallion in World War I is an eye-opening documentary of life before, during and after the Bolshevik Revolution.
White Magic

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
Okudzhava Bilingual

Okudzhava Bilingual

Poems, songs and autobiographical sketches by Bulat Okudzhava, the king of the Russian bards. 
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955