The White House Cook

Welcome to Vladivostok

When Tom and I arrived in Vladivostok in the summer of 1993, one of the first Russians we met was Alla Brovko, a neighbor who lived with her husband, Pyotr, and their two sons in our apartment building, a prefabricated concrete high-rise on the edge of the city. Pyotr was a geography professor at Far Eastern State University, where Tom and I also worked. Alla taught English at an elementary school in our neighborhood and spent much of her spare time trying to help the new American faculty in our university program cope with the challenges of daily life in the Russian Far East.

Shortly after we moved into our apartment, we were delighted when Alla and Pyotr invited us to their home one evening. "Come for pies at eight o'clock," said Alla. Thinking that she planned to serve pie-and-coffee for dessert at that hour, we ate a full dinner at home beforehand, then walked up the five flights of stairs to the Brovkos' place in another wing of our building. As soon as we stepped over the threshold into their small foyer, Alla greeted us warmly, calling us her "dear guests," before asking us to take off our shoes and change into tapochki — floppy, comfortable, house slippers provided by the host — an old Asian custom that the Russians have adopted.

Inside Alla's apartment, the scene was typical of many meals we would eat in Russian homes during our time there. Hosts, guests, and children sat elbow-to-elbow on mismatched chairs and little backless stools around a drop-leaf dining table temporarily set up in the middle of the living room, almost filling the small space. (Most Russian apartments didn't have a separate dining room.) Crowded onto the table were plates and glasses of various sizes and patterns — whatever the family had been able to acquire during decades of Soviet scarcity. Platters of home-cooked foods vied for space with bottles of Russian vodka, Georgian brandy, Russian champagne, and imported fruit-juice drinks.

Convivial conversation in a mish-mash of Russian and English covered topics from the personal to the political, while one of the Brovko boys performed pieces by Chopin on an upright piano in a corner of the room and Proshka-the-kitten played at our feet.

Pride of place on Alla's table that first evening went to her homemade pies — thick, rectangular, and family size, with top and bottom crusts of yeasty dough enclosing fillings of meat, potatoes, cabbage, mushrooms, and plums. Having expected only a slice or two of sweet pastry with a cup of coffee or tea, we were confronted with our second meal of the night, an entire dinner of maindish pies. And we quickly learned that when Russians say "pie," they mean much more than just dessert.

From that first evening of pies in Vladivostok, when Alla discovered our particular interest in Russian food, she took Tom and me under her wing, sharing family recipes, shopping tips, and culinary stories with us. The Brovkos also invited us to family celebrations, to simple suppers, and to sumptuous feasts for Russian holidays. And through long hours of talking around their dinner table, they taught us more than we had ever hoped to learn about daily life in Russia, past and present.

Alla herself was an excellent cook. Talented and inventive in the kitchen, she had a natural ability to ferret out a wide variety of foodstuffs in a country where shopping was a daily challenge, and to combine those ingredients in ways that made every dish seem grander than the sum of its separate parts.

She was always open to new culinary ideas, expanding her range of traditional family recipes to include any new dishes that captured her imagination. Like many good cooks, she could visualize a recipe and predict its taste even before she made it. She was also a wealth of information about folk remedies concocted in the kitchen from flowers, grasses, herbs, berries, lichens, bark, and tree sap. And to top it all off, she was a can-do person whose energy and enthusiasm infected everyone around her. Whenever I mentioned something that I would like to see or do or taste in Russia, Alla would immediately say, "Well, why not? Let's do it!"

The White House Cook

Alla was a living link to Russia's culinary past, to the cuisine of Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Born in 1948 in Yakutsk, in northeastern Siberia, she had also lived as a child for a year in a village near Irkutsk, more than a thousand miles to the south of her home town. At the age of eight she moved with her family to Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Far East. And for many years of her childhood, Alla — like most other Russian children in a society where both parents worked outside the home — was raised by her grandmother Polina, the woman who first taught her how to cook.

Alla always spoke about her "Granny" with great tenderness and affection, often phrasing her comments in the present tense, as if Polina were still in the next room instead of 18 years in the grave. And after I got to know Alla better, she told me the story of her grandmother's life — the tale of a woman I came to think of as "The White House Cook."

The oldest of several children in her family, Polina had been born in the mid-1890s in a village near the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. When she was still in her young teens, her father died and her mother remarried. But her new stepfather didn't want so many mouths to feed, so he arranged to marry off Polina to an older widower in the village, a cobbler with three children of his own. Polina resented being forced into marriage at such an early age, to a man she hated and with all those step-children to take care of, too. Only a month after the wedding, she sneaked out of the house one night and ran away to the home of a relative who lived in another village a few miles down the road.

Polina eventually made her way to Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, where she found employment in the household of the governor-general of that vast region of Russia. For six years she worked in the basement kitchen of the palatial residence that housed the last three governors-general before the revolutions of 1917. Known as the Bely Dom (The White House), it was a three-story, colonnaded, white stone mansion built by a wealthy merchant in the early nineteenth century. The historic Bely Dom is still a landmark in the city today, where it now houses the scientific library of Irkutsk State University. In 1994, whenever I attended university conferences and official ceremonies held in the elegant setting of the Bely Dom's restored tsarist-era rooms, I tried to imagine the meals that Polina had once prepared for the last upper-class families who resided there before the Bolshevik Revolution changed all of their lives.

Polina began working at the Bely Dom when Nicholas II was the tsar of Russia....