英语翻译

英语翻译
英语翻译

英语翻译
MANY I ask what you thought of first when you saw the title of this piece? Was it rotten meat and inedible sausage, with people standing in endless lines to obtain these delicacies? Or was it mounds of caviar and free-flowing vodka, with exuberant guests flinging their glasses into the fireplace? During those tumultuous days in August, once it was clear that Boris Yeltsin had faced down the coup, the thought occurred that along with a revival of freedom, Russians and all their captive peoples might also recover the joys of hospitality.
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The Impact of the Structure of Debt on Target Gains We all know that in czarist times the merchant class and the aristocracy were the only ones who got much of the caviar and vodka. But whereas Communism's idea of equality was forcing everyone (except the nomenklatura) to eat like serfs, part of the new leaders' task will be to bring about a Russia in which ordinary people have a chance to eat like princes.
Nineteenth-century Russian literature is full of the sorts of food most living Russians have only dreamed of groaning zakuska tables; blini with butter, sour cream, and caviar; meat and fish dishes ingeniously contrived to satisfy the Russian taste for trompel'oeil; artful, Frenchified desserts.
Russian food was never strong on vegetables, except mushrooms-and mushrooms are not merely a food but a passion. Vladimir Nabokov describes his mother's picking mushroom at their country estate:
One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit' po gribi (looking for mushrooms). . . . all she picked were species belonging to the edible section of the genus Boletus (tawny edulis, brown scaber, red aurantiacus, and a few close allies). Rainy weather would bring out these beautiful plants in profusion under the firs, birches, and aspens in our park, especially in its older part ... Its shady recesses would then harbor that special boletic reek which makes a Russian's nostrils dilate-a dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, rotting leaves.
This is a love that Russians carry with them wherever they go. Anya von Bremzen, in the good new cookbook Please to the Table, writes of two Russian diplomats in England:
These fellows went into the countryside on a mushroom-picking expedition (a must for every homesick Russian) and were promptly arrested for trespassing. When the country policeman actually realized what they were doing, however, he became so concerned for their health . . . that he dropped all charges and insisted that they call an emergency number in case of poisoning. The diplomats had a good laugh with their friends later that evening over an exquisite mushroom dinner back in London.
The mushrooms thus gathered can be used in any number of ways; the one Nabokov mentions ("fried in butter and thickened with sour cream"), known as mushrooms smitane, is one of the simplest and best.
But equally typical in their own way are the zakuski-appetizers of all sorts. (Traditionally guests stand around the buffet table. However, Miss von Bremzen reports that recent emigres almost always sit: they have spent too much time standing in lines ever to stand when it isn't necessary.) The Russian Tea Room in New York used to serve, for after-theater supper, a glorious zakuska platter. It always included two or three kinds of fish (pickled herring, matjes herring, smoked salmon); one or two smoked meats (tongue, ham); a square of jellied calf's foot; eggplant oriental (the one offering I didn't like); and always a nice scoop of chopped chicken liver and another of red caviar. None of these items-with the possible exception of the eggplant and the calfs foot (and that's not so very different in flavor and texture from headcheese)-is a stranger to the American table. The genius lies in the profusion.
An American who studied at Moscow University during the Khrushchev Thaw recalls the order of meals there: soup for breakfast, soup for lunch, soup for dinner. At breakfast and dinner, the only cutlery was a spoon, but at lunch the students got a fork as well. That is because at lunch there was a hunk of meat in the soup. Fortunately that experience did not put him off real Russian soups, of which the queen is borshch. Borshch (which is of Ukrainian, and not Russian, origin) can be made with pork, beef, goose, duck-there are as many variations as there are cooks. The one essential is beets (the name comes from an Old Slavonic word, brsh, meaning beet). And with the borshch comes a pirozhok, a turnover filled with meat or fish or cabbage or-of course-mushrooms. Pirozhki have also served as a high-class fast food; when NATIONAL REVIEW visited Russia in the middle Brezhnev period, Moscow and (as it was then) Leningrad were dotted with pirozhkovaye, informal restaurants serving many varieties of pirozhok and glasses of tea. Although McDonald's deserves much praise for its entrepreneurship, I hope it doesn't drive these establishments out of business.
The French sent many chefs to Russia in the nineteenth century-above all Cardeme, who created the charlotte Russe while working for Czar Alexander 1-but they did not bring many dishes back. Blini are an exceptional-though the refined French version is a far cry from the substantial buckwheat cake the Russians load with butter and sour cream and all manner of caviar and smoked fish. This is one of the most sumptuous dishes in any cuisine, but it is not at all an invention of the Imperial Court. It was for centuries the centerpiece of the traditional Butter Festival, the Russian equivalent of Carnival.