Caviar, and Poor Olga

Last week was the festival of Maslenitsa, the holiday celebrating the official end of winter. It's marked with a blini-fest, with everyone eating as many pancakes filled with smetana (sour cream), caviar and jam as they can. I've also heard some people burn effigies of old man winter, a bit like Guy Fawke's Night.

And so, at my Russian lesson last Saturday, Yelena, my teacher, told me that while I was revising verbal adverbs, she was going to fry me up some blini. And thus, having successfully figured how to tell people that "while reading, I sat," I was served a fluffy concoction overflowing with hundreds of little salmon eggs.




I was initially concerned, as I didn't think they were kosher. However, Yelena assured me that in Israel people eat this kind of caviar, and that she had in fact been told as much by her brother, who lives in a little village near Tel Aviv. The taste was - interesting. Very very salty and very fishy little balls that pop in your mouth. It wasn't bad exactly, and in fact I'm thinking right now how nice some would be, but it's a taste that definitely needs getting used to.

Russians generally seem to love food that's very salty or very sour. Really popular dishes are pickled mushrooms, the ubiquitous pickled cucumbers and smetana salads. Yelena said it was because the winters are so long here, and you can't get fresh veg, so everything has to be pickled. I don't know how relevant that is today, with Russia more globalised every day, but it's still hard to find anything but the bog standard fruit and veg in the shops mid-winter - you can either buy potatoes, apples and oranges, or a single papaya for £12 (seriously).

Now it's Lent, and my landlady (/flatmate) Olga is not eating meat, fish or bread. This morning she was chucking beetroot and cabbage into a pan - "But you can still eat sugar!" she said cheerfully, although with a manic glint at the corner of her eye.

Temperatures here are much improved.



(The end of January.)


(The beginning of March.)