Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives (review)

Classic Russian Cooking: Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets.Translated, introduced, and annotated by Joyce Toomre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 680 pp., $27.50 paper.

Elena Molokhovets's A Gift to Young Housewives, first published in 1861, became the Bible of cooking and household management for generations of middle- and upper-class Russian women up until the revolution in 1917. Even after the collapse of the tsarist autocracy, copies of this book circulated and were at times copied by hand. Then, in 1989 it reemerged in a number of reprinted Russian editions. Joyce Toomre of the Russian Research Center at Harvard and lecturer in culinary history at Radcliffe College has produced a superb translation and edition of this classic work. It is not only great fun to read and practical to use, but also it is immensely revealing both of Russian cultural history and as a comparative foil for understanding American culture.

Classic Russian Cooking is an encyclopedic compendium of detailed recipes (Toomre's edition contains more than 1,000 of the original 1,500 recipes). These recipes are still great. The carrot fritters (343), sauerkraut shchii (30), and potato and beet salad (254) recreated a sense of a simple Russian meal for our own family, and were prepared with a minimum of fuss and difficulty. But A Gift to Young Housewives is much more than useful Russian recipes. It is a window into another world, a comprehensive manual for the khozhaika, or mistress of the household in late-nineteenth-century Russia. With the assistance of a superb introduction by Toomre, this book provides insight into eating habits, religious holidays, the organization of household labor, class distinctions, gender roles, and the influence of non-Russian national groups on Russian culture.

Although there is never the slightest mention by Molokhovets of the enormous social upheaval taking place everywhere around her, the very order and ritual associated with Russian cooking and eating; the exact patterns of table-setting; and the detailed courses, drinks, and appetizers (zakuski) provided a reassuring stability to the upper-class home. One would never know from the endless reiteration of ingredients, some of them quite exotic, in this twentieth Molokhovets edition (1897) that the Russian countryside was still recovering from the Great Famine of 1891-93, and only a few years away from the upheavals of 1905. And yet, as Toomre reminds us, even the elite households of the turn of the century worked hard: water had to be drawn, wood chopped, vegetables grown and harvested, wheat turned into flour, and milk into butter.

And everything, virtually everything, had to be preserved, saved, and stored. The general rule of thumb for the households Molokhovets describes was that fresh food was available for three months, and for the rest of the year the household lived off its stores: in the dry and cold cellars, in the pantry, in the ice house. The sections on preserving foods expanded over time as the art of preserving--canning, freezing, drying, and pickling--was lost due to the break up of families and the urbanization of the turn of the century. A fascinating part of this book is what it reveals about containers and utensils, intricately carved and inventoried, and kept free of vermin, dust, and mold.

Elena Molokhovets herself loved to cook, plan meals, and compose recipes. She was 30 years old when the first edition of the book was published in 1861, and she died sometime after 1914. When she began her work she published anonymously, since women authors were not looked upon favorably. She tells us that she made her authorship clear in order to ward off imitators and plagiarizers, first stamping each book with her initials, and then, by the time of the fourth edition (1869), naming herself as compiler. By the time of the Jubilee edition of the book in 1911, she...