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My grandmother's sekritest of secret recipes, going once...
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14valentines. Today's subject is body image. There's a great essay on the subject here. This post has little to do with body image per se, except possibly for how my love of this sort of food led to a love/hate relationship with my own body.
I'm offering up a recipe I learned from my grandmother, an amazing woman who left her home at twenty and raised ten children in a country on the other side of the world. This recipe is a bitterly kept secret, so if any of you are in fact little old ladies of the Wellington Greek community, I must ask you to avert your eyes. Otherwise, have at. To be honest, I don't know why it's a secret, it's incredibly simple. The trick lies in the laborious beating of the mayonnaise. I once balked at doing it with a food processor, and my grandmother snapped, in her inimitable fashion, "I used to do it with a fork! While your grandfather was off playing with bitches!" Nothing I could say to that.
Anyway, here's the recipe, and the story that goes with it, a story about language and identity. Enjoy.
When I was a child my mother called this dish, which was only ever made at Christmas and New Year, but always very much in demand, Salade de Boeuf. Mum taught French in a local high school, and loved everything to do with France, even to the treasonous extent of cheering for the Tricoleurs when they played the All Blacks, so this did not seem unreasonable to me.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that it was my grandmother’s recipe, and so there was no reason at all it should be French. When my grandmother said the name I assumed she was mispronouncing the French (she always spoke English with a very heavy accent too), but I now realise my mother had misunderstood what was actually Romanian – Salata de Bef. I now realise also, that whenever my grandmother swore, that was Romanian too. At the time it was just nonsense, and I didn’t believe my mother when she said she didn’t understand either.
Why? Because my family were Greek. That was our first language. Well... Not mine. But certainly that of anyone older than me. I was the turning point, the first person to speak English as my native tongue. When I was a kid, Greek was the language adults broke into when they didn’t want children to know something. We were never sent out of the room, the lingo just changed. And I gave up trying to learn when I offered a crotchety old neighbour a cup of tea and she laughed in my face. Approximately a decade later I realised I’d offered her chai (Russian) instead of tsai (Greek). But that was how my family said it, so how was I to know...?
That decade and epiphany later, my mother smiled, and said, yes, when she was a child they used to eat sarmathes (stuffed cabbage), and the neighbourhood children would laugh and shriek dolmathes, dolmathes. Poor Mum assumed they’d been fatally exposed as uneducated hicks, and fled the community to befriend “English” people (ie New Zealanders), who were more polite. And to speak English with them. She then studied French and German at school and university, and became in all ways a model New Zealander.
And so it went. When I was a teenager, I noticed that the dish under discussion was uniformly called Russian Salad when it turned up at parties. Just like that, in English. Everyone spoke English now. God only knew how it had suddenly become Russian, but it was still my favourite part of a good meal, so let it be. All the old crones of the community admitted, incredibly grudgingly, that my grandmother’s was the best, and would try to find out the secret. Nothing doing. And then, my first year at varsity, I went to Greece for the first time, where you could buy it in containers in stores! Nowhere near as good as my grandmother’s, but sure enough, called Rossiki Salata, Russian Salad. Okay then.
The next year something very exciting happened, something which changed our family forever. Mum was one of ten, so I had plenty of aunts and uncles and cousins, but my grandparents were alone, no other relations. And if I’d ever thought, I’d have said they were only children and orphans. But lo, one day, in the late eighties, a letter had arrived, via the Red Cross, from the Ukraine of all places. And it was from my grandmother’s sister. Turns out we weren’t from Greece at all, though we were damn well still Greek, just immigrants once before, before New Zealand.
Gorbachev had decreed that in line with perestroika and glasnost, anyone with a relative in the decadent West was to write to them, so she obediently did, after a gap of only fifty years. And not only were all four of her sisters and their brother still alive, but their mother too. It seemed obvious that my grandmother should go and see them, but she’d become timid in her old age, and refused for several years, despite her mother’s insistence she was living only to see her lost daughter again.
My second year at varsity, flushed with the success of my Greek trip, and the fact I’d been on exchange to France my senior year of high school, I decided I would go, and drag her with me. Only the arrogance of nineteen could have made such a decision. But somehow, god knows how, I talked her into it. Everyone was horrified at my importunity. A major stumbling block in their minds, never mind the actual logistics, was how on earth I planned to communicate.
Well, my Greek’s a lot better now, I sniffed haughtily. It was too. But they don’t speak Greek, everyone chorused. Huh? First chip in the edifice of my childhood belief. Maybe second, if you count the whole Soviet Union business. If it didn’t crumble as fast as it should, just believe me when I say questions were not encouraged at our house. They often led not just to silence, but to slaps.
Why on earth not, I asked. And what do they speak? Oh, use your brain, they replied. Everyone had to speak Russian. Stalin would have beaten it out of you too, even if you are a know it all. Meh, okay. It seemed odd to me, surely you didn’t forget your own language, even if you were being oppressed, but again, so be it. I’d muddle through somehow.
And muddle through I did. It was a nightmare of a journey, my grandmother glaring in airports, kicking and pinching me when I fell asleep on the train, refusing to speak to waiters and ticket sellers, even though she spoke the necessary languages. We got by in Romania on my Honours Latin – dead language, ha, I knew it’d be good for something! – and in Russia on a phrase book and a winning smile. And possibly all the duty free cigarettes I had stuffed in my pockets. And eventually we made it to Bolgrad. Not to be confused with Belgrade, though apparently the missionaries sent out from Constantinople did, which is why it has a massive and magnificent cathedral, despite being little more than a village.
To cut what’s becoming a very long story short, I had a great time and learned a lot. A hell of a lot, if you consider I learned it all via hand and head gestures, eye contact, the occasional word from a dictionary, and a love of stories about Siberia and the railways and the salt mines and cabbage soup, even when I can only understand one word in five. But then, one day, my great aunt burst into tears, and sobbed, Vika, Vika, if only you could speak Ukrainian. Why don’t you speak Russian? Even Romanian or Moldavian would do. And how can your grandmother not have taught you Bulgarian?
Well, why on earth would she, I sighed, getting somewhat annoyed by now at being such a colossal failure in the presence of genii. Clearly my French and Latin and Ancient Greek, and oh, yes, Modern Greek counted for naught. Why don’t you speak Greek, I asked, throwing down my own gauntlet. Why would we, she replied. Your grandmother only learned it when she got married. At which point the earth moved.
Break out those phrase books and all the hand gestures on earth. And back right up to the beginning. My aunt summoned her daughter, and we hammered it out. I then got a bus three hours into town and paid someone in a shop twenty American dollars (six months’ wages) to let me phone my mother. Turns out my grandmother’s first language, the language of her mother was Bulgarian. Turns out Bolgrad is Russian for Bulgarian town. How you like them apples?
Russian is her father’s language. Ukrainian and Moldavian were local dialects. And Romanian is the language she had her formal education in. She spoke five languages as teenager, growing up in a place called Bessarabia that doesn’t even exist anymore, and then she met my grandfather, who banned every one of them in the house, and made her learn to speak Greek, his father’s language. And then he changed her name from Lyolya Garvalova to Helen Garvalides. And then he took her a million miles away, to New Zealand, where she learned to speak English and never uttered a word of the others again, except when speaking of the foods of her childhood. And thus so many mysteries fell into place.
My mother, horrified, then recalled that when her father was being particularly despicable (not a rare occurrence) he used to call my grandmother a Bulgarian bitch. Find out as much as you can, she said, and write it all down. So I did. And there’s a million more stories I could tell, but this is my message for today. Because my brave, beautiful grandmother played along, and to this day insists that she’s Greek, and that I misunderstood her sister. But I know I didn’t.
I’m damn good now at reassembling fractured languages, and I can tell my grandmother’s Greek isn’t real. All the words in it that I thought I got wrong when people frowned at my attempts, all the vocabulary my mother assumed was peasant slang, all the wild and wonderful foods we ate, all the swear words and expostulations my mother learned from her mother and I learned from her. All the threads of the tapestry that was Bessarabia, a vanished state, and the lie created by my grandfather, a man who loved being Greek, but also loved Stalin, and never minded being (justifiably!) compared to him. My uncles play along with him, but my mother and my sisters and I do not. We like being the daughters of our foremothers.
Enjoy the salad!
Russian (yeah right!) Salad
3 carrots
2 parsnips
2 potatoes
1 small steak (I always use a piece of rump) [omit if vegetarian]
1 small tin peas (or fresh if you have them, but not frozen)
1 jar gherkins
salt and pepper
2 egg yolks
2 lemons
salad oil (any kind, but olive oil is too heavy)
1 good teaspoon American mustard (I daresay it wasn't American originally, but it's the one I like best)
Toss the carrots, parsnips and potatoes into a pot whole, along with the steak, and bring to a boil then simmer till done but not overdone. Drain, leave to cool, then finely dice everything. In a large bowl add the drained peas, and finely diced gherkins, and the juice of one lemon. Mix well. Season to taste.
Make the mayonnaise. The method is much the same as any handmade egg mayonnaise. Beat the two egg yolks in a beater, then when thickened start adding the oil very slowly. Don't add it too fast or it won't emulsify properly. If it curdles you can start again with another egg yolk in a clean bowl and add the curdled mixture a teaspoon at a time till it smoothes out again. When thick add the mustard to taste and the juice of one lemon.
Mix the mayonnaise gently into the vegetable mixture. At this point I have taken to getting fancy, and spooning it into endive leaves, or into hollowed out tomatoes. My grandmother always arranged it beautifully on a platter, spread reserved mayonnaise over the top, then piped decorative flowers all over it and decorated it with carrot and gherkin rosettes and black olives. It made a stunning centrepiece for the table, but was a lot of work. It also added extra mayonnaise, which my waistline didn't need. These days if I'm not eating it as a salad, I tend to treat it as a condiment - at Christmas I spread it on my hot slices of lamb or turkey and devour. It's also great in sandwiches the next day.
Bon Appetit!
14valentines. Today's subject is body image. There's a great essay on the subject here. This post has little to do with body image per se, except possibly for how my love of this sort of food led to a love/hate relationship with my own body.I'm offering up a recipe I learned from my grandmother, an amazing woman who left her home at twenty and raised ten children in a country on the other side of the world. This recipe is a bitterly kept secret, so if any of you are in fact little old ladies of the Wellington Greek community, I must ask you to avert your eyes. Otherwise, have at. To be honest, I don't know why it's a secret, it's incredibly simple. The trick lies in the laborious beating of the mayonnaise. I once balked at doing it with a food processor, and my grandmother snapped, in her inimitable fashion, "I used to do it with a fork! While your grandfather was off playing with bitches!" Nothing I could say to that.
Anyway, here's the recipe, and the story that goes with it, a story about language and identity. Enjoy.
When I was a child my mother called this dish, which was only ever made at Christmas and New Year, but always very much in demand, Salade de Boeuf. Mum taught French in a local high school, and loved everything to do with France, even to the treasonous extent of cheering for the Tricoleurs when they played the All Blacks, so this did not seem unreasonable to me.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that it was my grandmother’s recipe, and so there was no reason at all it should be French. When my grandmother said the name I assumed she was mispronouncing the French (she always spoke English with a very heavy accent too), but I now realise my mother had misunderstood what was actually Romanian – Salata de Bef. I now realise also, that whenever my grandmother swore, that was Romanian too. At the time it was just nonsense, and I didn’t believe my mother when she said she didn’t understand either.
Why? Because my family were Greek. That was our first language. Well... Not mine. But certainly that of anyone older than me. I was the turning point, the first person to speak English as my native tongue. When I was a kid, Greek was the language adults broke into when they didn’t want children to know something. We were never sent out of the room, the lingo just changed. And I gave up trying to learn when I offered a crotchety old neighbour a cup of tea and she laughed in my face. Approximately a decade later I realised I’d offered her chai (Russian) instead of tsai (Greek). But that was how my family said it, so how was I to know...?
That decade and epiphany later, my mother smiled, and said, yes, when she was a child they used to eat sarmathes (stuffed cabbage), and the neighbourhood children would laugh and shriek dolmathes, dolmathes. Poor Mum assumed they’d been fatally exposed as uneducated hicks, and fled the community to befriend “English” people (ie New Zealanders), who were more polite. And to speak English with them. She then studied French and German at school and university, and became in all ways a model New Zealander.
And so it went. When I was a teenager, I noticed that the dish under discussion was uniformly called Russian Salad when it turned up at parties. Just like that, in English. Everyone spoke English now. God only knew how it had suddenly become Russian, but it was still my favourite part of a good meal, so let it be. All the old crones of the community admitted, incredibly grudgingly, that my grandmother’s was the best, and would try to find out the secret. Nothing doing. And then, my first year at varsity, I went to Greece for the first time, where you could buy it in containers in stores! Nowhere near as good as my grandmother’s, but sure enough, called Rossiki Salata, Russian Salad. Okay then.
The next year something very exciting happened, something which changed our family forever. Mum was one of ten, so I had plenty of aunts and uncles and cousins, but my grandparents were alone, no other relations. And if I’d ever thought, I’d have said they were only children and orphans. But lo, one day, in the late eighties, a letter had arrived, via the Red Cross, from the Ukraine of all places. And it was from my grandmother’s sister. Turns out we weren’t from Greece at all, though we were damn well still Greek, just immigrants once before, before New Zealand.
Gorbachev had decreed that in line with perestroika and glasnost, anyone with a relative in the decadent West was to write to them, so she obediently did, after a gap of only fifty years. And not only were all four of her sisters and their brother still alive, but their mother too. It seemed obvious that my grandmother should go and see them, but she’d become timid in her old age, and refused for several years, despite her mother’s insistence she was living only to see her lost daughter again.
My second year at varsity, flushed with the success of my Greek trip, and the fact I’d been on exchange to France my senior year of high school, I decided I would go, and drag her with me. Only the arrogance of nineteen could have made such a decision. But somehow, god knows how, I talked her into it. Everyone was horrified at my importunity. A major stumbling block in their minds, never mind the actual logistics, was how on earth I planned to communicate.
Well, my Greek’s a lot better now, I sniffed haughtily. It was too. But they don’t speak Greek, everyone chorused. Huh? First chip in the edifice of my childhood belief. Maybe second, if you count the whole Soviet Union business. If it didn’t crumble as fast as it should, just believe me when I say questions were not encouraged at our house. They often led not just to silence, but to slaps.
Why on earth not, I asked. And what do they speak? Oh, use your brain, they replied. Everyone had to speak Russian. Stalin would have beaten it out of you too, even if you are a know it all. Meh, okay. It seemed odd to me, surely you didn’t forget your own language, even if you were being oppressed, but again, so be it. I’d muddle through somehow.
And muddle through I did. It was a nightmare of a journey, my grandmother glaring in airports, kicking and pinching me when I fell asleep on the train, refusing to speak to waiters and ticket sellers, even though she spoke the necessary languages. We got by in Romania on my Honours Latin – dead language, ha, I knew it’d be good for something! – and in Russia on a phrase book and a winning smile. And possibly all the duty free cigarettes I had stuffed in my pockets. And eventually we made it to Bolgrad. Not to be confused with Belgrade, though apparently the missionaries sent out from Constantinople did, which is why it has a massive and magnificent cathedral, despite being little more than a village.
To cut what’s becoming a very long story short, I had a great time and learned a lot. A hell of a lot, if you consider I learned it all via hand and head gestures, eye contact, the occasional word from a dictionary, and a love of stories about Siberia and the railways and the salt mines and cabbage soup, even when I can only understand one word in five. But then, one day, my great aunt burst into tears, and sobbed, Vika, Vika, if only you could speak Ukrainian. Why don’t you speak Russian? Even Romanian or Moldavian would do. And how can your grandmother not have taught you Bulgarian?
Well, why on earth would she, I sighed, getting somewhat annoyed by now at being such a colossal failure in the presence of genii. Clearly my French and Latin and Ancient Greek, and oh, yes, Modern Greek counted for naught. Why don’t you speak Greek, I asked, throwing down my own gauntlet. Why would we, she replied. Your grandmother only learned it when she got married. At which point the earth moved.
Break out those phrase books and all the hand gestures on earth. And back right up to the beginning. My aunt summoned her daughter, and we hammered it out. I then got a bus three hours into town and paid someone in a shop twenty American dollars (six months’ wages) to let me phone my mother. Turns out my grandmother’s first language, the language of her mother was Bulgarian. Turns out Bolgrad is Russian for Bulgarian town. How you like them apples?
Russian is her father’s language. Ukrainian and Moldavian were local dialects. And Romanian is the language she had her formal education in. She spoke five languages as teenager, growing up in a place called Bessarabia that doesn’t even exist anymore, and then she met my grandfather, who banned every one of them in the house, and made her learn to speak Greek, his father’s language. And then he changed her name from Lyolya Garvalova to Helen Garvalides. And then he took her a million miles away, to New Zealand, where she learned to speak English and never uttered a word of the others again, except when speaking of the foods of her childhood. And thus so many mysteries fell into place.
My mother, horrified, then recalled that when her father was being particularly despicable (not a rare occurrence) he used to call my grandmother a Bulgarian bitch. Find out as much as you can, she said, and write it all down. So I did. And there’s a million more stories I could tell, but this is my message for today. Because my brave, beautiful grandmother played along, and to this day insists that she’s Greek, and that I misunderstood her sister. But I know I didn’t.
I’m damn good now at reassembling fractured languages, and I can tell my grandmother’s Greek isn’t real. All the words in it that I thought I got wrong when people frowned at my attempts, all the vocabulary my mother assumed was peasant slang, all the wild and wonderful foods we ate, all the swear words and expostulations my mother learned from her mother and I learned from her. All the threads of the tapestry that was Bessarabia, a vanished state, and the lie created by my grandfather, a man who loved being Greek, but also loved Stalin, and never minded being (justifiably!) compared to him. My uncles play along with him, but my mother and my sisters and I do not. We like being the daughters of our foremothers.
Enjoy the salad!
Russian (yeah right!) Salad
3 carrots
2 parsnips
2 potatoes
1 small steak (I always use a piece of rump) [omit if vegetarian]
1 small tin peas (or fresh if you have them, but not frozen)
1 jar gherkins
salt and pepper
2 egg yolks
2 lemons
salad oil (any kind, but olive oil is too heavy)
1 good teaspoon American mustard (I daresay it wasn't American originally, but it's the one I like best)
Toss the carrots, parsnips and potatoes into a pot whole, along with the steak, and bring to a boil then simmer till done but not overdone. Drain, leave to cool, then finely dice everything. In a large bowl add the drained peas, and finely diced gherkins, and the juice of one lemon. Mix well. Season to taste.
Make the mayonnaise. The method is much the same as any handmade egg mayonnaise. Beat the two egg yolks in a beater, then when thickened start adding the oil very slowly. Don't add it too fast or it won't emulsify properly. If it curdles you can start again with another egg yolk in a clean bowl and add the curdled mixture a teaspoon at a time till it smoothes out again. When thick add the mustard to taste and the juice of one lemon.
Mix the mayonnaise gently into the vegetable mixture. At this point I have taken to getting fancy, and spooning it into endive leaves, or into hollowed out tomatoes. My grandmother always arranged it beautifully on a platter, spread reserved mayonnaise over the top, then piped decorative flowers all over it and decorated it with carrot and gherkin rosettes and black olives. It made a stunning centrepiece for the table, but was a lot of work. It also added extra mayonnaise, which my waistline didn't need. These days if I'm not eating it as a salad, I tend to treat it as a condiment - at Christmas I spread it on my hot slices of lamb or turkey and devour. It's also great in sandwiches the next day.
Bon Appetit!