MOSCOW, 1972 — My mother was determined to have a real American Thanksgiving.
The year was 1972.
We were living in Moscow, where my father was a journalist for the Associated Press.
The Soviet Union at the height of the Brezhnev era was a grim place to be. It was a society of informers. Russians spied on each other, and they spied on us. We lived in a compound for foreigners that was guarded by a sentry who kept track of our comings and goings. Like most foreigners, we were issued a maid and a driver by the state. Their jobs were not just to clean up after us and transport us but to report on our activities to the secret police. Even our apartment was bugged. My parents, like most people, found living in the Soviet Union to be a little oppressive; but to an undersized 9-year old, the idea that anyone — especially adults! — would be interested enough in what I said or did to record it was the source of endless amusement.
Since the fall of Communism and the release of scores of secret intelligence documents, I’ve wondered what my KGB file might disclose; I imagine it would read something like this:
Subject wears hair in effeminate “Beatle” haircut and spends hours listening to primitive, decadent rhythms of American “rock” group Grand Funk Railroad.
Breakdown of bourgeois family structure as a result of capitalist imperialist hegemony demonstrated by frequent arguments Subject has with mother about picking clothes up off floor of Subject’s bedroom.
The Russia of the time was also a society of scarcity. My father’s previous assignment had been a five-year stint in Paris. The Paris of the late ’60s was still the food capital of the world, an earthly paradise where my mother, with a little help from Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, had learned how to shop for food and how to cook.
By contrast, the Soviet Union that we moved to was a country where the government seemed to take pleasure in making everyday life for its citizens as threadbare as possible. It wasn’t unusual to go into a state-run grocery store and find only five or six items or nothing at all. There was a truck that came around the neighborhood, like the Good Humor man, and dispensed kvass, a foul fermented drink made from old bread. You could always buy good, dense black bread and frequent cafes that sold strong tea and hearty piroshkies. But it was rare to find meat or fish or even green vegetables in the stores, or anything else besides onions, cabbages and potatoes.
There was a private market where you could buy a few luxury goods, but its selection was capricious and exorbitantly expensive. If you were an American attached to the embassy, there was a PX (a military-run supermarket) that was a bounty of frozen, canned and processed American foods. I had once briefly been allowed inside the PX and wondered at its display of row after row of brightly colored breakfast cereal boxes, cookies, ice cream bars, packages of flat, uniformly shaped hamburgers.
My mother had long ago decided not to raise us as American children. We would eat muesli and yogurt and blinis for breakfast, not American cereals; we would be immersed in the culture of whatever country we were stationed in. I am now grateful for her decision, but at the time I rebelled against it. Whenever we would return to the United States, I would spend my allowance on the most garishly American foods I could my get my hands on — Strawberry Yoo-Hoo, Fruit Loops, grape bubble gum.
My father, since he often wrote articles that were critical of the embassy, refused to compromise his journalistic independence and allow my mother use of one of his contacts at the Embassy to acquire the canned pumpkin and turkey and cranberries that she needed for Thanksgiving from the PX.
My mother was able to buy a few foods from a Swedish mail-order catalogue; since the catalogue didn’t offer cranberries, she decided use lingonberries, which are always plentiful in Sweden.
We invited good friends of ours to spend Thanksgiving with us; the father was president of an airline and promised to fly over a turkey from France on one of his jets.
He and his wife were an unlikely (and as it turned out, ill-matched) couple: He was a tall, remote patrician with prematurely white hair and a name that ended with a number; she was a tiny, voluble Jewish woman. Our families had gotten together in a way that wasn’t uncommon in our small expatriate community. I had become friends with one of the boys, my classmate at the school for foreign children. Then our mothers had found themselves on the same committees and activity groups. Then our families began to socialize, playing board games or charades or renting dachas, the country houses Russians keep, or skating in Gorky Park, whose walkways were flooded and frozen over in the wintertime.
Our order from Sweden arrived with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately, so did the turkey from France — we received it 10 days before Thanksgiving, fully defrosted. My mother stored the turkey in the refrigerator, anxiously lifting the plastic wrap a few times a day to give it a sniff. Two days before the holiday, it began to develop a strong odor. So she tied it to the faucet in the bathtub and ran cold water over it. She washed it in bleach. Finally, when she still couldn’t get rid of the smell, she hung it from a rope off our balcony in the freezing weather.
We decided to blend the traditions of our two families. We had sauerkraut (a Baltimore Thanksgiving tradition) for our family and creamed pearl onions and peas for our friends. My mother improvised pearl onions by buying thirty or forty regular onions, peeling them down to the heart and throwing the rest away. She browbeat my father until he allowed her to buy a bag of frozen peas and a few cans of pumpkin from the PX.
On Thanksgiving Day, our guests arrived a few hours before the meal and everyone took turns swinging the turkey from the rope above the heads of curious passers-by, who no doubt reported this bizarre behavior to the authorities. The apartment, whose temperamental Soviet central heating was augmented by a battery of space heaters, was warm and cozy. We made mashed potatoes, the creamed pearl onions and peas, sauerkraut, biscuits and cornbread; lemon meringue pie in honor of our guests’ tradition, mince pie for our own and pumpkin pie for everyone’s. The kids — there were seven of us — drank milk and the adults drank bottle after bottle of rough Georgian wine.
The turkey, despite (or possibly because of) the abuse it endured, turned out to be the most flavorful and tenderest bird any of us had ever eaten. And that meal is the one Thanksgiving my parents will always remember at holiday time.
I like to think that the experience of enacting this exemplary American holiday for an unseen audience of envious watchers and auditors gave it a peculiar intensity.
But what’s also true for me about this Thanksgiving, and about cooking in general, is that there is often a correlation between the amount of effort and ingenuity we expend in putting together a meal and the satisfaction it gives, not only when we eat it, but in the dividends it pays off in the form of happy memories. It’s one of the reasons that many of us choose cooking as a profession: this desire not just to feed people but to sustain them, in some small way.
John Broening cooks at Duo restaurant, .
