Foraging for Breakfast in the Other Russia
Foraging for Breakfast in the Other Russia
Blinis in Kostroma
Having taken an exhausting overnight train ride from Moscow to a friend’s house in Kostroma, which is almost 200 miles away from the Russian capital, I was only too happy to eat her homemade breakfast of blinis, something she often prepares for her two young sons.
One of the first introductions many people have to Russian cuisine, blinis come in many forms and textures. They can be light and fluffy pancakes, or they could be like the ones Tanya made me: thin, with the texture of crepes.
I ate two ravenously with butter, sour cream, and some strawberry jam, which had been made with strawberries from her parents’ garden. They were washed down with tea, the Russian staple. I placed a spoonful of jam in my mouth and drank the tea, washing down the sweetness, a common practice in Russia. Meanwhile, Oleshka and Romka, Tanya’s sons, ate the blinis with their hands.
Tanya has lived all her life in Kostroma; she had told me firmly that Russia is not just Moscow. Having spent three weeks in the capital, I had told her that I was only too keen to visit another Russian city and go mushroom and berry-picking. Even city-dwelling Muscovites like to escape to their dachas on weekends to plant, pick, pickle, and get away from it all.
What doesn’t grow in their gardens or on their windowsills, they like to get in their forests, or sources as natural as possible. From her neighbor’s cow, Tanya gets unpasteurized milk, which she used to make my breakfast blinis. The only milk I drink back in my native Singapore is pasteurized and from cartons in the supermarket.
After a stroll of only fifteen minutes we find ourselves at the edge of a forest, standing among birch trees, bathed in a golden light. It was still a bit too early for mushrooms and it hadn’t been raining, so a mushroom hunt was out. But there were berries. Tanya’s son has well-trained eyes and spies some blueberries, which he offers to me. A life-long urbanite, the only berries my concrete-weary eyes manage to spot are larger clusters of red currants and raspberries, obvious dots of bright red that pepper the bronze and green of the forest.
When I leave, Tanya gives me a back of frozen raspberries and strawberries, from which the jam I had at breakfast was made, together with a bottle of water she’d filled from a nearby spring for the train ride. These are small berries, different from the only ones I have ever eaten in Singapore, which are large varieties imported from the U.S. or Korean farms. Back in Moscow, I will eat them with a teaspoon, washing them down with hot tea.