SpiceLines

At Kuznechny Market in June, we found glorious
red gold cherries and enormous peonies--and,
to our surprise, many vacant stalls.

When we visited Kuznechny Market in late June, we were surprised to find so many empty stalls. Was it the early morning hour? Or was it the fallout of a controversial law banning non-Russian citizens from selling spices and other foods at the fresh produce markets?

I fear we now have the answer:

A few days ago, our St. Petersburg correspondent emailed an excerpt from Pulse, a “monthly entertainment magazine” published in both Russian and English. Pulse also keeps up with local current events: this is from a recent article, “Market Forces: Kuznechny Market.”


“At the entrance there's a hand-written notice:
'Gardeners of the Leningrad region are provided with
free places. Contact the administration.' Under the
notice, perhaps at the provided place, sits an
elderly gardener selling onions. After the infamous
law banning non-citizens from working at the
markets, the once-lively Kuznechny Market has become
a lot more subdued. There are many empty counters,
and the ones that remain are occupied by traders,
who look more or less like Slavs. They invite
customers to try their fare- in an insistent yet
friendly manner.
Apart from the familiar fruit and veg, fish and
meat, the market has a great selection of dairy
products (from Leningrad region) and honey (from
Altai, 280 rubles). Kuznechny also has a wide
selection of spices. You can even find Iranian cumin
for pilaff and sumac for basturma."

To my regret, the honey sellers did not make an appearance during our visit and there were only one or two stalls selling spices. I did buy a packet of blue-black sumac berries which, though dried, were still quite fresh and very tart.

Basturma, incidentally, is a dish which turns up in various guises in Russian, Armenian, Georgian, and even Turkish cuisine. In some recipes, basturma is a dry cured beef that has been rubbed with an incendiary paste of red and black pepper, garlic, allspice, and fenugreek. In others it refers to grilled skewered lamb or beef that has been marinated in something sour like vinegar or pomegranate juice and fresh herbs. But nowhere have I found a recipe for basturma made with sour sumac.
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At 1913, a restaurant whose name commemorates the most prosperous year of
Russia's economy, we ate delicious dranki, potato pancakes stuffed with bacon and
wild mushrooms. Plain dranki are served with sour cream, dill and red pepper.

Three days was not long enough to taste all of St. Petersburg’s treasures, culinary and otherwise.

Between visits to Peterhof and the Hermitage, we couldn’t squeeze in a meal at Khinkalnaya-Khachapurnaya, a Georgian restaurant which offers Eastern Mediterranean style dishes like grilled shashlik, or lamb skewers, and eggplant with walnuts. Nor did we have time to eat blini stuffed with mushrooms and cheese at one of Teremok’s fast food outlets. Ditto for Molokhovets’ Dream, where the menu includes dishes from the 1861 Russian cookbook, A Gift to Young Housewives. (You can read about all these eateries in “36 Hours: St. Petersburg,” by Clifford J. Levy (The New York Times, Sunday May 12, 2007, Travel Section, p. 13).

Although St Petersburg is not known for great food—our best eating was at Podvorye in Pavolvsk--we did visit three restaurants where we dined reasonably well. Here’s where we ate—and what we most enjoyed.

Restaurant Polovtsev’s Mansion

A mosaic of lightly salted salmon with lemon and mint.

The former home of a Russian senator, this opulent mansion is known as the Architects’ Building, since it houses an architectural institute. The restaurant on the ground floor is in two rooms: a small bar for cocktails, with pale walls and lavender curtains, a place for Nora Charles, swathed in furs, to have a vodka martini, and a 19-century robber baron's dining room (think Orson Welles) with high carved walnut ceiling and elaborate panels streaming with medallions, flowers and ribbons. Darkly exotic paintings of elephants, a turbaned gentleman with a camel, and hunters in pursuit of lions, an ostrich and black boar are set high up on the walls.

We zigzagged our way through the enormous menu, sampling mostly small dishes and sipping the excellent Baltic Beer, a light, bitter lager brewed in St. Petersburg. We adored the mosaic of lightly salted salmon, hot-smoked sturgeon and halibut served with tiny olives, thinly sliced lemon and fresh mint, and a meat assortment of pork baked in mustard and garlic, beef tongue with horseradish and a gorgeous rabbit roll stuffed with bright green pistachios. Other winners included beet borshch with diced tongue and marinated chanterelles and milk mushrooms with garlic and dill. Alas, the vareniki, dessert dumplings stuffed with sour cherries, were slow in coming and leaden when they arrived. But as our waiter marched repeatedly into the kitchen, where voices were raised over the banging of pans, we had time to observe four men downing shots of vodka, becoming louder and pinker of face as the minutes ticked away. The one woman in the group, handsome with silver streaked hair, circumspectly sipped a glass of fruit juice.

We emerged at 11:20 PM (“open till the last customer leaves”) as twilight was deepening, but the streets were crowded. During summer’s “white nights” the bridges on the River Neva are raised around 2 AM to let large ships pass through; everyone stays up to watch the silhouettes arched against the pink and purple-streaked dawn sky.

Restaurant Polovtsev’s Mansion, 52 Bolshaya Morskaya, St. Petersburg. Telephone: 812-973-8467.

1913 Restaurant

A pristine salad with chives and crisply fried eggplant.

The name celebrates the best-ever year of the Russian economy, which coincided with three centuries of Romanov rule. (It all came to a bloody end in 1917.) We lunched upstairs under a milky glass-domed ceiling in an elegant room with pale green curtains. Dishes were whisked on and off the table by a precisely choreographed battalion of waitresses. A pair of stolid men with impassive faces—I fantasized that they were Russian security agents--smoked cigarettes and drank wine at a nearby table.

We began with a pristine salad of tender lettuces, warty-skinned cucumbers, red peppers, and fresh chives with pesto and a few slices of paper-thin eggplant fried crisp and golden, then segued to delicious dranki--potato pancakes, one plain with dill and sour cream, the other stuffed with smoky bacon and succulent wild mushrooms. There was a lot more sour cream to come--in the whipped potatoes, in the mushroom soup and the meatballs in…sour cream sauce. The blueberry ice cream was lovely.

1913 Restaurant, 13/2 Vosnesensky Prospekt, St. Petersburg. Telephone: 812-315-5148.

Adamant

One blini with caviar, another with ham and cheese.

One evening we walked across St. Isaac’s Square to Adamant, a “luxury” restaurant on the Moika River, where we dined in a pretty room with red curtains and a trompe l’oeil vista of a terrace that could have been Versailles, but was probably Peterhof, Peter the Great’s palace of many fountains on the Gulf of Finland.

Here we had wonderful blini, thin butter-soaked pancakes topped with sevruga caviar and icy cold shots of Russian Standard Imperial Vodka. This was followed by clear fish broth with chunks of very fresh sturgeon, perfumed with dill, and chicken kiev, spurting with butter. A troupe of elaborately costumed “gypsy” dancers peered at us from the door, but, thankfully, never performed.

Adamant, 72 Nabereznaya Reki Moiki, St. Petersburg. Telephone: 812-311-0409.

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At Podvorye, a country restaurant favored by Vladimir Putin, peonies and zinnias
were blooming in profusion in the summer garden.

“Marina came in a red motorcar of an early ‘runabout’ type, operated by the butler very warily as if it were some fancy variety of corkscrew. She looked unwontedly smart in a man’s grey flannels and sat holding the palm of her gloved hand on the knob of a clouded cane as the car, wobbling a little, arrived to the very edge of picnic site, a picturesque glade in an old pinewood cut by ravishingly lovely ravines. A strange pale butterfly passed from the opposite side of the woods, along the Lugano dirt road, and was followed presently by a landau….”

--Vladimir Nabokov in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 1969

Nabokov’s Ada is a novel that demands to be read during the dog days of summer, preferably on a velvet couch while drinking cold black tea spiced with black peppercorns and red currants. Ada and Van Veen’s cousinly love affair evolves slowly and deliciously during a languid summer at their family’s romantic country retreat. Even though Ardis, a three-story pile of “pale brick and purplish stone,” is located in some mysterious land, not quite Russia, nor Europe or America, it is in spirit a summer place that evokes the dreamlike world of the old dachas built during the reign of Peter the Great.

Dacha means “something given”—and the term came to be used for the property given by the tsar to his most loyal retainers. Some dachas were simple log cottages or izbas, others were small palaces—but all of them were places of retreat from the world, where long hot summers might be spent drowsing in bedrooms on cool sheets, chasing butterflies in wildflower meadows, and drinking, as Nabokov wrote, “the cold sweet tea of childhood".

I was thinking about all this as we drove slowly through the sleepy town of Pushkina, just a few miles from St. Petersburg. With the sunlight filtering through tall trees on moldering neoclassic buildings, it felt light years away from the urban thrum. We had spent the morning at Tsarskoye Selo, the Baroque summer palace of Catherine I, the favorite second wife of Peter the Great. It was painted the most improbable shade of bright blue by their egomaniacal daughter, Elizabeth, to match her eyes, it is said. Once compared to a “celestial constellation,” the palace resembles an elaborate turquoise and white confection. The Great Hall or ballroom shimmers with gold leaf and mirrors reflecting upon themselves, and the famous Amber Study, whose glowing panels were plundered and lost, forever, it seems, during World War II, has been painstaking restored by a battalion of craftsmen. But in the Park surrounding all this opulence there are semi-wild, romantic spots with charming pavilions and little bridges that must have enticed courtiers to ramble, perhaps aimlessly, on a summer day.

Delicious fresh salted vegetables were pickled for 24 hours in a brine flavored
with garlic, dill, hot peppers and leaves such as black currant and cherry.

A little futher on we turned into the driveway of Podvorye, a rambling log izba with a tower crowned by a stained glass cock. Podvorye, which means “coach house,” is really a restaurant, but its summer garden of crimson peonies and fanciful decor—wild horse heads serve as roof finials--evokes the dreamy spirit of an old country dacha. Which is great, because within minutes of sitting down at a long trestle table and pouring the first of many glasses of Russian Standard vodka, we were besieged by busloads of singing Venezuelan tourists and folk dancers stomping on the unpolished wood floors.

Is Podvorye a tourist trap? Yes, but of the most delectable sort. It is said to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s favorite restaurant—he was born in St. Petersburg and you can order the same menu he had on his birthday—and the guest book includes Prince Charles, French President Jacques Chirac, First Lady Lora (sic) Bush, actors Steve Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran, and fashion designers Jil Sander and John Galliano.

But if you can get past all this, it is a perfectly wonderful place to eat authentic Russian food. Podvorye’s cookbook, naturally sold in the souvenir shop, shows owner Sergei Guttsayt in Kuznechny market, poring over boxes of bright lingonberries, examining strings of dried mushrooms and sizing up fine cuts of pork. Guttsayt, who is rotound, pink-cheeked and vaguely aristocratic looking, has his own summer estate in Crimea and the red and white wine on the table is made in his vineyards.

Here’s what we had for lunch:

Beef with spicy sour cream dressing was mixed with sauteed onion and topped
with sour cream flavored with a special Georgian herb mixture and cranberries.

Boiled beef topped with a garlicky sour cream sauce. The sauce is spiced with with freshly ground black pepper, coriander leaves and a mixture of dried basil, hot red pepper, parsley, celery, dill, coriander, laurel leaf, mint and marjoram widely used in Georgian and Armenian cuisine. The dish was strewn with tiny cranberries, very tart and much smaller than our own.

Earthenware bowls of delicious fresh salted cucumbers, tomatoes, huge garlic cloves and scapes. The tomatoes and garlic were pickled for 24 hours in a brine flavored with dill stalks and flowers, black currant leaves and hot peppers; the brine for the cucumbers included horseradish root and leaves as well as dill and other wild leaves.

Plates of thinly sliced roast pork with cucumbers, and bowls of mushrooms baked in sour cream.

A superb sorrel soup or green borshch, thick with fresh sorrel leaves, potatoes and hardboiled eggs, topped with sour cream and thinly sliced scallions. The soup was sour and very peppery.

Golubitsy, or cabbage and grape leaves stuffed with beef, pork and rice, simmered in a sauce of sour cream , tomato and fresh greens.

To die for pale green pistachio ice cream, rich and nutty tasting, served with tender blini filled with dried lingonberries in a pool of the delicious honey that had eluded us at Kuznechny Market a few days earlier.

Later, perusing the menu on Podvorye’s website, I was struck by what we didn’t have a chance to try: paprika (red peppers) pickled in honey, wild quail stuffed with lingonberries and apple, chicken Taback, pressed and grilled Caucasus style, sturgeon (Beluga) shashlik (on a skewer), and the "drunken desserts"—preserves of fruit like mulberries and cornelian cherries in liqueur, homemade at Guttsayt’s own summer place in Crimea.

Podvorye Restaurant, 16 Filtrovskoye Avenue, Pavlovsk, St. Petersburg, Russia 196625. Telephone: 812-466-85-44. Web: www.podvorye.ru

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"Next time, bring me a husband," laughs a merchant at Kuznechny, a covered market
in St.Petersburg. She is selling big bunches of dill and parsley, traditional greens in
Russian cuisine.

It’s 7:42 AM in St. Petersburg. The early morning sun is slanting across the street. Well, perhaps not early morning. During summer’s white nights, the sun begins its slow ascent at 2:00 AM after just an hour or two of deep blue twilight. I love the endless day. It makes me feel unmoored from time.

We’re standing on the sidewalk outside Kuznechny market, waiting for the doors to open.

To get here, Masha—a plump, red-headed aeronautical engineer turned computer analyst—has led Bill and me through empty streets along the Moika River, past faded stucco palaces, through an arch into a secret garden with wide, tree-shaded paths, and finally on a street car down bustling Nevsky Prospekt until we alight a few blocks from the onion-domed Lady of Vladimir church.

The covered market won’t open until 8 AM. On the sidewalk a few elderly women are selling buckets of blowsy pink and crimson peonies. Across the street, in the shadow of the 18th century Russian Orthodox church, a vaguely Asiatic brother and sister are hawking a version of shawarma, shredded carrots, cabbage and meat wrapped in flatbread. Masha shows us the window of Dostoyevsky’s last apartment, now a museum. “He always chose an apartment where he could see the domes of a church,” she says. The great novelist probably strolled through Vladimirsky, the open air market which occupied the site on which Kuznechny was built about 70 years ago. Today food is sold is an airy, white-tiled hall, but for centuries there was a vibrant oudoor market on this spot.

At last the doors open. The air is marvelously perfumed with dill. “Next time you come, bring me a husband!” jokes a vivacious red-head, who is laying out big bunches of the greens--parsley, onions with long tops and feathery dill--which are used in so many Russian dishes. There are almost no customers and the merchants don’t mind chatting as they uncover their wares—caviar on ice, brightly colored honey cakes, jewel-like displays of dried fruit and nuts.

Here’s what we’re seeing and tasting now:

--Mounds of plump stiff-necked garlic bulbs, some creamy white, others lightly streaked with purple. Not Chesnok Red, or any of the other compact Russian purple stripes grown in America, but more likely elephant garlic—which, naturally, is often called “Russian garlic.” In Georgia the mild tasting cloves are tossed with olive oil and lemon or vinegar, marinated for a few days and then eaten like a salad.

--Bright red tomatoes with tiny “birds’ beaks” or tails curling out of the blossom end. Enormous pink tomatoes that look a lot like German Johnsons, a popular heirloom variety at our local farmers’ market.

--Glorious bunches of green and purple grapes that give new meaning to the word “Dionysian.” Each juicy bunch hangs from an iron stand in solitary perfection. From the south, piles of red-gold cherries, dewy apricots, buff-colored melons, their rinds traced with intricate lacy pattern.

--In the meat section to the rear, huge pork haunches. In the fish department, tanks of live perch, carp and sterlet, a sort of sturgeon with a long, narrow, vaguely prehistoric snout. There is a recipe for whole steamed sterlet with a sauce of ground almonds and Madeira in the cookbook for Podvorye, an idyllic dacha turned restaurant near Tsarskoye Selo, the turquoise summer palace of Catherine I.

--Ladies with frilly white tiaras and stern expressions selling ladlefuls of smetana or sour cream. Russian sour cream tastes a lot like crème fraiche and it can be very runny or quite thick, depending upon the fat content. It is sublime on beet borscht and, mixed with a spicy Georgian blend of herbs and hot red pepper, over boiled beef sprinkled with dill and fresh cranberries. Carp is sometimes baked with potatoes in sour cream.

I buy a slice of domashnije siz—Masha translates this as “cheese of homemaking”—white, delicate, creamy cheese pressed into round decorative molds. It is exquisitely fresh but so perishable that 12 hours later the texture has become rubbery.

-- Spicy pickled cucumbers, whole garlic and bundles of wild garlic shoots. The vegetables are steeped in rassol, salted vinegar spiked with hot peppers, horseradish root, dill, black currant leaves and other ingredients. Leftover rassol, or “pickle water,” is the base for a variety of hearty soups, one of which is known as rassolnik, a common cure for vodka hangovers.

--I linger longest with a shy young man selling dried fruit and nuts. There are plump walnuts, pine nuts from Siberia, dried apricots, kiwis, figs and wild cranberries (much smaller than our own), and tiny packets of spices: cinnamon, coriander seed, and blue-black barbarries with a bright, acidic flavor. The shiny, reddish churchkhela, a traditional Georgian candy, is irresistible: walnuts are threaded onto a thin string, then dipped repeatedly into grape juice that has been boiled until it is thick and syrupy. The candy is soft, chewy, sweet and mildly scented with cinnamon.

We’d love to tarry, but our friends are calling. The honey sellers still haven’t appeared. In fact, at 9 AM a surprising number of tiled counters are simply empty. It is too early? Or is something else going on?

Since April 1, immigrants have been banned from selling at any of Russia’s 5,200 food markets, ostensibly as part of a “Russia for Russians” campaign. Traditional vendors of fruits, vegetables and spices—mostly Georgians, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Chinese—are forbidden to work in the markets. Empty stalls and price hikes followed the ban. For more, see “Markets Suffer After Russian Bans Immigrant Vendors,” Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times, April 14, 2007.

Kuznechny Market is located at 3 Kuznechny Pereulok.
Telephone: +7 812 312-4161

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