Russia, an (ignored) organic paradise

Tonia (Antonina) and her goatsA village in Central Russia
This is about a real-food issue that goes unreported because it's neither sold or bought, but it's the thread of the daily life for many people in this country.
I know that many people will find the title of this story provocative and unfounded, given the widespread idea that Russia is heavily polluted as a result of years of careless industrial and military neglect, but I think that Russia is indeed the ignored land of organic food.
I don’t know what foreign media correspondents are doing in Moscow, but I’m not sure that they spend much time in the Russian backcountry, otherwise there would be more reporting on this subject, instead of the well-selling pollution stories. I suspect that the news people assigned in France mostly find their stories and their coverage angle sipping a coffee at a terrace in Paris, reading Le Monde and Liberation, and I'm afraid that's about the rule everywhere else.
I understand that Russia is a huge country, not always easy to travel through, but you don't need to be the best investigative journalist to just meet Russian people in the deep provinces and see how they live.
What I can say from my repeated visits in this country is that in addition to being a very big country, Russia has huge expanses of wilderness, most of it being in pristine condition. The Russians often wander through the nearest forest to pick pick berries, mushrooms or fish, and they consume what the generous nature offers them. They also routinely grow vegetables in their garden, and this often without using chemicals. Even the city people to some extent have kept cultivating a tiny garden in the suburb, all of them love this real food, and they don't do it only for economic reasons but because the Russian people remain deeply almost religiously connected to nature and purity.
All of this self-grown food represents a huge part of what the Russians consume, and as it isn't bought in a shop or manufactured in an industrial farm, this is totally off the radar of analysts...

Gardens plots in a housing complex This goes unnoticed by the foreign media, and Russian officials themselves may not realize it : this country is an organic giant who sits unknowingly on a potential gold mine : much of the food consumed by its people is either picked in the woods, fished in wild rivers or grown without chemicals in the rich earth of a back garden.
Due to the food shortage along the soviet years, Russians and Soviet citizens at large had to take care of their own supplies, tending gardens at that effect. City dwellers were given small gardens in the suburbs, sometimes very far from the cities, and you could see them on weekends commuting with buses and trains with big bags to and from their private lot (even today, these regrouped private garden-lots are much used by city people and not only by retirees). The Russian and ex-Soviet citizens have learnt the traditionnal way to preserve the food naturally so that they could count on it through winter. There were no chemicals available for the ordinary citizen in the soviet times, be it pesticides, weedkillers or preservatives, so only natural ways were used for these home-prepared food. Ogurets (огурец), the Russian national vegetable... Take the Ogurets (огурец or cucumbers in English), the Russian-most vegatable that you eat all the time with zakuski and vodka on the side : you make all sort of canned preparations with them, and most Russians wouldn't stand the industrial cans of cucumber-with-vinegar we're happy with in the west.
Since the fall of the socialist regime, the tradition of canning home-grown vegetables and fruits has survived and you’ll find vegetables, mushroom or fruit cans even in homes of the middle class whose revenues have noticeably improved these recent years. On an other side, as many people, especially in the countryside, have modest revenues, they’ve not yet been targetted by the chemical industry specialized in gardening. Even though there's a Russian heavy weight in the sector and also an international giant known for its bestseller weedkiller which opened a branch here (beware, Russian gardeners, keep your garden chemical free...). It’s quite uncummon for villagers to get rid of beetles by hand, picking them one by one from the plant before burning or drowning them. For the best soups of the Russian winter This video was shot in central Russia far from main roads. Lydia, helped by her daughter Tania, are preparing cabbage for the winter, they're chopping the cabbage as thin as possible with traditional tools in some sort of long wooden container made out of a section of tree trunk. They will will add a few ingedients like a bit of salt and herbs so that it can wait for later

consumption :
Here is the recipe for the two sorts of fermented cabbage

prepared here (a green and a white) :
Take off the green leaves and put the white, inside-part on the side. You'll get two different cabbage preparations, they'll go through the same preparation but will have different uses.
Chop the cabbage with carrots and a bit of salt that you add from time to time. You need about 2 to 4 carrots and 100 grams of salt for 5 kg of cabbage. Don't add water : the salt with make the cabbage yield lots of good juice. Put the whole thing in jars, making sure that the cabbage is fully immerged in the salty juice. Keep the jars in a warm place (inside a house) without lids for 3 days so that the light fermentation takes place, then put te lids on and put the jars in a cold room for the winter months.
The white cabbage is eaten as snacks or mixed with salads while the green is used for the traditional Russian soup, usually boiled in the Russian brick ovens.
Yes, even the cooking of this Russian soup is so beautifully natural : here is a video (on the left) showing the age-old brick stove that you find in every old house in the russian villages : It's a big square block of bricks with two furnaces, one for the stove and one for the iron-cast plates where you'll cook with your saucepans. Sometimes several rooms wrap the stove so it can bring heat to the main room, to the kitchen and to the bedroom. Speaking of bed, when it's really cold outside, you can climb on the stove (in the back) as there's a specially-designed site at the top for a mattress....
The fire that you can see in the first part will heat the oven, after which (when it's hot) you can dispose of the embers and place your soup in a clay pot or cook a bread. Building a Russian wooden house After the stove, why not look at the construction of a beautiful wooden house : the age-old techniques used for centuries to build these Russian isbas in the middle of the woods are still trusted by local builders and villagers. There's no shortage of trees in Russia and all a house needs to be built is a a few dozens of them and a few simple tools. Economical way to become a home owner in a rural country where disposable income is still low. Once selected and cut down, the trees are put to dry for a certain time. There's something close to what is done to make casks : you don't take just a tree, you pick the right type of tree with good insulation properties and you dry it properly until it's ready for the construction. When this day comes, the logs are prepared and planed down on one side, with a number marked on each of them so that they're assembled the right way. Take a few bricks and mortar for the base of the house, go pick some moss in the taïga and you can build your timber house with a few friends (well, almost, maybe if those friends have already some experience in the trade, that might help...).
Look at this, doesn't it look simple and solid ? Now, I'd have liked to see how they build these traditional brick stoves, I'm sure they'll make one themselves as soon as this house is finished. I happen to love wood cookstoves and stoves in general, and I think I would have the patience to learn this construction technique.
Here is a page about Russian sophisticated wooden homes inspired from the traditional technique, but simple isbas have more charm than these fancy houses. A goat herd in central Russia There seems to be lots of goats in Russia, although much of the milk may be used for family consumption. Tonia on the picture above for example has two goats and she and her family drink the milk, they don't make cheese. According to my friends who know her well, she is almost totally autarcic and makes much of her food. We visited her and I could see how these interiors are cute and unchanged for ages : her room was very small with also a very small bed and old-time decoration and objects, including a few icons, the living quarters being wrapped around the brick oven with the kitchen corner on the side. I forgot to ask but I guess her goats have a place to stay when it's really cold. Slava's salo : white gold That's a meat product but of the most organic type you may dream of : Slava got this pork fat from a friend/neighboor in the village who raises his own pigs a couple hundereds meters from here. Salo is generally very good when you're used to it, if not healthy because it's 100% pork fat and probably not very good for our arteries, but this one was a delicacy, especially eaten along with straight glasses of vodka. I try to shrug off the high-fat question by thinking that the (big amounts of) vodka that we drink on those occasions will just melt away the fat... My particular thanks to Slava who took this Salo out from his reserves. Salo is a national dish here in russia as well as in Ukraine, and we got excellent salo in southern russia (Krasnodar) too.
The one on the right has been sprayed with raw salt and spices while the other was was stored as such. Dry fish on a stall in a Russian villageSame with fish, the Russian rivers and streams are very rich and the fish are often preserved and stored the ancient way, without chemical products, and just a bit of salt or smoking. People in the villages put such fish aside for later consumption and you can find and buy on private stands along the roads dry or smoked fish of all sorts. You can keep these fish very long just by hanging them in a corner, and I think that they keep pretty well their nutritional benefits. There’s a myriad of small rivers, streams, ponds and lakes in this country, and I bet that most of it is untouched by pollution. Looking for mushrooms in the TaïgaSeveral days in a row, we went to the taïga for mushrooms, we walked to one of our neighboors, packed in his UAZ and drove toward the forest on grass roads until we were in the middle of the wilderness, after which we walked another good distance.
Walking in the woods looking for mushrooms is one of my favorite sports, it's as healthy as golf, and more affordable. Doing it in Russia is playing in another dimension and scale, because of the size of the forests there and of the richness of its underwoods. The only thing is, you better not looses vocal contact with your mushroom mates (hoping they know where they're going, which I wasn't always sure) because you could end up walking days without finding any inhabited spot.

Now, there are mostly two ways to keep and store these mushrooms for later consumption, and here is a photo story of the recipes used by Russians. First : cut the mushrooms into pieces This first stage is common to the two ways : cut the mushrooms in small pieces, then you'll either dry them or boil them. >The boiling wayJust boil them with a bit of salt and without any water added, the mushrooms will give back lots of water. At the end, the volume of the mushrooms will shrink substantially and you'll have it ready for canning in glass jars. Ready for dryingThis is the other option : dry the mushrooms. Here, Slava uses a soviet-era drying system that you can put in an electric oven. This light-metal utensil is smartly designed with two layers of mushrooms, and as Slava now used another system (a big stove) because he picks large quantities of mushrooms, he gave me two of these tools, complete with their plastic wrapping, the printed manual and even the price it was sold in the Soviet Union (it's been made in 1983, says the printed manual)..... I'll use it in the Loire, thanks, Slava ! To the oven This will stay a couple of hours in the ovzen, at a low heat and with the half-open door and regular checking. It must not be cooked, just dried, the water must be completely gone, or the mushrooms could turn bad. Almost_ready This looks done, but Slava kept it in the oven some more time. The color has changed and turned leather and brownish. These mushrooms are still as full of nutrients and taste as when they were in the taïga... >For the long Russian winter... Now you can look forward for the fast-coming winter with relief, you're stocked with all the good things that mother Nature grew for you in the taïga and in the dark earth of your garden. All of this is pure natural food, and if the Russian villagers still live in otherwise very modest conditions, their food can be seen like a luxury that no money can buy... Katia whith one of her horsesI'll close this story with a couple of portraits : here is Katia, who works for an aeronotics company in a big city 250 km from here. Her husband moved to this village to change life and she joins him on weekends. They're the first of a new generation of villagers who keep a foot in the city but prepare to live permanently here. NatachaNatacha is the daughter of a neighboor, she has always lived here in the village, with the green endless taïga and the river which runs through it. We're all shaped by the places and surroundings we grew in, and this place also shapes people a certain way, the hard winter, the isolation, people seem to be very kind and helpful to each other over here.

Comments

[Athena Rork]

This was a fantastic read! Thanks so much for all the videos as well.

[Mart]

Hello Bertrand,
Thanks for the fantastic series on Russia. Didn't have time to read it all but I'm saving it for a dark autumn/winter evening. What video camera did you use btw. It is more interesting than TV. Not sure where you are right now but next week we'll have http://www.vinidivignaioli.com/ in Parma. Loads of natural winemakers from all over Italy and surprise surprise (for me at least) Puzelat is coming, gives me the change to stock up on some of his wines.

[Joseph Di Blasi]

Bertrand,

I always look forward to reading your very thorough and interesting stories and this is no exception! Thank you!