Podcasts

Russian Food: Old and New North of the Acrtic Circle, the Roots of Russian Food

26

Darra Goldstein on the edge of the Barents Sea

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:34 — 25.3MB)

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Bowl of barley and dried mushroom soup, photo by Teresa Cherfas Darra Goldstein combines a scholar’s knowledge of history and literature with a cook’s interest in recipes and ingredients. She had already written extensively on food across the vast Soviet empire, but more recently turned her attention to a search for what she calls “the true heart of Russian food“. She found it on the Kola Peninsula, a wild and forbidding part of Russia right at the top of Scandinavia. Our conversation, prompted by her new book, went further afield to include glimpses of food revivals and innovation in Russia today.

Notes

  1. Darra Goldstein’s website is here.
  2. Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Food and Lore is available you-know-where and also from independent bookshops, many of which will ship. It takes more effort, I know, but everything these days takes more effort. Here, I’ve done a bit of that for you, for the US and a couple of places in the UK.
  3. Banner photo shows Darra at the edge of the Barents Sea, which bounds the Kola Peninsula to the north. Podcast cover photo © Stefan-Wettainen.
  4. Photo of barley and dried mushroom soup, and the soup itself, by Teresa Cherfas.
  5. Transcript here.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 120 An opportunity?

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  1. Extraordinary Fungal Masks used by the Indigenous People of North America and Asia
  2. The Italian Farmer Returning Chickens to the Wild. I don’t envy him collecting about 1000 eggs a day from the woods.
  3. How herring in the North Sea could sour the Brexit trade negotiations.
  4. If you don’t know it, and even if you do, listen to Singing the Fishing, in my opinion the best of the marvellous BBC Radio Ballads.
  5. Covid–19 and the future of food from Chris Smaje of Small Farm Future. Long-term hopeful.
  6. “The Gastronomica Editorial Collective is seeking dispatches about food in the time of COVID–19.”
  7. Here’s mine … Life here in lockdown land honestly hasn’t been that bad. I’ve written a bit about it here and here.
Podcasts

The book of the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food Remembering the food of the past, no matter how bad it was

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Illustration of a avish spread from The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:16 — 23.5MB)

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Home mdae ice cream on a snowy Moscow balcony

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food – Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище – was published in 1939 as a complete guide for Soviet citizens. It was both practical, with recipes and tips on etiquette, hygiene and nutrition, and propaganda, with pictures of lavish spreads that no ordinary citizen would ever enjoy. It was, effectively, the only cookbook most Russians knew, and for a few writers has acted as a springboard to produce a food-based memoir. Latest of these is Anna Kharzeeva, a young Russian woman whose blog posts detailing her adventures cooking from The Book – leavened with the stories of her Granny and Granny’s friends – will shortly be published as a book.

Anna sent me a selection of her online articles to read, and on the basis of those, I set out to discover for myself the allure today of Soviet-era food.

Notes

  1. Anna Kharzeeva’s cookery school is the Samovar Cook & Chat Club. She is also on Facebook and Instagram.
  2. Wikipedia has a little information about The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food and the 1952 edition is online in Russian.
  3. Some of the stories and recipes we talked about:
  4. Here is the transcript. Sorry about the delay.
  5. Laughter from Freesound by lonemonk
  6. The ice cream photograph is Anna’s own.

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Podcasts

Orange-fleshed sweet potato to feed hidden hunger No-one wakes up saying 'I crave vitamin A today'

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Marketing campaign for orange-fleshed sweet potato

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:33 — 22.1MB)

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podcast cover artworkThere is more to good nutrition than calories and protein. The realisation that you can be perfectly well fed, maybe even too well fed, and yet still malnourished, is relatively recent. It often goes by the name hidden hunger, and reflects a lack of essential micronutrients in the diet. Tackling the lack of micronutrients is tricky because people do not really feel their hidden hunger. “No-one wakes up saying ‘I crave vitamin A today’,” as a recent paper put it.

That paper looks back over the 25-year history of the most successful effort to feed hidden hunger to date: the introduction of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes to subSaharan Africa. The beta-carotene that makes sweet potatoes orange is the precursor of vitamin A, one of the most important micronutrients. In this episode, I’m talking to Dr Jan Low, who has worked on orange-fleshed sweet potato from the start.

Notes

  1. The paper by Jan Low and Graham Thiele is Understanding innovation: The development and scaling of orange-fleshed sweetpotato in major African food systems and, oh joy, it is freely available.
  2. Banner photograph by Benjamin Rakotoarisoa.
  3. As mentioned in the episode, as an experiment I am going to try and provide a transcript, at least for a little while. Find it here.
  4. Work on vitamin-A rich sweet potatoes is carried out under the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB).

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