Our cookbook of the week is Salt & Time: Recipes from a Russian Kitchen by chef Alissa Timoshkina. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Devilled eggs with forshmak , shchi (Russian-style cabbage soup) and Siberian pelmeni dumplings .
Salt and time, a timeless formula for fermentation, lies deep at the heart of chef Alissa Timoshkina ’s debut cookbook. After all, according to the London, England-based author, sour and tangy fermented foods are what give Russian dishes their inimitable funk and flavour.
As an evocation of her native Siberian cuisine, though, its title — Salt & Time (Interlink Books, 2019) — carries another, even more poetic, layer of meaning: The crunch of salt crystals between her fingertips reminiscent of trudging through freshly fallen snow; time, a reminder of where she comes from — history, family and traditions — and how those roots play out in the present.
“Salt is something that reminds me of snow, and it’s a visual effect of the beauty of the Russian landscape that I miss a lot,” says Timoshkina. “Time is obviously a key element in cooking, but … time is our memories — the history and the past — and how the past informs what I might do in my own kitchen, and how my family history connects to my own cooking.”
Timoshkina, who left Siberia at age 15 to attend school, has been living in England for half her life. This distance, she says, has allowed her to cultivate a new relationship with the food of her homeland. In 2015, after earning a PhD in film history, she combined her two passions — food and film — in a supper club, KinoVino , which continues today.
In establishing Russian food “as a really aesthetically pleasing, contemporary, relevant thing” — and Siberian cuisine especially as a vibrant mosaic drawing on the traditions of such diverse places as Armenia, Central Asia, Georgia, Korea and Ukraine — she presents a unique perspective and counters stereotypes.
Through Timoshkina’s modern take on the dishes of her youth — inspired by Jewish Ukrainian customs on her mother’s side, those from the Russian Far East on her father’s — as well as pre-revolutionary and Soviet-era classics, any lingering misconceptions of Russian food consisting solely of bland cabbage and potatoes in shades of grey are cast aside.
“Siberia’s not something that you associate with delicious food or anything pleasant in general. There’s almost a stigma attached to it, and rightly so for various historical incidences of migration and exile. I’m taking that, not as a positive, but as an interesting fact and (a way of examining) how that whole romantic, very complicated history of resettlement and exile informed the cuisine of that region,” says Timoshkina.
“It created such a fascinating melting pot and became a crossroads between different parts of the former Soviet region. So many people passed through that region, taking or leaving their culinary experiences, and that really makes it a very interesting place to look into.”
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
