Trying Russian Cocktail Food in Chicago with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
“So tell me what glasnost is before we get there,” I said to my college buddy as we waited to cross one of Chicago’s eight-lane streets on our way to a cocktail party honoring glasnost.
“Don’t you read the newspaper?” my college buddy asked.
“No, I gave it up when the student subscription ran out,” I said as we crossed the street fighting the autumn wind and crowds of people coming from the other side of the street.
“Don’t you watch the news?” my college buddy asked, trying to keep her little red bow from blowing in her face. I wore a similar bow with my blue suit in an early 1980s attempt to emulate male neckties at IBM.
“I work too late to see the six o’clock news, and I’m in bed before the eleven o’clock news,” I responded in the pre-CNN year of 1987.
“How do you keep on top of things,” my college buddy asked
in disbelief. I had gone to a PR briefing on CNN at J. Walter Thompson, advertising agency in Chicago, but I did not watch it.
I laughed and said, “I eavesdrop on conversations.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard anyone talk about glasnost,” she said.
I pushed my little red bow out of my face that was flapping
in the wind and looked over at her.
“Don’t pick on me,” I said. “I know glasnost is Russian, but we’re more into things Asian in my unit at the firm.” We both fit the type of organization types in our blue suits, even though we had said in college we would never wear these in college.
We arrived at the restaurant and immediately headed to the restroom, so we could comb our windblown hair. “Who’s sponsoring this shindig?” my college buddy asked.
“The invitation said it’s a radio station that has a Russian political commentator. Maybe they’ll think we’re potential advertisers and ply us with food and drink,” I gleefully thought aloud.
“I love your reasoning,” my college buddy responded.
We left the restroom and walked towards the meeting room. “You never did tell me what glasnost is.”
“Well, it’s hard to define exactly…” my college buddy started in.
“Oh really. I thought you would know since you read the paper and watch the news all the time,” I said.
“Don’t push it, Ruth. I could leave you in the dark about it all evening.”
“Oh, come on. I’m trying to educate myself here,” I said.
“Let’s just say glasnost is about promoting political openness,” my college buddy said.
“Is that all! It sounds like Mao’s “Let 100 Flowers Bloom Campaign” that encouraged dissent, so it was easy to identify critics and jail them later,” I said.
“My, you’ve gotten some mileage out of that degree in Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations,” my college buddy laughed.
"I know. My relatives asked if I was an expert on Philadelphia, Boston, and Bangor (Maine) when they saw the Far East Languages and Civilizations BA notice I sent out for graduation money," I said.
The radio presenter was giving a presentation when we walked in the conference room. We headed towards the food and drink and viewed our first Russian zakuski table. Zakuski in Russian means “little bites” I learned later.
I had eaten Polish food before, so I recognized the pirozhki (Russian ravioli stuffed with beef and onions) and the cabbage leaves (stuffed with ground beef) On the other side of the table around the outer edge were dishes like beet salad, carrot salad, radishes in sour cream with scallions, and glass dishes of black and orange-colored caviar.
Carafes of plain and flavored vodka sat in the center of the table with shot glasses surrounded by baskets of black rye and white bread.
My college buddy, who was Polish and Lithuanian on one side of her family, knew about vodka. She poured us some of the innocent looking potato-based fluid.
“You’re supposed to drink it down in one swallow,” she said. “The fumes are what make you drunk.”
The vodka burned my throat as I contemplated the caviars in their glass bowls on ice. “I’m not bothering with the potato salad,” I said. “I’m just going to eat the caviar, because it’s the most expensive thing here.”
“Have you ever eaten caviar before?” my college buddy asked.
“No, I wonder what you’re supposed to do with it?” I asked.
“We can just drink a bit until we see what everyone else does,” my college buddy suggested.
After a few more shots of vodka, a few more people did come and eat the caviar, which had its nuances. The small, black caviar got eaten with white bread. The orange-hued salmon caviar got eaten with dark rye bread.
Some people added chopped raw onions and lemon juice to the orange caviar. I tried both kinds of caviar and liked the salty squirts of liquid they left on the tongue.
We both continued to generously serve ourselves with regular vodka. My college buddy finally asked, “Don’t you think it’s time for our dessert vodkas?” We had a choice of apricot, cherry, and lemon flavored ones to choose from.
We could hardly keep up with the serious drinkers around us, though. I only discovered the historical saying “Drinking is the Joy of Rus” years later when I worked in a gallery selling Russian icons among other art objects.
In the tenth century, the Grand Prince Vladimir unified Russia and wanted to confer a religion on his subjects. He was ready to accept Islam as the state religion until he found out that it forbade alcohol consumption.
I thought it was quite neat that I had been able to attend a glasnost cocktail party without being asked my opinion of glasnost. Towards the end of the evening, though, one of Chicago’s consul generals (the Greeks do moocher patrol in the Windy City) came up to us and asked if we were journalists, which made us laugh.
I told him that we had recently graduated from college, and then asked, “Do you think glasnost is going to have a lasting effect on politics in the Soviet Union?”
He gave what I am sure was an intelligent response, but I was having a hard time paying attention. My college buddy had choked on her vodka, and I was trying not to laugh at her.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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