Eating Russian Food by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating Russian Food by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Before I moved to Monterey County twenty years ago, I read about the history of the area and learned that explorers had come to the area from nations as diverse as France, Spain, England, and Russia to establish whaling trading posts. 

There are still entire Russian settlements in California and Alaska in the United States.  We even have a darling Russian Orthodox Church in Seaside, California.  There is an old whaling station that you can visit outside Carmel, California in Point Lobos State Park, too.

With this historical background in mind, I immediately wanted to try the food at the Pagrovia Café in Pacific Grove, California that advertised Russian and Italian specialties when I was on my way to pick up Florence at her charter Waldorf School in PG.

I called up my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) and said, “There’s a Russian restaurant in PG.  We need to see what they eat.”

I got the assignment and off I went to write the following article:

A là Russe

As soon as I heard that the Pagrovia Café served Russian food, I took out an atlas to locate the Russian region of Pagrovia to see what influences it might have on the meals served in this new restaurant.

Luckily, before I started doing online searches to find this mysterious region, my Pagrovian friend told me that “Pagrovia” is PG-speak for Pacific Grove.

With that issue out of the way, I invited another friend to sample a Russian dinner.  When we walked into the restaurant, we liked seeing a samovar at the door.  Paintings of icons and St. Petersburg canals by the Italian-American chef lined the walls.  White linen tablecloths and fresh flowers awaited us at our table.

I suspect that co-owner Valentina Rapisarda, a native of St. Petersburg, had a hand in the decorating.  I could easily imagine the early 20^th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova alchemizing her unrequited loves into poems in this former diner.

But it is not all about Russia at Pagrovia: the oversize menus offering a choice of Russian and Italian foods reflect both owners’ cooking styles – Russian and Italian.

While my dinner mate and I decided what to order, we dipped fresh, warm slices of Parmesan focaccia in balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  (This is a sneaky vegetarian protein combination from Italy).  Then, we ordered our Russian banquet: piroshky and beef Stroganoff for my dinner mate and borsch and barashka (lamb stew) for me.

I love the crimson color that borsch gets from beets, its main ingredient.  What I especially like about Pagrovia’s version of borsch is its savory flavor as opposed to the sweet and tangy flavor the soup usually gets from sugar and lemon juice in the versions I ate at Zukin’s Deli growing up in Detroit, Michigan.  (Zukin’s was by Friends School – my first high school in Detroit.)

My dinner mate laughed about all the vegetable additions to the borsch I ordered: carrots, cabbage, potatoes, celery, and mushrooms.  Moscovites traditionally make their borsch from beets and serve it cold as a clear broth; my dining mate told me that we were eating the Ukrainian version.

I liked the taste of the dill that decorated the top of the soup.  If I were cooking, I would chop it up and sprinkle it on top to combine the flavors.

The traditional accompaniment for borsch is beef.  The soup is based on a stock made from beef and ham bone.  I chose seafood as my accompaniment, because I can never pass up shrimp after suffering a seafood-deprived youth in the Midwest.  However, I can tell you that the borsch was so good that it made the seafood superfluous.

The piroshky my dining mate ordered was a surprise to me.  Where I grew up in Detroit (Michigan), we used to call Polish piroshki “Russian ravioli” to which our Polish friends would yell, “Polish ravioli.”  (2018 Note:  Did you catch the difference between the endings on Polish and Russian word?)

Piroshky are half-moon shaped pasta pockets filled with either cabbage or beef and onion fillings.  I was expecting my dining companion to get a pile of these with melted butter and parsley on top.

What my dining companion got was a piroshky with a college education.  Mounded up like a sculpture with a potato pancake as a base was a cannoli-like crêpe filled with chopped porcini mushrooms imported from Italy, sweet purple onions, and chopped, hard eggs held together with a cream sauce.

My dining companion said he had never eaten such delicious mushrooms in his life and told me not to worry about food pedigrees when things tasted this good.

Trying Russian Food in Pacific Grove (California)


When my dining companions’ order of Beef Stroganoff arrived, it looked worthy of the man it was named after.  Darra Goldstein relates in her cookbook A la Russe that while 19^th century Russian revered all things French, they secretly harbored a love for their own cuisine.

Count Pavel Stroganoff, whose family had made a fortune developing land in Siberia, had an inventive French chef who appealed to his benefactor’s dual tastes by adding sour cream to a basic French mustard sauce.

Stroganoff’s chef added this sauce to tender, sautéed tenderloin strips.

Pagrovia has improved on the basic recipe by adding chopped porcini mushrooms and serving it with perfectly al dente egg noodles.

I liked the Beef Stroganoff my dining companion ordered better than the barashka I ordered.  This dish comes with tender chunks of tender lamb, large slices of carrot, and celery in tomato sauce – all served over mashed potatoes.

I think adding a little salt to the sauce would have enhanced the flavor.  A few renegade lumps in the mashed potatoes let me know that the chef mashed the potatoes by hand, but I wish he had used a little more butter and milk in their preparation.

While I was talking with the chef about how he used to feed 6,000 people a day as a chef on a US Navy ship, my dining mate devoured the tiramisu he ordered for dessert.  He left a little bite for me on a saucer, because that is what I had requested him to do.  (2018 Note – I’m sure he was thinking, “If you ask for two tic tacs that is what you get for dessert.)

I have two book recommendations to make about Russian food:

-The Food and Cooking of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain

-Classic Russian Cooking: A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Sampling the Foods of Alsace-Lorraine (France) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling the Foods of the Alsace-Lorraine (France) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of my favorite places to go out for a light lunch was Patisserie Bechler in Pacific Grove, California.

I called my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200, 000) and told her how cute the decorations were at Bechler in addition to having nice food.

She gave me the go-ahead to write the article that follows:

Pastry Heaven

The stork on the roof of Patisserie Bechler signals your arrival at Pacific Grove’s own bit of Alsace off Highway 68.  The stork is a symbol of Alsace, France’s eastern region bordering Germany and the native region of pastry chef G. Bechler.

When you enter Bechler’s a wall mural depicting an Alsatian village with its steep, roofed homes held together with wooden beams greets you.  I am tempted to walk down the mural’s winding streets in search of shops selling the famous wines of the region like Riesling and Gewurztraminer and the region’s fragrant yet zesty cheese, Muenster.  Luckily, to find beautiful pastries all I have to do is look around Bechler’s.

Sometimes I have chosen to eat pastries with coffee in this room and just look at the adorable mural, because its lace curtains separating it from the main dining room remind me of being invited to a French friend’s house for a lunch.

While there, I like to leaf through wedding magazines and Bechler’s notebooks of cake creations he has made for film stars and opera stars.  I am reminded that the great chef Careme once likened pastry to the art of sculpture.

I usually eat in the restaurant’s main dining room when I go to Alliance Française lunches.

Alsatian charm permeates the room.  Most notably, Bechler has installed a two-tiered fountain with lion faces in the center of the room like the ones you find in Alsatian villages.

Arms from the town of Colmar close to Bechler’s village of Bergheim decorate the walls along with a picture of beehive signs like the ones that hang from buildings in Alsace.  Later, Bechler told me that the same beehives decorate shops in Germany.

“Alsace has been fought over many times,” Bechler told me.

“Now all we want to do is drink together,” he said.  I just smiled at him.

The menu reflects light French fare rather than hearty Alsatian dishes like choucroute (sauerkraut with assorted pork sausages).  Quiche, soups, and salad are the restaurant’s mainstays with daily specials adding variety.

Quiche is the specialty of Alsace’s neighboring region, the Lorraine, which also has a history of contact with Germany.

The name “quiche” actually is derived from the German word “kuchen,” meaning “cake” according to Jean Ferniot’s La France des Terroirs Gourmands.  It is worth noting that the “ch” in French is pronounced “sh,” making the French pronunciation of Bechler “Beshler” not “Bekler.”

The day we went, we ordered the salmon and spinach quiche and the spinach quiche.  Bechler’s creamy custard-like fillings always make the savory ingredients taste even better.

What I liked most about the salmon and spinach filling was that the chef had used enough salt in the preparation, so that the end result was not bland, but actually brought out the flavor of the salmon.

The same was true of Laurent’s spinach quiche.  The real test of a successful quiche lies in its crust.  Bechler’s crust is tender and perfectly absorbs the flavors of the ingredients.

My favorite dish at Bechler’s is the onion soup.  Julia Child once said, “It’s hard to imagine civilization without onions.”  Surely, she must have been thinking of onion soups like Bechler’s.  

This famous bistro dish gets its start by sautéeing onions in butter.  You add beef bouillon to these onions when they have become golden.  After this, you add toasted bread and place cheese on the bread.  Then, you grill everything for several minutes.

On other occasions, I have tried the restaurant’s pork pie.  This pork pie turned out to be a very sophisticated potpie.

The flaky crust melted in my mouth while the ground pork and onion interior made me eat more slowly, so it would last longer.

These foods are all good, but the real reason for going to Bechler’s is to sample the desserts.  One of my daughter’s favorites is the meringue cookies.  These cookies really do not have a lot of calories.  Laurent likes to indulge in chocolate eclairs.  Bechler’s version features a pastry cream rather than a chocolate filling.

I like the passion fruit mousse made of a thin, moist, layer-cake, which serves as the base for the mousse on top of which is a clear icing.   Bechler sets a raspberry in the center of this on white frosting.

Bechler looks as professional as his desserts when he comes out of the kitchen in his double-breasted, white chef’s uniform.

Bechler perfected his pastry making at the three-star Michelin restaurant, L’Auberge de L’Il before coming to the U.S. in 1984.

End of Article

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Traveling in Minnesota (USA) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Traveling in Minnesota (USA) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I have been on several trips to Minnesota throughout my life, beginning as a small girl and ending as a Youth Services Librarian in middle age.

On a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana with my father, we stopped in Brainerd, Minnesota, so I could go to Paul Bunyan Land.

There is a huge statue of Paul Bunyan that moves and talks to kids as they enter the park.

The “tall tale,” or American myth about Paul Bunyan and his ox named Babe was the he was the lumberjack, who cleared the forests from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest.

There were many small rides in Paul Bunyan Land that I liked, but one experience that marred my entire appreciation of the Park was a cruel, nickel game. 

For a nickel, you could prod a hen to play a piano with its beak.  When the piano recital was done, the hen would get a handful of corn feed for its efforts.  I knew that the hen was only fed when it played the piano.  (In 2018, I am sure this game is no longer there.)

I went back to Minneapolis-St. Paul for work when I helped put on the first Super Bowl in the Peoples’ Republic of China and did the public relations work for it.

I had a video of the game to show with Chinese announcers making commentary.  I had media kits available for conference attendees with all our PR clips for those people who wanted one.  Many international newspapers were unknown at the time.  We had access to them, because we had international newsstands in downtown Chicago.

I had a book by a University of Chicago professor that I let attendees look at about the different newspapers in the Peoples’ Republic of China.  Attendees wrote down the name of the book to buy in this new advertising market.  We had fun watching the video.  Minnesota is a football state, too.  The Vikings fans at that workshop wanted to get a winning football team to send to the Peoples’ Republic of China, too.

I gave them the names of my contacts at the Illinois Department of Commerce and the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service for information on how to set up trade delegations.  I told them my firm provided services like translation, interpretation, and production of marketing materials for businesses going overseas and showed them samples of our work.  (This is spiel.)

“The Chinese do not bow like the Japanese,” I said.  “They just shake hands, but you should present business cards with both hands to the Chinese with the Chinese-language side of the card facing up, so they can read it,” I said as I showed them how to do this.  (This is schtick.)

You can do little presentations like this to demonstrate what service firms do at a trade show.  This is what is called a nice take-away.

I told people I had studied Japanese, but had traveled to both countries.  I asked them, if they would like me to write their names in Japanese on the back of their business cards.  I knew the katakana alphabet for writing foreign names in Japanese quite well.  I wrote out names and the phonetic pronunciation of the character of the alphabet letter below. 

“Japanese is pronounced almost exactly like Spanish, so this is what your name sounds like,” I said as we went through the cards.

“The cards are presented in the same way as you do for the Chinese, but with bows.  You usually do three bows.  If you are the firm with lower profits, you bow first or if you are seeking sales from another firm, you bow first,” I said as I showed them how to do this.  (More schtick.)

Everyone at my stand would be practicing bowing and encourage other people to come over at look at what we were doing.

Finally, I would say, “I’d be happy to send you a free bid on translating your business card or any other materials you have in mind for marketing purposes.  We can do production work for any language in the world.”

I got requests for business card bids in several languages.  I had an envelope ready to keep all my business card requests in for quick response and a larger notepad of paper ready to ask people what other projects I might be able to provide a free bid on. 

I found out about all sorts of larger projects associated with the business card requests and asked if I could send in a free bid on those projects, too.  I did state on those written bids that the fees asked for were good for six months to one year.  After those dates had expired, I noted that we would be happy to submit a new bid.

One thing I learned in this sales job is that getting budgets for a project approved is hard and so is collecting the money that is due to you for completing a project.  If I volunteered to do a bid, I could find out a lot about getting paid (i.e. purchase orders, billing cycles – 30 to 90 days and so on). 

The added benefit of doing a free bid is that I learned to thoroughly understand the production process.  I went over similar work we had done with our production manager and went from there.  I would take my final bid estimate in to the production manager to look over before submitting it.

This trade conference was held at the University of Minnesota, which has nice gardens to walk through and is very clean or was at the time.  Minnesota is a state that has a large Scandinavian population.  (Scandinavians are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.  Finland is not related to these cultures linguistically or culturally.  It has a most-favored nation status with Russia for giving asylum to Vladimir Lenin.)

On the way to and from the University of Minnesota, you cross the origin of the mighty Mississippi River.  I wanted to go on trips south and west of that river someday in the United States.

The third time I went to Minnesota was with my husband Laurent.  He had a district meeting with his job at the American Chamber of Commerce outside Minneapolis, Minnesota at the Izaty’s Resort.  My mother agreed to take of Florence for the weekend, so we could have a small vacation.

On Saturday, while Laurent went to his meeting, I drove around Lake Mille Lacs to Isles.  That name cracked me up in translation from the Frenglish name – Lake Thousand Lakes.  Obviously, the name referred to all lakes in Minnesota that were created when the last glaciers retreated.

A state park dedicated to Father Hennepin further attested to the French exploration of the area.  Most of the Europeans in this area, though, are from Scandinavia.  The Objibway are the Native American tribe that originally inhabited the area.

When I arrived in Isle, I immediately saw the Norskhaus craft store, but had to start my souvenir shopping at the hardware store, because that was the only place that was open.

I bought two fishing tackle that were made in Isle and some toys for Florence.

The toys I bought at the grocery store for Florence included:

-dominoes

-white chalk

-a pick-up sticks game

-a little handheld pinball game

I just loved getting toys like that when I was a child.  I looked forward to showing Florence how to play these items.

I saw that the Norsk Haus was now open, and I proceeded to walk across the street.  I walked into a party happening at 10 am in the morning.

About fifteen Norwegian matrons were gathered around a “Congratulations” cake.  The owner of the store was signing copies of her first book, which detailed her romance with an American that brought her to Isle.

She invited me to have some cake and tea and asked me where I was from.  I told her about my wanderings that had brought me to Wisconsin.

I told her I would like to write a book.

“Everyone’s life has drama in it,” she said.

Her encouragement persuaded me to buy a Norwegian book for Florence called The Tomten and the Fox.  The tomten looked like a Norwegian leprechaun, but instead of tricking people a Tomten helped them.  In this story, the tomten protected the chickens from a wily fox for a family, who did not know how hard he worked.

The visit to the Norsk Haus left me in high spirits.  I thought the next town named Onamia might hold some unsuspected treasure as well as and set off to that town bent on discovering more about Scandinavian life.

I was particularly interested in getting some books about the mythical lumberjack Paul Bunyan for Florence.  (I could not find anything, but luckily I could find copies of Paul Bunyan stories in the library in Wisconsin where we lived.)

Unfortunately, Onamia just had a grocery store.  I did check it for Paul Bunyan books, but they did not have any.  If I had been truly adventurous, I would have driven to Brainerd to see the Paul Bunyan amusement park again.

I drove back just about the time Laurent got out of his meeting.  We walked around the golf course and admired leaves on the trees and kicked red and golden leaves with our feet.  It was October, the air was crisp, and winter was on its way. 

Dinner that night was really great, because I did not have to cook it.  I do really like chicken and rice, but almost all hotels serve it in the upper Midwest as the “meat” option that does not offend diners.

We said grace before eating and had a motivational speaker talk during the meal.  He also gave a lot of organizational tips on how to run solo sales operations. 

I forgot the speaker’s name, but I have used a lot of his organizational tips like keeping a clean and organized work area, having lots of pens and paper, and keeping stationery on hand to write thank-you notes that you can put a business card in for follow-up.  No one writes thank-you notes anymore, so people who do this really stand out.

I have also gone to Minneapolis to obtain information about how to run Big Reads for the National Endowment for the Arts on Grapes of Wrath and Fahrenheit 451 when I was the Youth Services Librarian for Monterey County (California). 

We had an advantage in teaching the students of Monterey County about what was in these books by having actors from the Western Stage come in and do monologues about important points from the book after which I would go through discussion questions.

All in all, I have very good memories of my trips to Minnesota.  I would still recommend going there on vacation even though I have not been there in a awhile.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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