Recipes for Russia: Food and Nationhood under the Tsars 9781501757457

Citation preview

FOOD AND

NATIONHOOD

UNDER THE TSARS

iffi NORTHERN

ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

P R ES S

DeKalb

© 2008, 2011 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

1st printing in paperback, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-87580-668-6 (paperback: alk. paper) All Rights Reserved Text and cover designs by Julia Fauci Cover illustration by Julia Fauci and Shaun Allshouse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Alison K. Recipes for Russia : food and nationhood under the tsars I Alison K. Smith. p.

em.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87580-381-4 (clothbound : alk. paper) 1. Diet-Russia. 2. Food supply-Government policy-Russia-History.

3. Food habits-Russia-History. I. Title. TX360.R9S65 2008 394.1'20947-dc22 2007034865

CrJitfcntJ Illustrations Preface ix Introduction

vii

3

PART I-AUTHORITY AND MATERIAL CONCERNS

1-Ensuring Sustenance-The State and the Starving Peasant 2-Making Cabbage Healthy-Dietetics and Public Health as a National Concern 44 3-Describing the Russian Diet-Ethnography, History, and Cultural Definition 72 PART II-PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

4-Searching for an Authority-Encyclopedists and the Art of Translation 101 S-Who Is Responsible?-Master Chefs, Gentlemen Farmers, and Progressive Patriotism 122 6-Audiences and Authorities-Russian Housewives and European Gastronomes 147 Conclusion

177

Glossary 181 Notes 189 Selected Bibliography Index 255

237

13

Frozen Provision Market

17

"The Eat-All and Drink-All"

68

"Everything is healthy to a Russian" Peasants, reading

71

135

Sweet and savory dishes, Radetskii Savory dishes, Radetskii

168

Decorated pastries, Avdeeva

175

168

Every time I go to Russia, food plays a prominent role in my life. On my first trip, in the difficult fall of 1992, food could be hard to find even for someone like me, armed with dollars. In the southern town in which I lived, the markets were at first filled with the new harvest, but soon the stock of food disappeared, except for root vegetables and cabbage. Stores were empty, too, for the most part, and tram drivers would stop their trams in the middle of the street to run into a store that had bread. The basic act of finding food occupied more of my time than I'd ever imagined possible. By the late 1990s, the horrible sense of dearth had passed, but thinking about food and Russia's history now occupied even more of my time as I sat in libraries reading old cookbooks and in archives trying to trace out the ways that food intersected with the lives of past Russians. In those years I enjoyed eating-homemade soups from a talented landlady; pastries from a humble bakery still prominent on St. Petersburg's main street; pel'meni or "peasant-style pork" (with cheese and pickle) at neighborhood restaurants. Now, as I sit in the oil-rich Moscow of spring 2007, although my research has moved on to new topics, I still find myself thinking about food. Unlike the comparatively rich American of 1992, I shake my head at the prices of items in the omnipresent coffee houses, sushi bars, and glistening restaurants, and I relish instead the pastries and soups sold in the basements of Moscow's libraries. The real joy of working on a project involving food has been the response of many Russians to my topic. I've heard countless stories about food today and food in the past, and I have told my own stories about food from my home. Russians have made bliny for me for Maslenitsa, and I have made pumpkin pie or sage and bread stuffing for Thanksgiving meals that brought together Americans and Russians. I've been served unbelievably tasty borshch by a landlady in Kazan' and pig fat and cream puffs by an aerobics instructor in St. Petersburg. So, my first thanks should go to all those people who helped me immerse myself in the world of Russian food-from the unappetizing to the utterly delicious.

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I cannot possibly thank every person whose comments and support have helped this project develop, but I hope that this list, however imperfect, comes close to the mark. I must first thank those who supported my work at University of Chicago: Richard Hellie, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and John Bushnell, visiting from Northwestern University. Participation in the Russian History and other workshops there gave early drafts yet more readers, and critical feedback of a very high quality, for which I thank Ron Suny, Matt Lenoe, Josh Sanborn, Julie Gilmour, Charles Hachten, Steve Harris, Mie Nakachi, Mark Edele, and especially Jon Bone. Particular thanks go to Steve Bittner for suggesting a food topic over beer and fries at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, to Michael David for advice both historical and medical as I first tackled the topic, and to Kiril Tom off and the late Jenifer Stenfors for their collegiality and friendship in Chicago, in Russia, and beyond. Thanks to financial support from Fulbright-Hays, University of Chicago, the Mellon Foundation, and Colorado State University's College of Liberal Arts, I was able to conduct research on this topic and even found time to do some writing. Thanks, too, to the countless and helpful staffs at the National Public Library, Russian State Historical Archive, and Archive of the Russian Geographic Society, St. Petersburg; the Russian National Library, Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, and Russian National Historical Library, Moscow; the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan'; and the National Library, Helsinki. Over the years, many others have read bits and pieces of this eventual larger work, or have given other advice and support. Thanks go to Christine Worobec, Michelle Marrese, Christine Ruane, Catherine Hall, Rebecca Friedman, Paul Werth, Ulrike Shmiegelt-Rietig, Diane Koenker, Mark Steinberg, and the participants in the Russkii kruzhok at the University of Illinois in 1999-2000. Thanks, too, go to my colleagues in the department of history at Colorado State University, where the dissertation was transformed into this book, especially Judy Gaughan, Elizabeth Jones, Ann Little, Thaddeus Sunseri, Mark Fiege, Doug Yarrington, and Prachi Deshpande. And Mary Lincoln and the anonymous reviewers she found for Northern Illinois University Press have much to do with how this book finally turned out. Finally, heartfelt thanks to family and friends (though many of the latter have been named above), for their copious emotional and logistical support, and for willingness to be forced to make pel'meni when they thought they'd just been invited over for dinner: Rosemary and David Smith, Amy and Matt McGowan, Linda and John Lundberg and their larger family, Roberta Harris and Rowen Bell, Kate Redmond, Mary and Colin Ong-Dean, Lisa Geering-Tomoff, Ken and Sara Bigger.

INTRODUCTION

n 1847, a group of St. Petersburg's grain merchants, motivated by both altruism and self-interest, sent a large quantity of rye and rye flour to England and Ireland. They genuinely wanted to help ease the suffering then beginning to develop as a result of the potato blight, but they also knew that rye was not popular abroad and hoped that their donation might waken a taste for rye that would eventually create an international demand for one of Russia's greatest products. The Russian newspaper Posrednik reported on the mission, and on a problem it soon faced: "it turned out ... that abroad they do not bake and do not know how to bake sour rye bread, like ours. There, they make an unsoured starter of rye flour ... from which the dough does not sour, does not rise, and produces a bread that is damp, bad-tasting, and difficult to digest. On the other hand, as is known to everyone here, by the Russian method of baking, sour dough of rye flour bakes up well, and produces fluffy, soft, tasty and healthy bread."l When they realized their plan was in danger of failing due to the vagaries of consumption, the merchants decided to take action. And so, they sent after the flour ten Russian bakers to teach the British how to bake.

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As they traveled toward England, these Russian bakers got their first taste of how they and their products were viewed in the West. Passing through Lubeck, the Russian bakers offered their services to the locals. According to one account, however, "the guild of Lubeck bakers did not allow it, having declared that Lubeck masters themselves know how to bake rye bread no worse than Russians."Z A stronger reaction awaited them in England itself, where several Englishmen debated the merits of the plan, and of Russian rye bread itself, in the pages of the London Times even before the bakers arrived. Initially, "A Traveller" gave the plan a positive reference, based in large part on his belief that "rye-bread prepared in the Russian way is very savoury, nutritious, and wholesome, and constitutes, as you are well aware, a favourite article of food, not only of the lowest, but of the middle, classes in Russia as well as in Germany."3 This positive view of Russian rye bread, and also of Russian motives in sending the grain, was far from universal, as additional correspondence soon made clear. Mere days after the first letter appeared in the Times, another letter writer, "The Author of Revelations of Russia," took a strongly negative view of the plan in general, and of Russian rye bread in particular. In his travel account this author, Charles Henningsen, had taken the darkest of looks at Russia, believing firmly that any signs of improvement or glimmers of hope were nothing to the "sixty millions of Russian subjects, voiceless and hopeless in their misery, without the power of appeal to any human protective sympathy, or, as they are taught, even to any in Heaven, which, in their eyes, is the accomplice of the power for whose sole advantage they are born, and toil through life, and die."4 Whatever his implied sympathy for Russia's masses in his Revelations, Henningsen condemned far more than Russia's repressive political system in his letter to the Times. He first dismissed the Russian effort as mere "humbug," in part due to delusions of grandeur on the part of Russia's merchants, but particularly because of the quality of Russian rye bread itself. As he noted, "In Russia, where rye bread constitutes the staple article of food, it is prepared in a peculiar manner, so universally in use that it may be termed national. According to this national Russian fashion, it happens to be, less than by any other mode of preparation, nutritive, economical, or palatable." So unpalatable was Russian sour rye bread, he noted, that many Russians themselves avoided it, preferring "the common brown loaf made by our fancy bakers, and usually in those cities compounded by foreigners." Even worse, according to Henningsen, was the fact that among those who did partake, the bread "imparts to the individual using it a smell as offensive and peculiar as that which results from the saturation of the body with brimstone." He concluded that even if the bread were nutritious or economical, "it would be useless in this country, because it is well known in St. Petersburg that not one Englishman in ten can ever, even in the course of years and with the best will in the world, become accustomed to the effect either on the palate or the bowels of the soft, sour, billet, national bread."S

INTRODUCTION

5

Henningsen's compatriots who had also visited Nicholas's empire did not all share such virulent anti-Russian sentiment. "An Englishman who has been in St. Petersburgh" soon wrote in to contradict nearly all of Henningsen's claims, at least as they pertained to Russian rye bread itself. According to this author, Russian rye bread was not simply cost effective, but nutritious, even unusually so. He followed a generally accepted line on Russian rye, that "it stands [the Russian] in stead of meat, and strengthens him to perform exertions which [an Englishman] can only go through on a generous and costly diet." He also dismissed other assertions by the earlier author as hyperbole or error. He agreed that "the Russians of the lower classes actually stink," but noted that the cause was "the strong cabbage soup and garlick that they feed upon, and from their filthy clothes which do not pass through the bath with them," not the innocent rye bread.6 Positive this review might be, but hardly unalloyed praise for Russia or its citizens. The Russian newspaper coverage of the incident suggested that Russians knew full well that their biggest industry-agriculture-and their cuisine were either ignored or considered somehow substandard elsewhere in Europe. Back in Russia, Posrednik reported on this correspondence (some provincial newspapers also picked up the story) and later followed up with much shorter reports on the further movements of the bakers: three went on to Belfast, and all returned to St. Petersburg in early September/ The details of their trip and any major successes or failures simply failed to appear in the newspaper coverage of the event. But even in the coverage of the earlier stages of the journey, no reader of the periodicals could have concluded that foreigners and Russians had the same view of Russia's strengths. On a most basic level, rye was not favored in western Europe; indeed, before and after the arrival of the Russian bakers, a number of letters to the Times lamented the reported unwillingness of the poor to consume the grain even in the face of starvation. 8 The fact that Russia still based its economy on rye could be read as a sign of its backwardness in agricultural matters. Although it was true that western Europeans had gone through fads for things Russian, and Russian table service and the luxury it implied eventually gained favor on western tables, for the most part Russians worried that foreigners viewed their native foods at worst as simple and crude-nothing more than "horse-flesh, black bread, and train-oil," as one visiting Englishman put it-and at best as bizarrely unfamiliar and thus off-putting.9 Neither image was deemed fitting for the modern Russian state, and instead Russia's lack of international culinary or agricultural standing could be read as deeply problematic. A decade earlier, an anonymous author had somewhat jokingly brought up this very relationship between national cuisines, native traditions, and international prestige in an article entitled "On the current situation of culinary industry and gastronomy in Europe." He claimed that French cuisine, currently fashionable around the continent, was national, but not of

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the people. It was "French" only in the sense that it stood for the French nation in the eyes of the world, not because of any tie to the masses of the French people. The common people of France ate foods "just as bad as all national cuisines, which for the most part consist of foods passed down by habit from centuries of darkness and indigestibility."lD Yet France had produced not simply a coherent culinary image of itself, but an image strong enough to proclaim French cultural authority throughout the world. Russia, however, had still to define its international position gastronomically. And according to the anonymous author, in order to claim its deserved position in the world, Russia had to correct its situation. As the author wrote, "in many ways the future successes of our fatherland depend on the reform of our cooking. What do you want, that literature, industry, art, taste, wit may soar to the point of high development accompanied by the heavy scent of fish pie, pancakes, cabbage soup and cold sour soup ... ? People, cook quickly! Sic itur ad astra! [Thus do we reach the stars!]"ll This author certainly had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, but his humor does not diminish the central implication of his article.1 2 In the early nineteenth century, Russia lacked the international standing it thought it deserved. At times its soldiers might be lauded, but as often Russia was deemed a backward place of tyranny, where the population was enslaved and culture stunted or warped.13 Though discussions of Russia's cuisine as backward, crude, and indigestible could be taken humorously, in the first half of the nineteenth century the backwardness of Russia's agricultural system seemed an actual threat both internally, as bad harvests led parts of the country to the point of famine, and externally, as such backwardness damaged Russia's place in the international economy. Furthermore, cuisine and agriculture were essentially linked; Russia was a country still tied to agriculture in ways no longer found in parts of western Europe. The cultural divisions-between peasant and lord, between intelligentsia and the state, between Russia and the West-that so concerned some members of Russian society were reflected in attitudes both toward agriculture and toward cuisine. The process of defining Russia culinarily required some attempt at bridging these divisions, some attempt at refining and reforming Russian agriculture, and only then labeling its culinary production for foreign consumption. In the century before Emancipation, Russians of different social, political, and economic groups increasingly asserted their own particular authority over the production and consumption of food in their country. Although most did not explicitly challenge the overarching structures of autocracy and serfdom, there were those who at times implicitly did so. As the Russian state sought increasing control over the lives of its people, it usurped some of the authority of individual landowners in the name of ensuring the sustenance of the peasant population. Russian medical practitioners sought to designate themselves the most reliable authorities on

INTRODUCTION

7

Russian diet and health in the face of contrasting opinions from within and outside the country. Russian historians and ethnographers claimed authority over the story of their own nation's everyday life, sometimes in opposition to foreign descriptions possibly tainted by overtly political aims. Russian agricultural reformers, mostly from the elite stratum of society, sought-but largely failed-to create a unified body of agricultural knowledge as a guide to improvement, and to find individual authorities on a local, specific scale, to bring such improvement to life. And a series of culinary authors sought to reorganize the .Russian kitchen, culminating in the overwhelming success of the "middle-class housewife" as the authority over Russian stomachs. These various figures were often at odds, competing for authority in the same arena, but they were also united in important ways, the first of which was vying for available power within the context of authoritarian, autocratic Russia. As such, their debates highlight the problem of authority and power in the pre-reform period. In principle, there should have been no problem: Russia was an autocracy, and serfdom created a series of small, self-contained autocracies within the larger state structure. The reality was far more complex. Certainly the despotism decried by Henningsen and others was all too real for many members of Russia's intelligentsia. But Russia's autocrats, at least after Peter the Great, rarely acted in a truly autocratic manner, in the sense of acting against some general opinion; when they did, they were likely to end up like Emperor Paul, smothered in a fortress-prison of his own making. Due to the vastness of the state of Russia, and its general underfunding and under-administration (if over-bureaucratization), the autocracy often worked sluggishly when it came to everyday matters; as a result, authority over everyday life was contested in a way that authority in other realms was not. This did not mean that the state failed to participate in the struggles for authority over everyday life, at least when it came to the increasingly important role of food production and consumption. The state did assert its authority, particularly in the several decades preceding Emancipation, but because of the many little autocracies that controlled its peasants and gave its nobles some real power in this arena, the state could not always act as autocratically as it wished. Instead, the state was only one participant, and it engaged in dialogue with those very nobles, with the citizenry in the vaguely defined middle, and at least in principle, with the masses of serfs who, as soldiers, gave the state its authority internationally. The various aspirants to authority over food production and consumption often recognized a second point that united them: their efforts implied not simply control over these basic processes, and not even simply control over economic life, but control over larger social and even political issues, as well. Many recent historians of consumption and production have made such links clear in other contexts. In many cases, the linkage is

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direct: the mutual reinforcement of a taste for sugar among the British, their reliance on slave labor to produce it, and their nation's increased international authority to protect its productionJ4 In others, the link is more subtle, as regime changes in western Europe brought with them new ideals of taste.ls But in all of these links, consumption and production influence far more than markets alone, instead shaping and being shaped by the larger social, cultural, and political trends of the time. In particular, historians of western Europe often tie shifts in consumption to the growing economic and political power of the middle classes. In the influential Birth of a Consumer Society, John Brewer linked the eighteenthcentury rise in consumption and commercialization with the rise of the political importance of the "middling sort or bourgeoisie."16 More recently, Woodruff D. Smith has tied consumption, and particularly the consumption of colonial goods, to the development of middle-class respectabilityY Owning possessions from the colonial world showed the power of the middle classes economically and, by extension, politically and socially. This linking of consumption with empire as well as class has particular resonance for the investigation of nineteenth-century Russian production and consumption patterns. Russia's social and national structures were complicated by its position as an empire that simultaneously felt itself colonized by the West. In many ways, Russian social structures had little in common with those of the West, and Russia's middle classes played a different role than did western bourgeoisies. Particularly early in the nineteenth century, these middle classes lacked the political and civic structures to create the sorts of changes associated with western bourgeois revolutions. However, although it might lack a corresponding middle class based on economic and social definitions, Russia did partake in the western bourgeois culture that was not simply important for middle-class life, but was the very essence of it.ls As a result, Russians seeking to assert their own authority over production and consumption found themselves negotiating what might be class or political schisms in the West along essentially nationalist lines-a third unifying theme. As they promoted their own particular authority, Russians challenged not only each other, but also two alternative sources of authority: "Tradition," asS. A. Kozlov has called it, and the West.19 "Tradition" stood for all"age-old" ways of doing things, whether in the fields or in the kitchen; it meant the church and its control over everyday life, it meant unthinking allegiance to the autocracy, to serfdom, to Russia. The West directly challenged this "tradition," as it supplied new philosophies that challenged the autocracy, as well as new technology, new science, and new culture, all of which questioned the church and ancient habit. For the Russians, whether state servitors or private individuals competing for authority over agriculture and cuisine, the opposing ideals became weapons wielded on behalf of their own interests, and success depended

INTRODUCTION

9

on the ability to create arguments that balanced tradition and the West, that combined them in a way that resonated with their fellows. These Russians were neither explicit Westernizers, nor Slavophiles, nor even proponents of Official Nationality, per se, although some of their arguments echo the more political writers.zo They were for the most part far cannier, and able to weigh competing arguments to their own advantage. In their role as innovators, these often anonymous and faceless writers represent a layer of the Russian educated public in many ways separate from the developing intelligentsia. Unlike those who turned away from a belief in reason toward a more idealistic philosophy, these were men, and sometimes women, as well educated as any of the intelligenty.z 1 But their concerns were different, more practical and pragmatic, and as a result they held on to a belief in reason and rationality throughout the period, even as experience often tested their resolve. This particular layer of the educated public addressed elite Russians far more broadly, hoping to attract other believers in progress and change. "Elite Russians" is admittedly an inexact phrase. In the context of this book, it refers to those literate Russians who contributed to and read Russia's growing print media: not simply the richest of nobles, but the broader group of middling nobles, bureaucrats, even some unusually modern merchants. At times, though, and particularly in the last decades before Emancipation, these authors distinguished themselves within the larger group, as some sought out a middling group, or estate, or circle, to use the phrases of the time. In principle, this middling group-sometimes even referred to as a middle class-eliminated the very richest of Russia's belle monde; in practice, the most elite Russians were still often targeted by these practical authors even as they sought to express not only a practical, reasonable approach to everyday life, but a life with links to western bourgeois culture. Three different spheres in which Russians debated basic questions of consumption and production are examined in Part I of this book. First, the state, in particular, came to fear famine, and thus to consider the very real question of sustenance; in so doing, it recognized the linkage of production and consumption for Russia's masses, and took control of providing basic sustenance under its purview. Second, the state and Russia's medical professionals debated the relationship of food and health, examining hygiene, basic sufficiency, and nutrition or dietetics. And third, ethnographers and historians tried to define "Russian food" through observation of past and present practice, often in dialogue with western observers. These three spheres all involved questions of power and control, and of the relationship of Russia with the West. The task of defining modern Russia through its food was set by the anonymous author cited above, and was only partially accomplished. Attempts to do just that are covered in Part II of this book, which traces developments in the related literatures on agricultural reform and cooking

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from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the onset of the Great Reforms. Initially, these literatures were not simply related, but often one and the same: larger household or estate management guides included advice on production and consumption. In the early nineteenth century, the two split. Agricultural writers turned to an explicit dialogue of patriotism in their effort to increase their authority even as the very question of authority became a central focus of their reforms. Culinary publishers tried several models of authority before finding one that worked: the experienced middle-class housewife. While the state had some success in asserting its authority over Russia's structures of food consumption, and especially, production, its nobles had much less. Instead, the most successful authority turned out to be the created figure of the "middle-class housewife," in the context of nineteenth-century Europe about as modern and cosmopolitan a figure as possible. Because this middle-class housewife most successfully united the competing larger authorities of tradition and the West, her innate foreignness did not stop her triumph, for triumph she did.

CHAPTER

ONE

ENSURING SUSTENANCE The State and the Starving Peasant

uring the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a figure once considered consigned to Russia's past, or at most a rare aberration, began to appear in secret government documents, in Russian newspapers, and in foreign accounts of the country. A graphic description of the figure appeared in the account of George Augustus Sala, an Englishman traveling through Russia: In a crown village, in a time of scarcity, the sufferings of the free peasants are almost incredibly horrible. Then the wretched villagers, after having eaten their dogs, their cats, and the leather of their boots; after being seen scraping together handfuls of vermin to devour; after going out into the woods, and gnawing the bark off the trees; after swallowing clay and weeds to deceive their stomachs; after lying in wait, with agonized wistfulness, for one solitary traveller to whom they can lift their hands to beg alms; after having undergone all this, they go out from their famine stricken houses into the open fields and waste places, and those that are sickening build a kind of tilt awning-hut with bent twigs covered with rags, over those that are sick, and they rot first and die afterwards.!

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Although he had not witnessed such horrors personally, Sala cited as informants shockingly indifferent members of Russia's nobility, who described these visions "over tumblers of tea, and paper cigarettes, and usually accompanied by a remark of c'est comme (:a."Z This was a disturbing report, not simply to possible foreign readers, but to the Russian state itself. The starving peasant posed a threat not only to Russia's foreign image, but also to its sense of internal strength, while the indifferent nobleman threatened the foundations of Russian social order, by abdicating the last remnants of his supposed role of providing security in return for authority in the countryside. As a result, and particularly starting in the 1830s, the Russian state began to exert its own authority in the realms of agriculture and estate management, in an attempt to ensure the sustenance of its population. In the 1830s, repeated crop failures and the resulting dearth of provisions, combined with a changing sense of the role of the Russian peasant in Russian society, precipitated a new fear of the starving peasant. From the time of Catherine the Great, at least, the Enlightenment notion of population growth as a proof of national health and power demanded healthy, well-fed, reproducing peasants.3 Crop failures threatened such a mark of success. This notion was all the more important because in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Imperial Russia had reached the peak of its international authority. Although the debacle of the Crimean War would prove its strength a mirage, Alexander I and Nicholas I parlayed Russia's military victory over Napoleon into a position as the supreme power in the East. And on a practical, material level, the Russian peasant soldier formed the basis of Russia's international strength. Dominic Lieven, for one, has noted that in the long eighteenth century, "the core of Russian military power was made up of peasant conscripts hardened by rural life and agricultural labour," culminating in the Napoleonic victory. 4 For some Russians at the time, like the doctor Akim Charukovskii, the "capability of our soldier, alone in the world, to survive all the discomforts of war, famine and cold, with amazing strength" was a particular sign of Russia's power.s But that ability ought not be tested on a general level, and continued pressures on harvests created continued demands for intervention against famine. As this kind of concern grew during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Imperial Russian state promulgated a series of laws meant to ensure the sustenance of the Russian population. It believed that avoiding famine was centrally important; as a result, the state both borrowed methods from western sources and altered native Russian practice in an effort to make sure that no Russian townsperson or peasant would ever truly want for food. In some areas of the state's concern, a new attention to the problem of famine did not radically change the state's traditional authority over food supplies. The state had long placed restrictions on the food

ENSURING SUSTENANCE

15

trade in towns, many of which aimed to ensure a consistent and adequate supply of food. However, especially starting in the 1830s, its sphere of authority over peasant life expanded dramatically. Over time, the state encouraged, and eventually demanded, that peasants, including privately owned serfs, grow new crops and store quantities of grain to ward off famines. As a result, not only did traditional agricultural and cultural practices have to change, but so too did the relationships between landlords, serfs, and the state. The very lines between seigniorial, crown, and state peasants began to blur as the state began to intervene in the relationship between estate owners and their serfs, presaging the eventual ultimate intervention of the state-emancipation. TOWNS AND THE TAKSA

By the early nineteenth century, Russian towns were amply provisioned by markets, by merchant arcades, by small shops, and by wandering food vendors. In a children's book, V. P. Burnashev described the streets in vivid terms, listing the many foods available for sale: "rich white breads, rolls, pretzels, hot pirogi with various fillings, bliny, meat jelly, kisel', cooked fish, caviar, salted mushrooms, cucumbers, baked eggs, vegetables, ... aromatic sbiten', in huge copper flasks wrapped in white towels, in summer kvas, or berry mead, a rather tasty drink, foaming in big glass glasses ... assorted cookies, walnuts, sweet pods, raisins, fresh berries, apples or cooked pears, cherries, etc."6 For Burnashev and his youthful readers, these wares were mouth-watering examples of the variety and abundance available in Russian towns. The provision stalls in markets seemed classically Russian, places where age-old traditions came face-to-face with the modern city. Faddei Bulgarin imagined an ideal past, where "tables lay [covered with] boiled and roasted meat, liver, boiled eggs[;] ... hot dishes, that is, shchi, soup, roast goose with gravy, were eaten in the kharchevny, where only visiting merchants went-and for the common people there was a special hut, where on long tables were bread, saltand where each could, for a quarter-kopek piece, eat their fill with hearty shchi." Other authors described similar sights, if higher prices, in nineteenth-century Russian towns.7 For foreign visitors to Russia, town markets and merchant arcades were not simply sources of provisions, but symbols of the colorful, exotic land they surveyed. In some ways, the markets were simply markets, and thus familiar. The English traveler A. B. Granville, for example, found the district markets of St. Petersburg comparable to Covent Garden, though with far friendlier traders. s Other aspects of Russian trade, however, seemed stranger. Those who found themselves in St. Petersburg in winter discovered the particularly Russian wonders of the frozen meat markets, where frozen fish and entire animals stood about on display. Another Englishman

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described the fish as "attractively beautiful, with the transparent clearness of wax imitations," but was disturbed by the frozen carcasses of larger beasts "piled up on their hind legs against one another, as if each were making an effort to climb over the back of their neighbor."9 Another wonder was the sheer variety of wares in Russian shops and markets; as Edward Jerrmann put it, "from the potato to the oyster, from cheese to pineapple, you have your choice."lO Foreigners and Russians alike also described wandering street merchants, who carried about wares ranging from sbiten' to pastries and other sweets. Many foreigners found them picturesque parts of Russia's streetscape, though relatively few sampled their wares.1 1 All these authors saw abundance and exoticism; none considered the laws that created the system. Russian laws governing the trade of foodstuffs in towns focused on two essentially conflicting goals: ensuring profits and ensuring sustenance. Many laws sought to make trade profitable by protecting the exclusive rights of merchants and others to trade legally, by confirming monopolies on certain goods, and by regulating the state's cut. Other laws, however, had a different goal: ensuring that town inhabitants were always supplied with affordable food. The latter laws infringed upon traders' rights by limiting the price while increasing the quality and accessibility of certain foods. Although some laws ensuring access to food were of long standing, this second aspect of provisioning laws became more important during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Russian towns began to grow and to change both in population and in character, because fewer inhabitants actively pursued agriculture.12 Changes in the legal structures regulating Russian trade show a new urgency, for although the state always protected its own and sellers' rights, keeping food widely available in towns came to predominate the legal structure by the middle of the nineteenth century. Since at least the Law Code of 1649, Russian laws governing markets and food supplies in towns continually sought to make food more available to more people.13 In the Law Code, even when other trade was restricted (as on the Sabbath), merchants could freely sell food and fodder. 14 Initially, laws sought to keep food markets, and particularly slaughterhouses, located in specific parts of towns, but during the eighteenth century a series of measures gave more of the population easier access to food supplies. Simple food stalls outside the markets were legal as long as they did not interfere with traffic, and women and children younger than twelve could sell "lemons and oranges and other such things, as well as garden vegetables and foods" while walking along the street.ls In the late eighteenth century, new laws not only allowed stand-alone food shops but actively encouraged them in the hopes of making food more available and avoiding the horror of fire destroying a town's entire merchant arcade, and thus all its shops.16 In essence, these various laws sought to en-

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Frozen Provision Market, St. Petersburg, as an exotic, "native" place in the middle of the western city. Source: Robert Sears, An Illustrated Description of the Russian Empire;

embracing its geographical features, political divisions, principle cities and towns, population, classes, government, resources, commerce, antiquities, religion, progress in education, literature, art, and science, manners and customs, historic summary, etc., from the latest and the most authentic sources (New York: Robert Sears, 1855), 461.

sure that more people had access to food on a basic, spatial, level. Towns were growing physically as well as in population-some foreign travelers found Russian towns, and particularly provincial towns, oddly large and empty.J7 By creating new types of shops and legalizing roving merchants, the state ensured that the inhabitants of these sprawling towns had convenient sources of food, close at hand.

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During the same period laws expanded rights to trade in food stuffs socially as well as spatially. Peasants had long been allowed to trade their own wares in certain locations, like bazaars and open-air markets, and laws had consistently protected these rights in the face of challenges from the trading estates. At the end of the eighteenth century, laws created a new class of shops in towns, run by peasants and selling exclusively foodstuffs, and gave peasants the right to run melochnye lavki (general stores), "due to the circumstance that has come to light, that the local merchantry [was] itself not occupied with trade in various absolutely necessary minor products." 18 The melochnye lavki were "absolutely necessary." By the middle of the nineteenth century they had became central to the lives of townspeople; in one account, they were described as an "inalienable property not only of both capitals and provincial, regional and smaller towns, but even of great villages located on the post tracks and big roads of vast Russia," in large part because they supplied the means for everyday life to a very wide range of individual Russians.19 The state was also consistently interested in ensuring that town inhabitants who lacked the means to cook their own food had sufficient sources of prepared foods. Over the decades, it legalized restaurants and coffee houses for the elite, kharchevny for the lower classes, and a series of other establishments to fulfill the needs of the many types of town inhabitants.zo Here, too, the state had to walk a fine line between protecting the rights of merchants and protecting the interests of town inhabitants. In one case, the state debated establishing a new kind of food shop-a "sbiten' shop"-explicitly aimed at the poorest townspeople. These shops would provide shchi and other basic foods in plain surroundings (explicitly so defined) at a very reasonable price. Although officials at the Ministry of Internal Affairs recognized that such shops would "make easier the means of sustenance for poor people," proprietors of kharchevny complained that their trade might suffer if the new establishments were legalized. The officials agreed with the existing proprietors, and ordered the sbiten' shops closed on the grounds that kharchevny and foods available on the street and in markets constituted sufficient supplies for even the poorest of Russia's townspeople.zl Elsewhere, the Russian state was quite willing to exert its authority to take control over the affordability of foodstuffs, most importantly by instituting a system of price controls on the most necessary food items. The Russian solution of price controls, known as the taksa, borrowed from the French system of taxation. Steven Kaplan has described the contested nature of the French system: although even those who lamented its effect on trade often believed price controls to be a necessity, "contrary to general belief, bread prices in Paris were habitually not set by the police. In times of relative subsistence ease, they were largely the unmanaged (but never unmediated) fruit of what we call market forces .... The authorities prescribed ceilings

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reluctantly, under duress." 22 The Russian case was rather different. Pre-Petrine practice followed necessity, as when Boris Godunov sought to control the price of grain in 1601 during the worst years of the Time of Troubles. Even later, individual laws controlled prices in reaction to specific events, as in a law setting prices after the Moscow fire of 1752. 23 But a more regular system also developed and became central to the provisioning of towns. Over the course of the eighteenth century Russian tsars instituted the taksa as a regular system of price controls. In the very last weeks of the reign of Peter the Great, a law set out rules controlling the sale of food products. Part of the law sought to root out fraud; most foods were now to be sold by weight, not by volume, in an effort to stop adulteration of some products. But also, the law set clear price controls on the most basic necessities, bread and meat. It described accepted types of bread and the measure of flour that ought to go into a baked loaf of given weight. It gave local town officials the duty to examine the cost of grain and methods of baking, and from this information to set a reasonable and moderate price for the sale of bread. And it prescribed punishments: bakers who failed to follow these price guidelines were to be beaten. 24 A law of 1733 reiterated elements of the earlier law and set out further regulations for the policing of meat prices. It recognized that prices shifted over the course of a year and proposed that officials revisit prices in winter, spring, summer, and fall. In addition, the law listed the costs to bakers that officials were obliged to take into account, such as rent, taxes, salaries, as well as income from skins, hooves, "and other parts not sold by weight."ZS Emperor Paul turned his idiosyncratic attention to price controls several times during his short reign, in so doing expressing a particular antipathy toward trade and profit. In June 1797, he directed provincial officials to pay more attention to setting prices, out of his "disgust at the burden being suffered by the inhabitants of towns from the immoderacy of prices on all victuals in general, often rising due to the self-interest of manufacturers and the indulgence of the Civil Government."Z6 Mere months later he addressed the situation in the capital: "with deepest surprise and with similar displeasure We are informed, that basic vital supplies carried to Our Capital for its provisioning, from the inner provinces, by water transport, become more expensive hour by hour, not having the least proportionality with other goods sold." In reaction, he ordered the Senate to pay closer attention to the process of setting price controls and to more strictly enforce existing laws. In response, the Senate produced a report noting that, contrary to Paul's perception, food prices were actually lower than in the preceding year. At the same time, they also reaffirmed their belief in price controls, clearly understanding their importance to the emperorP Although Paul's language was particularly fierce, the general desire was indeed to put the interests of the larger population ahead of those of individual merchants and bakers. Paul expressed outrage at the self-interest of

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merchants, and local authorities sometimes echoed such concerns, as when they worried that bakers and others were failing to lower prices when supplies were cheap.zs As a result, the state found price control an important element of public policy, for it believed that prices in towns had far-reaching implications not simply for the health and well-being of town inhabitants, but also for social stability. A correspondence marked "secret" in the files of the Economic Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs discussed the link between high prices and a decline in the number of workers in Moscow. According to one account, in 1840 food supplies in Moscow dropped so low that scurvy was appearing among factory workers. Furthermore, a number of manufacturers were laying off workers in response to increased costs, creating a threat to public order.z9 In light of examples like this, the state's concern with prices seemed well-founded. At times, of course, local officials also tried to meet the needs of bakers, who were themselves pressed by increased prices. Even when the state benefited bakers or merchants, it sought to preserve the appearance of caring for the needs of the population at large. In the early 1840s, the bakers of St. Petersburg requested a change in the taksa on their wares in light of recently increased prices. In particular, they noted, grain cost more, and inflation made keeping journeymen more expensive. The bakers needed to raise prices in order to cover these increased costs. The state agreed, to a point, and set out new standards for a series of baked goods. Clearly, however, the state wanted to avoid provoking the populace with higher prices. Instead of increasing prices across the board, in most cases it masked the change by mandating smaller loaves at the same price as old loaves-a 3kopek "French roll" that once weighed 7.4 ounces now weighed only 6.7 ounces-and by slightly reducing the price of the cheapest rye bread. A similar resetting of prices happened in Kazan' a decade and a half later, as local bakers asked for an adjustment of the taksa in their favor; the town duma allowed them to reduce weights, not increase prices.3o As a result, the lives of the poorest inhabitants, who had to content themselves with cheap bread, were slightly eased, and even the increased costs to those higher up the economic ladder were hidden. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Russians living in towns knew well that various arms of the state controlled the way they ate. The state defined the kinds of stores and eating establishments available, it defined who could sell them their food, and it defined the prices they paid for at least some goods-and goods that everyone ate. Those higher up the social and economic ladder certainly had more freedom of choice, but all were constrained in some ways by the desires of the state for good order. Until around this time, the state's authority in the countryside had always been far more tenuous. In some ways its concern for the sustenance of towns affected peasants as well, for they received certain trading rights, but the lives of most peasants, and certainly most estate serfs, were other-

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wise little touched by the state's concern. In the decades before Emancipation, just as sustenance served as a particular focus of state attention in towns, a sense of a crisis of sustenance in the countryside served as a focus for increasing state authority there. The state, through the creation of new institutions and new laws, began to attempt, at least, to control not only the ways that townspeople ate, but also the ways that country people ate. THE STARVING PEASANT AND THE STATE's NEW ROLE Until the 1830s, the Russian state was generally reluctant to assert its authority in the countryside and over agriculture. In part this was a question of tradition, and of the authority of pomeshchiki over their serfs. The state did not often intervene in this relationship, and its rare attempts to do so were fraught with peril for individual rulers. In part, too, the lack of intervention was a practical matter; in the early nineteenth century the Russian state dismissed the idea that it even could concern itself with peasant sustenance and the agriculture that sustained it. In 1803 the minister of internal affairs filed a report in which he noted some of the problems inherent in improving agriculture by state decree: farming in the true sense can not be a subject of government. Taking its beginning in necessity and private benefit, it appears, grows, and strengthens by the very same private and personal motives. The government cannot act in those areas directly: it must limit itself to those decrees that generally appertain to improvement, to the conveniences of communication and trade and to the barrier of property by the actions of judgment.31

Not only did the state believe it could not intervene in agriculture, it was unable to aid others in their investigations of such matters. In 1828, Professor Konstantin Arsen'ev, investigating "provisioning in Russia," turned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for data on harvests, trade, and grain storage and use. The Economic Department of the ministry did try to answer his questions but had to admit that it simply had no real numbers or data on such matters.32 Even as the state remained detached, other concerned writers began to address questions of Russia's population and its sustenance, and to agree on a set of principles. The well-being of the populace at large influenced the well-being of the state. Famine could destroy the former, and thus the latter. Improved agriculture seemed the best means to avoid famine, for in principle it would be able "to prevent the sorrow of hunger, to lessen the suffering of poverty, to satisfy the needs of nutrition, to increase the means to maintain health and ... to lengthen life, especially to make possible the easing of the labor and the increase of happiness of people burdened by the most onerous labor."33 Malthus, with his warning about a future collision

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between increased population and limited food supplies, had made central the relationship between agricultural production and population growth. The Russian authors who commented on this relationship often saw it as a mark of Russia's place in Europe.3 4 Russia could not afford to be more backward than Europe when it came to the uneasy relationship between population and agriculture. Although Russia's size seemed to ensure a certain degree of agricultural health and prosperity, some started to worry that that very wealth was only postponing the inevitable collapse, nothing more. As another writer put it, "not a single state, not a single society can exist, when it is not secure in the possession of its domains and until it is provided with its material needs."3S Although peasants, with help from their landlords, had survived many poor harvests (indeed, there had not been a truly nationwide famine since the Time of Troubles), the early 1830s gave these theoretical musings new practical weight.36 Concern over agriculture sharpened considerably in the 1830s, largely in response to crop failures in 1830, 1832, and 1833. In the last of these three years, grain yields across the country were 31.8 percent below average, the sharpest drop in the entire nineteenth century.37 Suddenly, where once all seemed secure, even abundant, concern now rose over the ability of Russian agriculture to meet the needs of the nation. Specific reports on famine conditions described horrors and demanded attention. Governors and provincial bureaucrats reported about peasants "in extremity due to the lack of vital supplies." A local Kostroma official described state peasants eating "flax seed remains, bark and similar substances/' and even more disturbing to civic peace, the "fifty heads of household from one region [who had] absented themselves from their homes with their entire families to feed themselves off charity in other provinces."38 Not only was the crisis causing suffering among the population and disturbances to state order, it was costing the state money. Governors described the funds that had been dispersed to peasants suffering from crop failures. In some provinces, government handouts reached hundreds of thousands of rubles.39 Faced with reports like these, the state had to act. The early 1830s saw exhaustive investigation of the apparent crisis in food supplies and of individual efforts to alleviate the problem.4o Multiple state institutions considered the issue. A special committee of the Economic Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs prepared reports on the existing situation in Russia and on programs in other countries, while the Committee of Ministers discussed administrative changes that might increase the state's direct involvement in agricultural research and policy.4I In autumn 1833, the ministers first considered using the Free Economic Society to channel state funds toward agriculture but resolved instead to set up a new special state committee on agriculture.4z Thus, an arm of the state itself would investigate the crisis, suggest methods of averting future problems, and keep government funds working for the

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government. N. S. Mordvinov chaired the new committee, and A. M. Kniazhevich, later the minister of finance under Alexander II, managed it. At the new committee's first meeting, on November 24, 1833, its members identified the many measures that were needed. Planting hay, greater cultivation of potatoes, improvements in animal breeding, and increased use of fertilization were all lauded as necessary measures, for "by these means not only will the gradual impoverishment of the class of agriculturists [zemledel'tsy] be averted, but their prosperity, income from estates, and the very national wealth will be increased, although of course not at once and especially not for the peasants themselves, because the introduction of improved methods of farming must begin with the landlords."43 These were high hopes, especially for a special committee with no specific administrative backing. The establishment of the special committee was only the first step toward greater state involvement in agriculture. After several years in administrative limbo, in 1838 the special agricultural committee moved under the control of the newly founded Ministry of State Domains and was renamed its Scientific Committee. 44 In principle, this ministry was charged with oversight of state lands and, in particular, state peasants. The Third Department of the ministry had control over agricultural matters; in 1845 it was renamed the Department of Agriculture to emphasize this role. After Emancipation, the institution as a whole formally became the Ministry of Agriculture, but in these earlier years, agriculture remained a side issue within the larger ministry, though not an unimportant one.4s In 1841 the Third Department of the Ministry of State Domains asked the Scientific Committee to investigate "the sums that have been set for the perfection of agriculture by the governments of: England, France, Prussia and other States." In particular, it asked about how expenditures had changed "with the spread of civilization," suggesting the Russian state's desire to be part of that wider European civilization.46 Agricultural reform, it decided, now seemed an essential part of state business. Even as they decided the state needed to exert more authority over agriculture, state actors continually worried that such authority might accomplish little. The 1849 report of the Department of Agriculture of the Ministry of State Domains echoed earlier concerns when it noted that agriculture was based on "private actions" and thus was difficult to govern by means of legal measures. The department could encourage, could inform, but felt it could not demand changes of the landlords who ran much of the Russian land.47 Even so, within the government and its publications, the recognition of the state's duty to ensure sustenance grew in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the Journal of the Ministry of State Domains, an anonymous article described this well: "governmental measures, having the goal of ensuring popular sustenance, belong to the most important subjects of the state economy, touching on the essential,

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and also most widespread, needs of man." 4 B Although the state understood its own limitations, it nonetheless came to believe that it had to intervene and demand changes in efforts to ensure sustenance. Even so, it was difficult to decide where that intervention should take place, where the state should put its efforts. Given the limit of state power, members of the various agricultural committees sought to come up with realistic plans to change and ensure peasant sustenance. This was a difficult goal: finding a solution to a perceived, but by no means universally accepted, problem that neither set goals beyond the state's abilities nor challenged the current interests of the Russian state. At least two investigators ran into problems with the second point when they suggested that famine conditions could very easily be solved by one simple expedient: curtailing alcohol production. Count Koshelev-Bezborodko and Mr. G. Vitvitskii both believed that an obvious remedy for insufficient supplies for sustenance (and rent and tax payments) was to stop vodka production in the short term. After all, Kushelev-Bezborodko noted, spirits were easy to transport from grain-rich regions. More forcefully, Vitvitskii asked whether "the State would really allow the rich to quench their thirst for beer even when the poor stand to bloat from hunger?" This approach, however, received no support from the government. Even the general form for governors' reports, which reported grain available for sustenance only after subtracting both the next year's seed and grain for distilling from a given year's harvest, displayed the centrality of alcohol to Russian state interests. Vitvitskii's ideas were called "for the most part inconvenient and even laughable," and Kushelev-Bezborodko's were simply ignored.49 The state also investigated the possibility of intervening significantly in grain markets, considering reports on the experiences of foreign governments and the thoughts of foreign and Russian economists.so Encountering a generally negative reaction to that idea, the state instead focused its attention on two related projects based on existing structures: the introduction of new basic food crops, particularly potatoes, and the mandate to store grains. These were both programs with a long history in the country; preliminary experiments with both had first occurred a century before. In the mid-1830s, however, the state exhibited a new willingness to stretch the limits of its authority by intervening in the world of the Russian serf in the name of ensuring sustenance. AUTHORITY, PRODUCTION, AND CONSUMPTIONNEW CROPS

Early nineteenth-century Russians focused on one major cause of famine: crop failure that led to food deficits. As a result, many believed that new crops that were less likely to fail would best overcome this prob-

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lem and ensure sustenance. Scientists and journalists were not entirely sure which crops would best suit Russia's particular needs. Many examined grain surrogates already used by peasants in time of dearth, hoping to find there a new crop already suited to Russian conditions. Practically, however, current surrogates-"foods" like bark or the chaff of hemp seeds that had been pressed for oil-lacked nutritional benefit or proved difficult to cultivate, to regulate, or to promote systematically.sl Another option was to introduce a crop that was totally new-or at least new to Russian soils. In the hope of finding the perfect solution, reformers looked abroad, to corn, to rice, to lentils, or to other more exotic eastern and western grains and greens.s 2 But these were generally small-scale investigations, or mere reproductions of foreign texts. A more intensive experiment with a new crop took place in the 1830s and 1840s, when the Third Department of the Ministry of State Domains looked to Andean quinoa, a high-protein grain adapted to harsh climates, as a possible fix for the famine problem. In this case, not only did journalists write about the viability of the grain, but state and other actors devoted time and money to investigating its cultivation. In 1838 the Third Department of the Ministry of State Domains imported quinoa seed from France and began to cultivate it on experimental farms throughout northern Russia. In principle, quinoa ought to be extremely useful; the Third Department noted that it grew in difficult climates and could give phenomenal returns-they claimed at least 1:1,000. In practice, the experiments, which continued through the late 1840s, gave mixed results at best. In initial tests, the seed either failed to sprout or gave far lower returns than expected; a later attempt was destroyed by a particularly hot summer. Even so, the state continued to invest in experiments, and some successes were reported in the pages of the Farming Gazette.s3

In 1841 an inquiry sent from the Third Department to the Scientific Committee brought up an even bigger problem with quinoa, one that faced any new crop: how was it to be consumed? The committee clearly had no idea and furthermore lacked written sources to turn to for information. It suggested that the department turn to the Russian consul in Valparaiso, who ought to be able to find out how the grain was usually consumed. Although a few years later the department was still querying the unresponsive consul, an 1847 report of the Scientific Committee finally concluded that quinoa could be used "as a vegetable in taste no worse than spinach," as feed for livestock, or, with proper preparation, as porridge. Despite this affirmation, the report also noted that without proper preparation, the grain had a "bitter and muddy taste," and that "in all there have not been heard good reports" on its consumption in Russia.s 4 In no small measure due to the problem of taste, the experiments were deemed a failure.

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For all their experiments with other options, most Russians interested in new crops focused their attention on the familiar potato, despite its own problems with production and consumption. By the time of the crisis of the 1830s, potatoes had been known in Russia for a century, but the crisis prompted new, more authoritative state measures to encourage the cultivation and consumption of potatoes. The process of introducing the potato to a wider audience had been a difficult one in many parts of Europe. Although it promised great things-a cheap, reliable food source, perfect for the continent's growing masses-the potato initially gained popularity only locally. But because of its promise, states began to promote its cultivation, hoping that its appearance would create real change in the lives of their peasants. They soon learned that producing potatoes alone was not a magic fix. Instead, states or other more responsive actors had to promote potato consumption, a far more difficult task. As Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat put it, until the problem of consumption was solved, "the potato could not appear in the light of miraculous manna .... It had to be given its own dignity and personality."ss This was perpetually the crux of the issue in Russia: finding ways not simply to encourage the cultivation of this "miraculous manna," but also to make its consumption seem palatable, even desirable. From at least the mid-eighteenth century, articles and laws touted potatoes both as an ideal object of production and as a new miracle food for a Russia not then in apparent need of miracles. A 17 58 article "On the Cultivation of Potatoes" stated that "without a doubt Russia would receive a great benefit, if potatoes were cultivated in all provinces, and thus the common people would use them," although up to that point their cultivation had been limited in scope and success. 56 Over the next several decades, authors of household manuals or guides to public health frequently combined any discussion of potatoes with laudatory introductions to the great but unspecified benefits that awaited a Russia fully engaged in their productionY One of the early proclamations of Catherine the Great focused attention on the potato in much the same way. It described the great benefits that potato cultivation had brought to other countries and could also bring to Russia, and it lamented the low level of interest in potatoes among the general Russian population. The benefits of potatoes had already been proved by "all economic essays, published in various languages."SB For all its positive intent, Catherine's proclamation also described a possible problem, but one that was soon to be overcome. "In time," it noted, "just like millet, buckwheat, and other products brought from other places, [potatoes] may become accepted."S9 Acceptance, however, proved difficult to win. First, through the eighteenth century, writers could not even agree on what to call the new food. The 1758 article used a literal translation from the French pommes de terre: zemlianye iabloki, or earth apples. Catherine's proclamation presented many more options. Its title used transliterations or translations of French, English, and German

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words (zemlianye iabloki, potetes, kartofel'). The English never caught on, but the French and German variants both appeared frequently through the early nineteenth century. Zemlianye iabloki, however, eventually faded from the literary landscape, perhaps because of the connection between that phrase and peasant superstition. Various early nineteenth-century sources noted some peasants, particularly Old Believers, considered potatoes not just unappetizing, but sinful. Among the reasons cited were a belief that the potato was the apple with which Eve tempted Adam, and a reference to the potato as the "devil's apple," so called because "a potato grows with a head and eyes, like a person, and therefore, he who eats a potato eats a human soul."60 Downplaying the connection between potato and apple by using the less vivid kartofel' helped to erase this link. During the eighteenth century, articles and other literature promoting potatoes included advice on two counts: how to cultivate potatoes and, just as important, how to consume them. Both issues had their complexities. Cultivation was in some ways straightforward, in that most advice suggested similar basic techniques of planting, cultivating, and harvesting. However, even in the eighteenth century a secondary issue clouded the picture. Advisors disagreed over where potatoes should be planted: in fields, or in gardens? The latter had certain advantages. Potatoes would then be close to home, and peasants often took better care of their personal plots than they did of fields that might belong to their owners. On the other hand, potatoes planted in fields would not simply produce more potatoes but might more basically alter Russian agricultural practices. Russia's agricultural reformers wanted to shift agricultural patterns from the three-field system to one that used more fields, thus increasing the amount of land under cultivation at any given time.61 Adding a field of potatoes to the standard system would help forward this goal. Publicistic articles also provided copious information on how to consume potatoes: "one may grind them into flour, bake bread from them, boil kasha, make dumplings, piroshki, starch, and vodka; boiled with German cabbage, called brunkol, [their] taste is like that of chestnuts."6Z Catherine's proclamation included even more detailed cooking ideas: potatoes were tasty 1) in soup with meat or fish; 2) bake of them bliny, pancakes and karavai with milk or sour cream; 3) they are tasty and filling, fried in Lenten oil or butter; 4) boil, ground with groats and milk, for a kasha and other foods; 5) it would not be useless, according to the advice of Fisher, to cook them with beans or peas, which grow well in various parts of Russia, ground into a flour, especially during bad harvests, when it will make a great substitute for bread. 6) Curious people can make experiments with baking of them, with wheat flour and eggs, karavai, with [other grains] pirogi of other grains: but as they, without butter and salt, have no taste, such seasonings are demanded by potatoes, too; and in which manner to bake of them bread, it is written below.63

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In addition, the proclamation noted more industrial applications of potatoes: producing potato flour or potato starch, or using potatoes for distilling. In the household management books of the late eighteenth century, potatoes-when they appeared-seemed ordinary objects to be incorporated into normal life, not something new and strange. But, these works were often translated from foreign sources and thus reflected foreign attitudes toward potatoes, not Russian attitudes.6 4 Despite this attention, at the beginning of the nineteenth century potatoes were still uncommon across Russia as a whole. The English traveler William Tooke noted that "prejudice and plenty of other provisions prevent the progress of this new species of culture: yet here and there the introduction of it has been successfully begun, particularly in those parts where, from the rudeness of the climate, corn does not always thrive." Where potatoes did grow, he also noted, they grew well; near Arkhangelsk, potatoes could "yield an increase of from thirty to fifty fold, when raised from native seeds."65 Others agreed that potatoes were much in use in certain regions, but rarely cultivated or consumed in the rest of the country. R. Johnston saw many potatoes in the Baltic region, such that he compared their cultivation with that of the cucumber, which he described as "incredible." But nearer Moscow, "the potatoes are in general round and small, and do not appear to be cultivated with so much assiduity as some other vegetables."66 G. Reinbeck noticed a different source of variation: German colonists near the capital were particular cultivators of potatoes, and although the common people principally ate cucumbers and onions, potatoes were also much in use. 67 Through the first third of the nineteenth century, written sources continued to combine information about production and consumption, but now authors also focused on potatoes as a possible industrial crop, a crop like sugar beets that demanded significant processing. Potatoes were most of all to be cultivated in fields, not in gardens, and to be consumed by industry, not by households.6B Authors presented sometimes new, sometimes repetitive information on distilling alcohol from potatoes, on producing potato starch or flour, and on drying or otherwise preserving potatoes.69 By tying agriculture to industrial production, authors tried to raise interest in potatoes among landowners who might use the new methods to increase the profits they gained from their estates. Such use also made land more productive, a goal of the author N. P. Shcheglov in a pamphlet on industrial agriculture. As he put it, Russia lagged "behind the other states of Europe" in the value of its industrial output, and potatoes could help make the land itself more valuableJO As this larger-scale interest took hold, culinary literature instead connected potatoes with individual consumption and even subsistence. The translated cookbooks of the early nineteenth century sometimes included potato recipes; a note inked on the inside front cover of one copy of 1808's Cooking Calendar even sin-

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gled out a dish of potatoes and mustard as particularly tastyJl Articles in agricultural journals often described methods to use already processed potatoes to bake bread. Here, the most important link was to subsistence. As one anonymous author wrote, potato bread made "such a surrogate for grain, especially in times of bad harvest!"72 Despite the attention to large-scale potato cultivation and use, evidence shows at best only limited cultivation of potatoes in gardens. A flurry of articles on potato cultivation and consumption appeared in the early 1820s, but potatoes fell out of style, journalistically, in the second half of that decade, suggesting that the elite audience for such journals was uninterested in producing potatoes industrially. Potatoes are rarely mentioned in provincial governors' reports from the first third of the nineteenth century. In Kostroma and Kazan' provinces, governors did not take note of potatoes until at least the 1820s, and then only rarely. That potatoes appeared at all was in part due to an apparent mandate for newly formalized reports that were to cover a series of issues. The result was boilerplate reports that barely varied in wording. In 1826, clearly following a template, the governor of Kazan' province reported that "garden vegetables, which grow in abundance, especially potatoes, turnips, cucumbers, carrots, beets and cabbage, serve as a source of subsistence." In 1830 the governor of Kostroma province reported a slightly more restricted, but essentially identical situation: "garden vegetables, which grow in abundance, in particular potatoes and cabbage, serve in part as a source of subsistence."73 Obviously the state wanted to hear of flowering vegetable production, including potatoes, and assuming the reports held even a glimmer of truth, potato cultivation had become at least somewhat common in peasant gardens. In 1835, the agricultural writer P. Protopopov claimed that it was "a rare peasant garden" that lacked potatoes.74 But whatever this limited success, the dream of largescale cultivation of potatoes in fields was yet to be achieved. The crisis of the 1830s brought new state attention to the potato, and particularly to field cultivation of the potato. Articles published after the crisis urged serf owners to demand that their peasants plant potatoes in fields, giving them advice on cultivation and processing.7 5 Furthermore, articles on potatoes appeared in journals far more frequently than their actual cultivation in fields might warrant. In the semi-official Farming Gazette, between 1834 and 1852, one article on potato cultivation appeared for every 2.6 articles on grain cultivation, and one out of every five articles on processing agricultural products dealt with potatoes. Even more significantly, although various state actors had earlier expressed uncertainty about the utility of state-mandated agricultural change, on August 8, 1840, Nicholas himself demanded that state peasants be compelled to plant more potatoes. According to his decree, state peasants had to plant potatoes in common fields that already existed or that were to be cultivated just for this purpose.76 Over the next several years, additional laws

30

RECIPES FOR RUSSIA

first strengthened and then eased these demands. In early 1841 state peasants who rioted against potatoes were punished with army service or other strong correctives. In February 1842, Nicholas again addressed the minister of state domains, instructing him to continue his investigations of potatoes, reiterating the strength of the 1840 and 1841 pronouncements and placing them in historical context, and suggesting cash awards that might lure landlords to the cause. Over the next two years, Nicholas returned to the theme, singling out provinces that had succeeded in increasing their potato production with praise and with freedom from compulsory planting.n Although apparent short-term success brought an end to compulsory potato planting for state peasants, articles and other agricultural tracts continued to promote potato cultivation and consumption through the 1830s and early 1840s. Their words were aimed primarily at members of the gentry, suggesting ways they could profit by processing their peasants' increased potato cultivation, but also providing recipes that made potatoes something fit for a noble table. Landlords who successfully increased potato cultivation on their estates were also eligible for cash prizes, more useful than the medals awarded to state peasantsJB Elsewhere, authors implored nobles to consume more potatoes, as such efforts would serve as models for their peasantsJ9 During these years, Russian writers could not agree on the true popularity of potatoes among the peasantry. Governors, ethnographers, and others described the cultivation of potatoes in gardens. Several commentators noted that the extent of crop failure and famine in 1834 either proved the usefulness of potatoes to those who already cultivated them or shocked those who had previously refused to cultivate or consume what they considered a sinful food into changing their minds.so These writers believed, as the agricultural author A. P. Bashutskii claimed in 1835, that "we have finally made peace, it seems, with the potato; not only enlightened landlords, but even the farming people, our simple muzhiki."B 1 Other authors clearly felt that peasants still needed convincing. Several ridiculed the "stupid people" with "laughable superstitions" who refused to eat potatoes but willingly consumed "chaff, goose-foot, leaves, [and] bark," while others found some sense in the fact that peasants preferred sour or salty foods, and not the bland potato.sz Authors of texts intended for peasants often particularly lauded the potato, in one case, even in verse: Potatoes are a blessed food In times of dearth for all priceless And when someone is in need of bread Potatoes often serve to feed him. Spuds are tasty, and filling, and sweet, There is no bad in them, and the only vileness Are those people, who think That God curses potatoes.s3

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Other authors, realizing that field cultivation would produce more potatoes than a household could consume, suggested ways of using potatoes or potato greens to feed livestock.8 4 And still, potato bread remained a major focus of attention and was tied most often with the threat of famine; articles appeared with new methods of baking such bread, while individuals wrote in to the Ministry of State Domains, seeking official approval and recognition for their new methods, which usually consisted of nothing more than a slightly altered proportion of potato, prepared in various different ways, to flour; each author of such a recipe usually claimed it and only it would solve Russia's famine problem.ss Although the potato blight did cause a shift in Russian attention to potatoes (articles on the blight and its results continued to be translated from foreign sources, as other articles fell in number by the 1850s), potatoes had become part of the peasant world of agriculture, although to a degree that varied from region to region.s6 In part this variation was due to circumstances of climate and soil; in part, too, it owed something to the interplay between what Eszter Kisban has called government policy and "spontaneous process."S 7 State and court peasants were subject to state authority in a much more direct way than were estate peasants. When Nicholas recognized provinces for success in potato cultivation, he recognized state peasants. In 1842, ten state peasants from Kostroma province received awards for their service to the potato. One, the volost' head Fedor Ivanov, was recognized for his ability to convince the peasants in his region to plant potatoes in fields. According to the report, every household in his volost' planted 10 to 15 sazhens of potatoes. Furthermore, this result was all the more impressive because of certain peculiarities of the region: the villages under Fedor's jurisdiction were surrounded by court villages, that is, villages under another authority, and were "adjacent to Nizhegorodskoi Province, where old belief exists to a strong degree," thus making them liable to infection by "an aversion to the potato." For his efforts, Fedor Ivanov received a "caftan, decorated with farming implements," and, at least in government circles, credit for "actions for the social good."SS But of course, he was simply following regulations; state peasants had to plant potatoes. Meanwhile, the behavior of estate serfs was altered less by law than by potato advocates who had long sought to influence serf owners-though laws had encouraged estate owners to plant potatoes, they were never forced to do so. The examples of Kostroma and Kazan' provinces suggest ways in which this interplay of government authority and individual action worked out in practice. Although official statistics can be unreliable and incomplete, governors' reports give at least some insight into the ways that potatoes entered Russian peasant fields between the big push of the late 1830s and early 1840s and the end of serfdom. These two provinces had vastly different agricultural conditions, the former with poorer soil and significant industry, the latter with better soil. The populations of

32

RECIPES F 0 R RUSS !A

the provinces differed too, the former having predominantly estate serfs, with sizeable numbers of Old Believers, the latter overwhelmingly made up of state peasants, many of them non-Russian.B9 Some reports claimed that numerous peasants in both provinces had adopted potatoes in their gardens. Their adoption of field cultivation of potatoes, however, was quite different. In both of these provinces, state peasants increased their potato cultivation more than did estate serfs in the immediate aftermath of the official proclamations of the early 1840s, although all peasants saw increases (see charts 1 and 2). And state and estate peasants generally ended the period cultivating more potatoes in fields than they had at the beginning of the period. Aside from these similarities, however, peasants in the two provinces acted differently. In these provinces, potato cultivation differed in at least three major ways. First, although all peasants tended to plant more potatoes in fields by the late 1850s than in 1842, peasants in these two provinces got to that higher level on different paths. Peasants in Kostroma province dramatically increased their field cultivation by the mid-1840s, but the increase did not last. By the time rates leveled off in the early 1850s, they had dropped from their peaks, significantly in the case of state peasants, less so in the case of estate serfs. In Kazan' province, however, the initial climb was more gradual (and more erratic), and the rates leveled off near their peak. Second, in Kostroma province the difference between state and estate peasants' practices was generally slight; only in the years immediately following mandatory state peasant rules was there a significant difference. At the very beginning of the period and during the long end plateau, rates were very similar. In Kazan' province, however, but for one possibly anomalous year of extraordinarily high estate serf rates, state peasants always planted significantly more potatoes than did their serf counterparts. And finally, there are clear differences in the absolute amounts of potatoes planted. Kostroma peasants simply planted more potatoes than their Kazan' counterparts planted. The highest level of potato cultivation in Kazan' barely reached the average levels reached by Kostroma's peasants at the end of the period. There are several possible explanations for these differences. Kostroma peasants did not plant more potatoes because their crops had better yields (see charts 3 and 4). The good soil of Kazan' province gave much better results, and higher average potato yields. But one source suggests that Kostroma peasants might have been inclined to cultivate more potatoes because of a strong market in neighboring Iaroslavl' province.9o In addition, Kostroma's peasants rarely produced enough grain to fulfill all the province's needs, while Kazan's peasants usually exported grain.91 Potatoes were, as a result, far more useful in the near subsistence agricultural economy of Kostroma province-they fulfilled a need. Kostroma's higher rates of potato cultivation also help explain the other differences between the

ENSURING SUSTENANCE

33

Chart 1-Potatoes planted per capita, Kostroma Province, 1842-1861

1842

1843

1844

----•---- Estate

1845

1846

1847

1848

1849

1850

1851

1852

1853

1854

1855

1856

1857

1858

1859

1860

1861

Year

------ State

Chart 2- Potatoes planted per capita, Kazan' Province, 1842-1861

0.020--t---~~----r~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~---j

·-----·

0.0104-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-1

0.000 1842

1843

----•---- Estate

1844

1845

1846

--------- State

1847

1848

1849

1850

1851

1852

Year

1853

1854

1855

1856

1857

1858

1859

1860

1861

34

RECIPES FOR RUSSIA

Chart 3-Potato Yields by Type of Peasant, Kostroma Province, 1842-1861 5.00 4.50

4.00

·---

~

.

-~

~\\.

\\\

3.50

,~,

/

/

·-----·1!"'v

\\·---.__.,/-/---

3.00

v

"0

a:J 2.50 ;;::: 2.00

··---

,.

,------\ / ,..... \

------.,

--------../

! I \·/

---

_____.

1.50

1.00 0.50

0.00 1842

1843

1844

----•---- Estate

1845

1846

1847

1848

1849

1850

1851

1852

1853

1854

1855

1856

1857

1858

1859

1860

1861

Year

- - 4 - - State

Chart 4- Potato Yields by Type of Peasant, Kazan' Province, 1842-1861 8.00

7.00

"

I\

6.00

5.00

"0

a:J ;;:::

4.00

~.

•

3.00

2.00

1.00,___________________________________________________________

~

O.OOJ-,--,--,---,---,---,---,---,---,--,--,---,---,---,---,---,---,---,--,---~

1842

1843

----•---- Estate

1844

1845

1846

_,.__State

1847

1848

1849

1850

1851

1852

Year

1853

1854

1855

1856

1857

1858

1859

1860

1861

ENSURING SUSTENANCE

35

two provinces. Essentially, in the province with a greater use for potatoes, state intervention made little long-term difference, but in the province with less perceived need for potatoes, state intervention more successfully encouraged planting potatoes. The dramatic differences in yields between state and estate serfs suggest, too, that success in planting did not necessarily mean success in cultivation. State peasants had generally far lower yields of potatoes than their estate counterparts. Although the state peasants were more strongly "encouraged" to plant potatoes, they did not perceive a use for the plant and thus did not grow it as successfully as those more likely to plant the tuber with some degree of choice. AUTHORITY OVER ALL PEASANTSGRAIN STORAGE

The state's other major focus of attention, compulsory grain storage, raised yet larger questions about how Russian peasants lived their lives.9z As several authors realized, the most severe harvest problems in Russia were related to climate and weather, and new crops, however hardy, could not necessarily survive a worst-case drought.93 Mandatory grain storage became a type of insurance system promoted by the state to protect peasants from this dire scenario. From the late eighteenth century on, the imperial state began to rely on a fairly straightforward system; in essence, peasants were forced to store grain communally (or to save the means to purchase grain), which theoretically ensured their ability both to sow a new crop and to sustain themselves with sufficient grain should a year's crop completely fail. Although the state thought of these stores (magaziny) as an insurance plan, or as peasant savings, peasants initially saw them as an additional demand with little perceptible benefit. The clash of perceptions was eventually noted by one bureaucrat, who incredulously reported, "these changes did not bring those benefits which the State expected! Instead they discovered that the collection and storage of grain, entailing difficulties, burdened the average man!"9 4 Despite this sort of reaction, grain stores rarely lost favor with the Russian state and became not only one of the most important methods of combating famine, but also an institution that transcended serfdom in longevity and challenged it in pre-reform practice.9s In some ways, grain stores were institutions of long standing in Russia, and were meant to help those lacking other protection from famine. In principle, for example, pomeshchiki owed their serfs sustenance in times of need, a system that gave serfs a degree of social support that state peasants and others lacked. In an effort to protect more of the population, Peter I investigated using grain stores to ensure the sustenance of his armed forces. Several grain stores were built near the fronts of the Great Northern War, and after the war ended, smaller storage facilities remained near

36

RECIPES FOR RUSSIA

concentrations of troops. Empress Elizabeth also considered further developing the system of grain stores, partly in order to benefit the military. Count Shuvalov, who suggested one program, believed grain stores could also help the state control grain prices through strategic release of grain, adding another layer of social engineering.96 Catherine II expanded the system of grain stores to many state peasants and towns.9 7 At this point, townspeople, soldiers, and state peasants were in some way protected by grain stores, although the "system" had yet little rhyme or reason. The basic regulation of grain stores, although refined over the years, changed little from its first regularized statement at the end of the eighteenth century. Emperor Paul instituted formal plans for grain stores, more definitively taking on the role of tsar/caretaker. As of 1797, each village of court peasants was obligated to build a new building to serve as a storage facility, located some distance from the village to keep it safe from fire; to pick an overseer (smotritel') from among its members; to collect a yearly tithe based on land sown; "to continue the collection without stopping, no matter what the amount of grain stored in the magazin"; and to sell off old grain in the fall, replacing it with new, or to freshen the stored grain with new grain of the peasants' own cultivation. Grain was to be loaned out only in case of great need, and returned after the next harvest.98 Two years later many of these prescriptions were repeated in a law for state peasants. Collections should take place in every village, at the yearly rate of half a chetverik of rye and 1/16 a chetverik of spring grain per male soul, until stores filled to 3 chetverti of rye and 3 chetveriki of spring grains per soul. All villages of more than fifty households were to build storage facilities, and those with fewer households were to combine with other villages to build stores.99 This basic plan was to be repeated in later discussions and legislation of grain storage facilities: peasants had to foot the bill to build a facility and then give up part of their harvest every year. Although instituted with good intentions, this system created problems for many peasant villages. As a later writer noted, "at the very beginning of the introduction by us of these stores, when experience had not yet proved all the use of this salutary institution, the peasants, considering this custom some sort of new tax, unwillingly brought in their due, little as it was, to the stores."loo They had good reason to distrust the measures. Assuming no bad harvests mandated withdrawals, peasants would have to tithe grain to the magaziny for at least twenty-four years; although after that point new grain would, presumably, be replaced by old, the extra tithe seemed unfair to many peasants. The loan system had to make the requirement seem even more of a burden. Peasants were not simply putting grain away for their use at a later point. Instead, they were supplying a grain bank with capital that would then only be loaned out to them. Furthermore, the stores were likely more actively harmful in another way. The grain peasants gave away was likely never to be seen by them again:

ENSURING SUSTENANCE

37

communal stores actually promoted the storage of weak, small grain, for there was no guarantee an individual would get back his own grain, or in some cases, even that it would stay in the village. The fact that enforcement of the new rules became an immediate problem for local authorities reaffirms the notion that these stores were initially deeply unpopular. In the early 1800s, provincial governors reported on the status of the new storage facilities, on whether they were built and how collection was progressing. Initial reports looked promising, but soon governors began to report problems with the collection schedule. In some areas, peasants were slow to build the storage facilities; in other areas, poor harvests led to an immediate distribution of grain and a very slow process of refilling the stores.1o1 By the middle of the 1810s, it seemed clear that grain collection was falling far short of the ideal promulgated in Paul's law. A survey by the Ministry of Police in 1816 found that grain stores were low: stores across the country held 17,795,000 chetverti of grain on hand, but another 4,700,000 chetverti were missing or loaned out. And some believed even this report was overly optimistic, and that in reality many of the millions of chetverti supposedly on hand only existed "in registers."lOZ Oversight rights were granted to new local institutions in 1822 in the midst of several years of poor harvests and in the face of continued problems with enforcement. The new Committees of Popular Sustenance were to make sure that all the inhabitants of their provinces had enough to eat by keeping track of grain harvests and stores. They were also placed in the position of arbiters of need, as they were given the right to appeal to the central state administration for extraordinary financial help. The committees consisted of a long list of local officials, who took on an extra duty. In principle, these committees could more easily watch over the state of local grain stores. And, in addition, a lowering of the target maximum storesfrom three chetverti per soul to two-strove to make the system more responsive to peasant demands and easier to enforce. In practice, the fact that many members of the committees were overworked or lacked interest, combined with other new regulations, made enforcement a continual problem. At the time, a new option was given to peasant villages. Instead of collecting grain, villages could collect a cash payment (twenty-five kopeks per soul per year) to be saved and used only to purchase grain in times of need.1o3 Although this option was intended to keep productive resources producing and to ease the burden of peasants engaged primarily in industry, it also emphasized the collection's resemblance to a tax. In 1827 yet another change was made to the regulations, again instituting a system likely perceived by peasants as more onerous. Court peasants were forced to start cultivating a "common field" in lieu of individually tithing their grain. The village as a whole was to work this field; all inhabitants were meant to give several days over the course of the agricultural season to its cultivation. Thus, rather than giving up part of their own

38

RECIPES FOR RUSSIA

TABLE 1-Grain sown, chetveriki, Kostromaprovince,

1847,1857 1857

1847

Spring

W:Sp.

Winter

Spring

W:Sp

51,087 178 277,194 328,459 49,688

106,035 330 486,610 592,975 89,918

1:2.1 1:1.9 1:1.8 1:1.8 1:1.8

18,560 16 330,670 349,246 75,457

50,400 6 678,006 728,412 128,228

1:2.7 1:0.4 1:2.1 1:2.1 1:1.7

76,533 2,602 79,135

117,732 9,033 126,765

1:1.5 1:3.5 1:1.6

72,958 2,806 75,764

122,369 6,725 129,094

1:1.7 1:2.4 1:1.7

457,282

809,658

1:1.8

500,467

985,73

1:1.9

Winter Estate lands

-estate -common -peasant Total: State pt. lands: Court lands

-peasant -common Total: TOTAL:

Source: !a. Krzhivoblotskii, ed., Materialy dlia geografii i statistiki Rossii, sobrannye ofitserami general'nogo shtaba, vol. 10, Kostromskaia guberniia (St. Petersburg: N. Tiblen i Ko., 1861), 217-18.

products, court peasants were to give up some of their time and labor.l04 Although only court peasants had to cultivate these fields, some estate owners also brought the technique into use. Practically, attempts to encourage common fields in northern provinces led to state recognition of the "inconveniences" of these fields, and in Kostroma province, for example, peasants who were not forced to plant common fields rarely did. 1D5 There, court peasants, who by law had to maintain common fields, did so more than any other sort of peasant did (table 1). In 1847, the common lands were likely farmed using innovative systems of crop rotation, as these lands were sown with far more spring grains than winter.1D6 But a decade later, court peasants had decreased the amount of land in these fields, reverted to the three-field system, or begun to sow spring grains less densely, a change that suggests disenchantment with innovation, if not a complete turn away. Over the same period, very few pomeshchiki, it seems, had ever instituted the common field idea on their estates, and the number did nothing but drop over the years leading up to Emancipation. This was an innovation that seems to have been clearly unpopular and, in the long run, unsuccessful. The crisis of the 1830s prompted not only changes in the existing system of grain stores, but also an expansion of its reach. That the current

ENSURING SUSTENANCE

39

system had largely failed was clear. When P. D. Kiselev, soon to found the Ministry of State Domains and reform the administration of state peasants, went off to tour Russia's interior, he particularly investigated the state of grain stores. According to the ministry's institutional history, these 11 village grain stores ... for the most part did not exist at all, and where they were, then [they existed] with the very least stores or completely empty." But Nicholas I himself drew particular attention to this issue, writing on Kiselev's account that this unacceptable situation deserved 11 the most strict responsibility."I07 New regulations were one attempt to improve the situation. Mter the poor harvests of the early 1830s, the state again changed the laws, creating a new combined system, according to which every peasant was to tithe smaller amounts of both grain and money. The state also added a punitive element to the current system. If grain or money was dispersed from the stores, peasants had two years to replenish supplies; if they took more time, interest of 6 percent was added to their debt.IOS More importantly, however, the new laws addressed private landowners and their serfs for the first time. Walter Pintner notes that Kiselev used the term //guardianship" to describe the Ministry of State Domains' role vis-avis the state peasants; that guardianship was in some ways just the newest example of a longer process.I09 With the new legislation, the state also sought to extend guardianship to estate serfs. Landlords were told to build and maintain grain magaziny in order to preserve their serfs' well-being. Local marshals of the nobility were given the responsibility to ensure compliance. This was a change in the relationship between the state and estate peasants, who had been for the most part left to the control of their owners. By extending legislation to private estates, the state inserted its own authority in the pomeshchik-serf relationship. This infringement on traditional rights and responsibilities began simply because pomeshchiki were not always carrying out their part of the bargain of serfdom: to make sure that their peasants were adequately fed and thus able to reproduce and pay taxes. Certainly the majority did fulfill this obligation, which in most years was hardly a chore.1 1 0 There were pomeshchiki, though, who were less conscientious. Starving peasants led some of these pomeshchiki to be prosecuted for neglect, and travelers commented on landlords more likely to seek profits in times of famine than to provide charity.IH Pomeshchiki themselves sometimes saw the obligation as a hardship to be avoided if at all possible. One, an author of a guide to squeezing more profits from estates, suggested that his fellows force their peasants to found and contribute to grain storage facilities. He reasoned, 11 When such things are not established, in case of a bad harvest the landlord, [already] with difficulty feeding [his] household serfs, often must purchase grain for his peasants for sustenance."112 Essentially, grain stores would put the burden on peasants themselves, freeing landlords from the need to feed them.

40

RECIPES FOR RUSSIA

The agricultural crisis of the early 1830s prompted a stronger statement of state power. Up to then laws had simply reminded pomeshchiki of their duty to feed their peasants, and of the threat of losing their estates, but "this position, on the one hand, had the consequence, that there are just about no stores at all on estates, and pomeshchiki, in case of poor harvest, run to loans from the Government; and on the other hand, that peasants, knowing that their sustenance is the duty of their pomeshchiki, try to sell their own stores and demand grain from their lords." Some members of the special agricultural committee believed that state institutions had to take a more active role in correcting this situation. Storage overseers had to strengthen their surveillance of the stores not just of state peasants, "but of pomeshchiki themselves and of their estates." Such a position was not unanimous, however, even within the committee or the ministry at large. On the archived record of the discussion of this matter, a different hand has underlined the last quote and noted in the margin "isn't there a mistake in this?"113 Despite dissent, and this implied recognition that interference in estate lands would constitute a serious change in the relationship of lords, peasants, and the state, the situation seemed too dire not to act. As a result, in newer laws the state moved beyond its traditional role by actively promoting new policies on private lands. Practically, these changes meant a new level of state authority in the countryside, and a new level that would, at least on occasion, cause problems. For one, the laws created a local position to be filled by a noble: an overseer of the progress of grain magaziny among estate serfs. In at least some areas, even filling this position, let alone carrying out its duties, proved difficult. In Kazan' province the local gentry complained that they were so few in number that there was no one to act as an overseer, and that as a result "there [was] absolutely no possibility to found and keep up gentry stores on a general basis." 114 In addition, some individual landlords saw this oversight as pure and utter interference and indeed found themselves in conflict with state officials. The Iusupov family instituted a more rigorous system of collection on its Kostroma estates than that set by law. On one tour of inspection, the local overseer found excess grain in the village storage facility and advised the peasants to disperse it. On hearing of the matter, the Iusupov estate office quickly chastised the peasants for listening to the inspector and demanded they "not disperse the extra grain to the peasants, and instead collect even more of it for the next year's proportion, and in the future continue the yearly collection because in this is contained the collective good."llS As this example shows, the new obligation seriously disrupted the relationship between lord and peasant. The state had expanded its authority, but that expansion was resented by pomeshchiki intent on preserving their own status. In the case of the Iusupov estates, grain collection also became a source of controversy in what had been an essentially trouble-free rela-

ENSURING SUSTENANCE

41

tionship between landlord and serf. In keeping with the new attention paid by the government to estate lands, the correspondence between the Iusupov family's Kostroma estates and the state's central administrative offices began in 1834 to include reports on the status of magazinyJI6 Thereports showed that the estate's previously reliable peasants were not keeping up with their new duties. Though correspondence from these estates rarely mentioned late obrok payments, it is filled with discussions of late grain collection. Stores that should have contained at least 343 chetverti of winter grain and 171 chetverti of spring grain by 1847 actually contained only 236 chetverti of winter grains and 157 of spring grains. Peasants in another village simply stopped collecting grain in 1845, as they claimed there was no more room in their storage facilities.1 17 The grain stores could also cause disruption within the village, for the large stores of grain represented significant wealth collected under the watch of only a few. Tales of corruption appear with some frequency in estate reports. In one case, a special investigator was sent to a village owned by the Golokhvastov family to investigate the malfeasance of a local starosta. Among the long list of his crimes was the fact that the starosta had frequently gone into the grain stores at whim, without witnesses, "and what [he] did there the peasants do not know, and saw only that [he] carried out grain, but how much they cannot say." 11 8 Other peasants were not immune to the lure of a quick profit. In the 1840s the peasants of a series of villages in Kostroma province received handouts from their grain store. Investigation by the estate owners showed that most of this grain "was given out not because of need and not for the sustenance of their families, but for sale in times of high prices, with the goal that it would be returned in cheaper times." Of course, the grain was not promptly returned: the temptation of speculation turned to the temptation of further dishonesty, and further investigation and trouble ensued.119 Additional complications arose out of sheer confusion. The frequent changes in laws up to 1834, plus the novelty of grain stores for estate peasants brought with them uncertainty. Some peasants and, presumably, landlords were not certain how to count the population for purposes of grain storage. For example, some wondered whether women were to be considered souls in this case, because they ate. The Ministry of Internal Mfairs had to send out a circular addressing the question, in somewhat testy language: [The law of 1834] did not explain in so many words that the collection of money and grain in the magazines for the protection of sustenance is made by only the male gender, but said only that this collection in the designated amount is made by every revision soul; still, by the system of collections generally accepted by the State, the female sex enters into the revision for a count, and in all situations when some sort of duty is calculated, or there is made a numeration by revision souls, it always means the male sex alone. 1zo

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Although this seems to have been a general enough question to invoke a formal state response, other questions were resolved individually. The peasants of one village asked their pomeshchik how they ought to deal with counting dead or drafted souls: should grain stores be more responsive to the actual population than taxes? In this case the pomeshchik responded that the commune as a whole ought to be responsible for such dues. In other words, stores ought to be considered in the same category as taxes. 121 Combining villages also provoked problems, as where combined facilities should be built might be a contentious issue, and sanctions were more difficult to impose on peasants of multiple villages than on those of one commune.1 22 Another set of problems had more to do with the problematic nature of enforced innovation. Grain stores were not popular, and peasants only grudgingly deposited their grain. The frequent changes of legislation exacerbated the problem, as did the corruption that reportedly ran rampant in the administration of the stores.1 23 As a result of their lack of enthusiasm, peasants were notorious for treating the stores poorly. Due to the "unconcern" of local authorities, the grain in one storage facility had not been changed in ten or fifteen years "and from that not only has spoiled, but has been dirtied by worms." 124 Another government official noted that a further problem with the grain collection was simply that the grain was of mixed quality, and therefore particularly poor for sowing.125 Some wealthier peasants either brought grain of bad quality or were unwilling to bring grain at all, working under the assumption that they never needed help, and therefore should not have to support others. 126 Even rules about grain storage might harm the grain itself. In order to ensure that peasants in one village actually put grain into their magazin, the local starosta was ordered to collect grain "at the very hour that it is collected from the fields." 127 Such damp grain was particularly liable to spoilage. Despite these problems, the idea of grain collection had become something familiar by the time of Emancipation and thus was a less problematic part of peasants' lives.1zs But it still represented an odd case of state interference as the state took on the role of welfare provider for all peasants in its domains. CONCLUSION

After a series of crop failures in the 1830s, the Russian state suddenly and dramatically increased its presence and authority in the countryside. Although it had long taken an authoritative role over the food supply of towns, it had generally assumed that the countryside was best left to those who farmed it. The new fear of famine, and of the social unrest and possible military decay that might accompany it, forced the state to demand, and not simply to suggest, significant changes in the lives of its pomeshchiki and peasants. The process was hardly uncontested. Landlords resented new state authority over their serfs, while many peasants found

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the thought of cultivating and consuming new crops like potatoes unappetizing. Laws frequently changed as local stubbornness resisted new authority. But eventually, peasants accepted innovations in crops and storage, and landlords accepted increased oversight of their own lands. Lurking behind much of the state's new interest was concern over its position vis-a-vis its European neighbors, and the very names of some state measures to promote sustenance-taksa, kartofel', magazin-show a debt to foreign models. This foreignness certainly affected resistance, but eventually even the foreign innovations became nativized, largely through the efforts of the state. Another element of the state's concern over sustenance was at least as intricately tied up with its relationship to the West but was in some ways much more difficult to untangle and nativize. The state also found itself involved in discussions of the scientific bases of sustenance, and of public health and its relationship to nutrition. Public health, in particular, was rather too complex a subject for the limited, if autocratic, Russian state of the early nineteenth century. Despite its best efforts, the state's authority in these spheres was rarely more than advisory, as it lacked the funds for significant intervention. Instead, individual medical writers and actors played an important role in the discussion of nutrition and its links to health-and especially in the discussion of proper Russian dietary rules, both for those living lives of bare subsistence and for those of wealth and significant means. At base, however, the concerns of these individuals were the same as those of the state in its worry over basic sustenance and the threat of famine. They too sought to increase Russian authority over Russian stomachs, and to use that authority to find the best way of ensuring the health and well-being of Russia's population.

CHAPTER

TWO

MAKING CABBAGE HEALTHY Dietetics and Public Health as a National Concern

hrough the first half of the nineteenth century Russian medical writers and state actors found themselves balancing foreign ideas with existing Russian practice as they sought to assert their authority over the health of their fellow citizens. For the state, ideas of public health compelled it to create new institutions devoted to socially progressive goals. Limited resources, however, meant that whatever its ideals, it could barely begin to control and legislate matters of hygiene and food safety. At the same time, Russian medical authors and doctors sought to increase their ideological authority over what their fellows ate. They investigated diet from many angles, seeking to define subsistence in order to advance the goal of increased and improved population, but also to define healthy diets for those living with abundance. They investigated the relationship between specific foods and popular health, operating with the belief that dietary reform might be the key to a population that not only expanded numerically but also thrived physically-an improvement in quality, not simply quantity. This was no minor issue, and defining what "healthy" meant in a Russian context became important to state officials and to medical professionals (as well as to amateurs).

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Practically, the investigations brought Russian medical writers into dialogue with two competing authorities over diet. First, the Orthodox Church, which was particularly known for its control over diet, demanded fasts of varying severity-sometimes no animal products at all, sometimes all but fish-every Wednesday and Friday, on several individual religious holidays, and during four longer periods spread across the year.l Formedical writers, such fasts had significant consequences for nutrition, and consequences that often came into conflict with the other major authority on diet, foreign medical knowledge. In many ways, scientific knowledge, including medical knowledge, passed beyond national boundaries, sometimes in confusing and twisted ways.z In principle, dietary needs were universal, and not bound by nationality. But the writings of foreign medical writers often ran contrary to the current experiences of Russians, guided as they were by Orthodoxy and other material limits on popular diet, in particular. As they sought to increase their own authority vis-a-vis both these other authorities, Russian medical writers found themselves negotiating their place as authors of particularly Russian dietary rules; as Dr. Akim Charukovskii put it, only with specifically Russian dietetics could individual medical practitioners and even the Russian state itself fulfill their goal "to guard the health of the people and to decrease its mortality."3 Of course, at the same time Charukovskii's conception of "popular medicine, applied to Russian life and the multiple climates of Russia," served a less altruistic purpose. Although he did not state it explicitly, he implied both that Russian doctors, not foreigners, were those best suited to oversee this Russian popular medicine, and also that their (or his) investigation of diet and health ought to stand as the final word on those subjects, regardless of the demands of the church or the West. PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE STATE's LIMITS

Through the first half of the nineteenth century, the "official line" on the Russian peasantry praised their toughness and strength, qualities that had won Russia military victory and a significant role in European politics. Increasingly, however, critics came to view this legendary toughness as something fragile, not simply because of specific crises like crop failures, but because of endemic problems in peasant life. As one anonymous author put it, "we Russians cannot complain about a lack of these gifts of God, that is, health and sense. The Russian peasant acts on what he sees; takes in hand what he thinks of. Pure Slavic blood boils in his veins, and for him work is a game; he knows no impossibility where others run from it." These gifts, he continued, were not absolute; poor hygiene, drunkenness, and superstition could easily ruin such natural strength. 4 Partly in order to preserve this strength, the Russian state began not only to demand changes meant to ensure basic sustenance, but also to dabble in

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other sorts of public health legislation. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that a modern understanding of germ theory began to emerge as a substantive part of medical discourse. Before that time, doctors poorly understood the causes and thus the means to prevent infectious and other diseases. As such, the spheres of medical practice that fall under the rubric public health often involved reacting to events rather than attempting to prevent outbreaks of disease or other health risks. Even then, however, the state increased its oversight of some aspects of public health legislation, taking an ever more active role in safeguarding the population. And in this period, when state resources were small and medical knowledge still primitive, regulating food and drink became one of the main objects of public health. As its efforts to ensure sustenance focused on counteracting the effects of nature itself, here the state sought above all to prevent human actions, whether from carelessness or from active ill intent, from interfering with health. Although medical practice had a longer history in Russia, Catherine the Great deserves credit for addressing issues of public health from the very start of her reign. As John T. Alexander has argued, Catherine sought not simply to intensify the practice of medicine in Russia but to extend its reach to more and more of the population. Certainly Catherine showed a particular concern about the role of infectious diseases in her lands-her own smallpox inoculation stands as a perfect example of early drug advertising-but her actions helped set the stage for more significant action in other realms, as well. 5 In particular, as the medical author Ivan Veltsin put it, "care for the quality of provisions" became an object of public health concern. Veltsin believed that many of the ways that states could influence popular health involved regulating food. Foodstuffs needed special oversight, for "how much danger to health results from food and drink, when they are consumed with immoderacy or badly prepared due to dangerous crockery or the trickery of merchants?"6 In principle, this meant that "the guardians of the common good must always take care, that every provision, which is brought for sale to the people, was not spoiled by self-interest and was of good quality." 7 In practice, this meant watching out for a whole series of possible problems with food quality, man-made or otherwise. Grain, for example, might naturally be contaminated with spores that could cause sickness, although Veltsin noted that "in our land, luckily such sicknesses occur quite rarely." Even more worrisome were concerns that had to do with purposeful adulteration. Veltsin warned of flour mixed with sand or other substances to increase its weight, of milk mixed with flour to seem richer and thicker, and of some merchants failing to watch out for poisonous greens or mushrooms, or using poisonous dyes to color candy or pastries.s Practically, the Russian state addressed such public health concerns through a series of administrative apparatuses but found its progress

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slowed by the generally poor state of medicine in the country. In a report published as part of a law establishing a new medical board in 1803, the then minister of internal affairs compared Russia and the West and discussed the ways in which specific differences affected governmental actions: In states where this science has already taken root, where Academies, Universities, and other scholarly institutions furnish a sufficient number of Medics, where private industry provides supplies of Medical stores and supplies: there the duties of the area governed by the Medical department consist of general oversight, so that people entering this calling have sufficient certification of their knowledge, and so that supplies used by them are of good quality; in a word, there the Medical administration, taking its natural place, consists of only part of the general improvement and Police. But in Russia, where this science has not yet completely become established, where schools cannot yet supply enough people well-educated in this knowledge, where private industry has not yet filled this branch of trade in necessary depth, in Russia the role of Medicine cannot yet be reduced to these limits.9

Such backwardness did not simply condemn Russia to a perpetual state of catching up but strained already thin resources, slowing the state's attempts to improve its medical situation. It had to invest in medicine at all levels and in all arenas, and it had to invest widely. The Russian state needed to enact change broadly, and thus through many institutions; as a result, it created a fairly complex system of administrative bodies dealing with the subject. As part of her general restructuring of provinces and towns, Catherine created institutions that would in part serve as the first institutions of public health in Russia, the prikazy obshchestvennogo prizreniia, Offices of Public Care, given responsibility for developing schools, charitable institutions, and hospitals on a local scale.1° Within the structures of Alexander I's newly established ministries, medical administrations took on additional responsibilities. Although other elements of control over medicine were located elsewhere, various police organizations established at this time played a particularly important role in the realm of public health. Initially founded as a separate ministry, later absorbed into the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Russian police administration was divided into three parts, the executive, economic, and medical.ll The latter two both dealt with food and health in various ways. The economic police had responsibility for oversight of food stores, for food supplies more generally, and for prices. In addition, the prikazy obshchestvennogo prizreniia were moved under its purview. The medical police were initially given significant oversight of doctors and medicines.12 During the next decades this administrative organization was altered. While central responsibility for medicine was consolidated into the Ministry of Internal Affairs, local civil administrations were given responsibility to

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oversee local food quality; their medical bureaucrats were to ensure that food supplies did not harm the local population. 13 By the mid-nineteenth century, a complex network of administrative bodies had responsibility for various aspects of public health, while the number of medical personnel remained strained and insufficient for full coverage.1 4 Ensuring the quality and healthfulness of food and drink was one of the important roles of public health workers in Russia. Laws and directives on fighting epidemics and disease were certainly more prominent, but even those laws often touched on the quality of food. Standard medical knowledge of the time believed in a link between diet and infectious diseases, agreeing, as the well-known author Doctor K. I. Grum-Grzhimailo put it, that diseases like "cholera and typhoid fever most of all proceed from errors in diet."ls As cholera, in particular, passed through the country, the state began to place additional controls on the quality of food and drink. Individuals caught knowingly selling spoiled food faced significant fines and punishment. According to a law of 1839, state peasants could be fined 25 to SO silver rubles for the infraction. 16 A few years later, another set of laws made punishments harsher: now a first offence merited a 30ruble fine, a second double that, and a third brought the loss of trading rightsY In addition, a number of authors published guides to food inspection aimed at both a private and a professional audience. In 1827, Dr. Ivan Zatsepin published a translation of a leading German work, Peter Josef Schneider's On Measures of the Medical Police, but added relatively few comments linking the original to Russian realities.ls In 1842 the doctor and bureaucrat Karl Geling published the first guide to medical policing according to Russian laws; he incorporated directives from the state with foreign works on medical oversight to give instructions to other inspectors. Although he covered a wide variety of subjects, he clearly felt that among the most basic duties of medical personnel was oversight of food supplies: "Due to the extraordinary influence that the quality of vital supplies and, in general, the elements of popular diet turns out to have on public health, the aforementioned determination of the quality of supplies is made, in medical terms, extraordinarily important."19 Practically, this kind of oversight meant watching out for multiple possible problems: foods that had simply gone bad, foods that had been damaged by misuse or greed, and popular misunderstandings of the role of food quality in health. Obviously, certain foods, when spoiled or carelessly chosen or prepared, could negatively affect people's health. Geling digested many foreign authors' works in order to present his readers with the basic issues facing public servants watching over food supplies. Oversight of meat addressed multiple concerns: overly thin animals; "slovenly handling of meat"; unseasonable use of meat; sick animals or carcasses sold as sources of meat; and bad salting or smoking.zo Some of these issues were obvious. Diseased animals could spread sickness, and peasants had been known to try to

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pass such animals off as healthy. 21 Slaughterhouses and butchers had long been held to standards of cleanliness by law.zz Other issues were more difficult to enforce. Some signs of spoiled meat were obvious; as one buyers' guide warned, customers should avoid meat "if [it] is kept improperly, if it is soiled with dirt, covered with mucus, too soft, with an unpleasant odor, not of a reddish color, dried out, not marbled in places with fat, [or] purposely colored with blood."Z3 But unless meat showed these obvious signs, it was difficult to identify unhealthy samples with current medical knowledge. Fish, according to Geling, was yet more dangerous to popular health than meat. As proof, he described "some kind of special toxicity in fish, the reason for which, as of now, is not yet discovered." Geling noted that although there were no poisonous fish in Russia, "several fish, nonetheless, are considered dangerous."24 The medical police had to be ever vigilant, to watch out for fish that was itself dangerous, perhaps at a particular time of year, to ensure that methods of catching fish were healthy; and to see that fish was properly preserved. Geling also recommended significant oversight of grains and vegetables because of their centrality to Russian diets and the possible consequences of their poor quality. He discussed problems that might affect grain, whether raw or milled, stored or fresh, from the ripeness of grain to the methods of harvesting and processing used. In particular, he called for oversight of rye, due in part to its ubiquity in Russian fields, but also due to the grain's susceptibility to ergot. Geling focused on only some of the possible side effects of ergot contamination: convulsions, hallucinations, and gangrene.zs Others, though, drew attention to the possible medical use of ergot-it is a powerful abortifacient-as an object of concern.z6 While Geling felt that strong oversight of raw grain best ensured good flour and bread, he still believed that bread, "as one of the most important parts of popular sustenance, should be given constant and strict attention."27 In particular, he believed that a law then in force only for St. Petersburg-requiring bakers to have certification-ought to be extended to the rest of Russia, as bakers had ultimate responsibility for the quality of their ingredients and products. He also suggested increasing oversight of those involved in the bread trade other than bakers themselves, for their malfeasance or error could cause serious problems.zs Similarly, because edible vegetables, particularly mushrooms, could so easily be confused with other poisonous plants, Geling also recommended particular oversight of vegetable sellers, from the construction of their stalls to the wares they sold. Geling drew on the legal basis for such inspections here more than in almost any other part of his discussion.z9 Falsification, adulteration, or other frauds were the central issue with many food products. Geling warned that spoiled meat was often unscrupulously hidden in sausages or minces and brought up the additional possibility of "abuse on the part of Jewish butchers." To explain this, Geling provided a detailed explanation of kosher butchering and the differences

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between kosher and non-kosher meats. Possible abuses included old meat sold as kosher, non-kosher meat sold as good, and kosher slaughtering and sales in spaces other than legal slaughterhouses.JO For other foods, adulteration was a prime concern. Milk owed its quality to the cows from which it came, but unscrupulous merchants might well damage even good-quality milk. Water, flour, or egg yolks might add weight or thickness to milk, and lime or potash were intended to stop milk from souring. Fat, sand, salt, potatoes, or dyes appeared in butter, adding weight or color. As Geling noted, even when additives were not actively unhealthy (and he generally felt the most destructive forms of adulteration were essentially unknown in Russia), medical inspectors had a duty to preserve the purity of food products; public health meant more than simply rooting out sources of harm.3 1 It meant actively promoting public well-being on even a somewhat abstract level by identifying other forms of fraud. Herring, for example, required special attention, in part because so much of it was imported, and its place of origin affected not only quality but price. To help his readers identify falsification, Geling listed the various marks placed on casks of herring from different countries and warned of possible fraud. 32 Another possible problem facing public health professionals was popular practice and superstition. Geling believed that one of the best ways to ensure popular health was to improve public knowledge of health matters. By publishing circulars, branches of the Russian state called attention to particular health subjects, and medical writers addressed others in journals and books. Over and over, medics reported that Russian peasants were far too likely to feed their children-and especially their infants-inappropriate foods. According to a staff medic named Nechaev, the top causes of infant mortality in Russia were food related: primarily the soska (a rag pacifier filled with partially chewed foods sometimes given to infants immediately after birth), but also the habit of feeding infants cow or goat milk, or even solid foods, too early. These practices were described and decried by state officials and other medical practitioners, who found in the soska a distinct sign of Russian backwardness.33 Several medical writers also felt that peasants were not alone in their unhealthy superstitions. Elite women might avoid the soska but were nonetheless known to feed their infants chamomile brews and herbal tonics instead of breast milk. Efforts to promote breast-feeding among the elite noted that such care would "prepare for the State good and healthy citizens."34 At other times the state focused on more specific evils. For example, Geling gave his readers a number of lessons on how to improve their diets. One of them was the then-accepted rule that "freshly baked, and especially hot bread [should] not be eaten." According to Geling, this medical rule had been the subject of a circular sent out by the minister of internal affairs himself, later republished in the ministry's journal.35

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Published accounts of death by food were one striking method of educating the public about the possible dangers lurking in apparently benign meals. Medical journals had covered the topic earlier, but through the mid-1840s the Journal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs frequently published accounts of bizarre food-related deaths, giving abstract state concern over public health tabloid-style publicity. One particular worry was uncooked salted fish, especially uncooked salted beluga. In 1838 the Journal published an official circular sent out by the minister of internal affairs on just this subject. The circular warned of the danger inherent in such fish, described elsewhere as "fish poison," and advised "landlords, priests and local peasant officials" of their duty to inform peasants under their watch to avoid consuming it.36 Later accounts were far more didactic and frustrated. The deadly consequences of consuming raw salted fish could be easily avoided by washing it three times in hot water or, better, boiling it. And yet, as an anonymous author put it, many ignored the simple and often stated rule that unwashed salted fish "is poison," and therefore died due to their "incomprehensible indifference to the most simple safety measures."3 7 Other articles focused on the danger of poisonous mushrooms, a danger made all the more serious because mushrooms were such an important part of Russian diet. Articles published in the medical newspaper called the Friend of Health were generally restrained and scientific, but a series of accounts in the Journal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were far more graphic, eventually featuring accounts of entire noble families cut down by their mistaken consumption of poisonous mushrooms.3s The public warnings were sometimes quite serious but often consisted simply of news of the bizarre or unusual. The Friend of Health published an article on foreign accounts of exotic poisonous fish, not an issue of particular relevance to even an elite Russian audience. The Journal did it one better; not only did it cover "fish poison," but at one point it also reported on two unusual and tabloid-ready cases of anglers felled by freshly caught live fish. In both cases, as the anglers held the fish in their teeth (their hands were occupied elsewhere), the fish wriggled free-and slid down the men's throats. In one case, the affected man died of asphyxiation, while in the other the affected boy's father attempted to cut the fish out, killing the boy in the process,39 Even the medical journal was not immune to covering the fantastic. It discussed the consequences of overindulgence in more unusual foods like walnuts or oysters and warned its readers of the consequences of drinking too much tea via the example of a man who, after drinking thirty cups of strong black tea within three hours, began to laugh constantly and quote poetry. 4° For a number of years in the 1840s, as part of its regular coverage of "mortality from imprudence," the Journal described a wild assortment of food-related death. While these articles were particularly concerned with deaths due to drunkenness, whether through alcohol poisoning or through stupid secondary acts, they also reported on death by bone, by cabbage, by beef, by a pirog, or by gluttony.4I

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The reports seem to take concern for food quality out of the realm of serious public health initiative and into the realm of the inconsequential, but a deeper sense of the importance of the relationship between food and health underlay all the discussions. Clearly, food had a huge effect on individual health, and just as clearly the state, and perhaps especially the would-be activist state of Nicholas I, wanted to improve that effect as best it could. But Nicholas's state was underfunded, understaffed, and overly and complexly centralized. Although in principle it had significant authority over public health, in practice it lacked the resources to make that authority real.4Z Medical inspectors could only do so much to oversee the quality of food for sale in Russia; their ranks were thin, they were tasked with many jobs and strained by the waves of epidemic diseases that hit Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tabloid-style accounts were a cheap and easy method of bringing attention to a subject deemed important. They did not, however, diminish the sense that Russian citizens and the Russian state needed to pay attention to diet for the health of the whole country, a sense that received its ultimate expression in investigations of basic subsistence. DEFINING SUBSISTENCE

Although public health encompassed many subjects, its most basic questions involved mere subsistence; thus, for some authors the state's efforts to ensure sustenance through new crops or grain storage were in themselves public health issues. A scientific question, however, underscored the following query: how much of which foods did a person need to eat in a day? In other words, what was subsistence? The question was all the more important because in the eyes of some nineteenth-century Russians, peasant diets, even "normal" ones, were deeply problematic. Outright famine might be rare, but diets, it was increasingly believed, were barely adequate at the best of times. One anonymous correspondent of the Department of Agriculture of the Ministry of State Domains brought up just this point in a discussion of "the possibility of improving the condition of agriculture and the agriculturist in Russia." He wrote, in part: "seeing the labor of the farm worker, it is impossible to appreciate sufficiently how human strength can withstand such prolonged and unceasing efforts, and it is especially made completely improbable when one sees on what the laborer is fed and strengthens his abilities."43 For this correspondent, the question of sustenance seemed the most important reason to think about the products of the land. Agriculture was physically demanding labor, and new techniques and crops often initially increased labor. Peasant labor seemed doubly incomprehensible in light of the limits of the diet. Given his hard work, the mostly starving peasant might actually be the norm, not the exception.

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As a result, the starting point for those interested in popular sustenance and public health was a complication of the deceptively simple question of daily dietary requirements: did nationality, in this case Russianness, affect those requirements? Beginning in the late eighteenth century, opinion wavered. According to Ivan Boltin, not a medical specialist, nutritional needs did not depend on a given body's specific nationality but might be affected by that body's specific location. Writing in 1788, he noted, "in the quantity of food one does not find a big difference between a Frenchman and a German, an Englishman and a Russian, if one and the other are comparable in body size and health; although it is also sure that Northern peoples eat more than residents of southern countries."44 Nationality was not itself important, but climate might be. Northern climes, for example, demanded heartier foods and portions. Thus, different peoples might have different needs based on their particular circumstances, if not their physiological makeup. In the mid-1840s, the minister of state domains set the Scientific Committee of the Department of Agriculture the task of investigating human nutritional needs with an emphasis on differences between peoples and individuals. In particular, the committee was to inform him of "the quantity of nutrients needed for people at different ages, of the determination of how many nutrients are included in various sorts of things used by man as food, and ... how much of what is necessary to supply for the daily subsistence of a working man, a soldier, a primary-school student, a topographer, a hunter, and so forth." 45 The Scientific Committee took this even further, suggesting a whole series of possible differences. They concluded that [i]t would be useful to make experiments about the quantity of food needed by man in various climates, because in the north a man needs an incomparably greater quantity of food and, besides that, [food] of a different composition versus an inhabitant of a Southern country. Peoples who eat almost only fish need a greater quantity of food than other peoples, because of the insignificant amount of nutritious parts in fish .... The times of fasting also demand special attention, [and] finally it is impossible not to mention that man's activities, his total health or his failing condition, regional habits, harvests and bad harvests of grain, high prices of some foods and low prices for others has not a little influence on the choice and quantity of food; and above that, a thinking man, accustomed to mental activities, usually needs less food and fewer nutrients than a man, whose life is in the category of simple animal .... 46

Climate, profession, local foods, all affected the judgment of sufficient sustenance, and limited the applicability of foreign science to Russian circumstances.

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Practically, of course, the real concern of the state was the subsistence of its peasants, and by extension its soldiers, and thus many of these other concerns were simply dismissed. From Boltin on, most basic accounts of subsistence assumed a working Russian of "normal" size and strength. But even examining only peasants proved difficult. Experts attempted to be both descriptive and scientifically prescriptive about what peasants needed and actually ate. If these two goals did not exactly conflict, they made uneasy partners. The more detailed a description of basic sustenance, the more difficult it was to create a prescription from it. In 1835, F. Maier listed the many foods he considered necessary for full peasant sustenance in a book on peasant oversight commissioned by the Moscow Agricultural Society. According to Maier, peasant well-being required sufficient but undefined quantities of "grain (flour and groats), vegetables (cabbage and such), salt, meat, Lenten oil, milk, and alcohol." 4 7 This was a descriptive account, but not a prescriptive one. I. Chernyvskii suggested a more specific list of necessities: over the course of a year a "typical" family of three adults and two children needed ten chetverti of rye, "cabbage and other vegetables must be in sufficient quantities from their own gardens," plus meat, milk, farmer's cheese, and eggs from their own animals. 48 The most detailed examination of peasant sustenance came from Ivan Vil'kins, in his description of the peasant household budget. Vil'kins listed specific quantities of foods necessary for "adequate sustenance": rye flour, meal, wheat flour, cabbage, potatoes, onions, assorted root vegetables, flax seeds, vegetable oil, butter, milk, eggs, malt, salt, and meat, described as (for a family of three adults and two children) three sheep, fifteen chickens, and one calf. 49 In principle the Vil'kins account could have been accepted as a basic standard of subsistence for peasants, at least of that northern region. In practice, however, it was difficult to consider actually using such detailed descriptions in any prescriptive way. Especially when tied to state interests and prescriptions, accounts focused on the most basic elements of subsistence, bread and meat. Even now, descriptions of subsistence farming often focus only on grain; modern estimates suggest that a physiologically adequate diet requires between 418 and 517 lbs. of unmilled grain per person per year (1.1 to 1.4 lbs. per day). The variance accounts for body mass and climate; as Boltin had claimed, colder climates require more caloric intake. so The subsistence levels that nineteenth-century authors proposed were for the most part at least as generous as modern estimates. Boltin, for example, suggested that the average Russian workingman ate about 1.8 lbs. of bread a day but could survive on half that amount for short periods.sl Although one anonymous author suggested a similar reckoning, in the nineteenth century official investigations more often found Boltin's numbers low.sz When the Ministry of Internal Affairs visited the question of subsistence in the early 1840s, it too focused on peasants and grain. As it discussed means to bring grain stores to estate serfs, the ministry decided that the

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average demand for daily sustenance was 2. 7 lbs. of bread per person, assuming some consumption of vegetables and meat, as well. That amounted to 2.75 chetverti of grain per person per year.s3 Other branches of the ministry used slightly different estimates. Governors' reports, for example, used an estimate of average yearly grain consumption in order to judge whether harvests were sufficient. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, governors estimated 2 chetverti of grain per person per year, an amount well below that estimated in the 1840s. By the middle of the century, however, estimates had been raised even higher. A general survey of agriculture in Russia suggested that the best estimate was 5 chetverti per person, to account for loss during milling and feed for animals.s4 The experts consulted by the Scientific Committee of the Ministry of State Domains looked at a slightly broader definition of sustenance, one that included meat as well as bread. Doctor E. N. Smel'skii, a founder of the St. Petersburg Society of Russian Doctors, estimated rather higher nutritional needs in terms of bread and meat. According to Smel'skii, each day an adolescent male of 12 to 20 years required 1.4 to 1.8 lbs. of rye bread and 0.9 lb. of beef, while an adult man required 1.8 to 2.7 lbs. of bread and 0.9 to 1.4 lbs. of beef. These proportions were inexact, he noted, and other foods could well be substituted. Potatoes, for example, could substitute for bread, but it took four parts potato to substitute for one part bread. Butter or fat could substitute for meat because, as he noted, they could increase the nutrient value of vegetable foods. Smel'skii also gave two caveats. First, he "considered it impossible to determine with mathematical precision how much of which nutrients was necessary for the daily sustenance of a man." And second, of his prescriptions he noted, "of course, it is impossible to explain this by showing a chemical reason, but it is confirmed by daily experience."ss Daily experience served as the basis for the estimate that the Scientific Committee found most convincing. Prince V. F. Odoevskii reported on the actual provisioning of his orphan asylum. Each day youths were given 3.6 oz. meat, 14.4 oz. bread, and 2.9 oz. of cereal or vegetables. Non-working adults were fed 7.2 oz. meat, 1.4 lbs. bread, and 3.6 oz. of cereal. Working adults received the most: 14.4 oz. meat, 1.8lbs. bread, and 4.8 oz. of cereal or vegetables. Furthermore, he noted, "no amount of plant matter can ever replace a pound of meat, and no amount of vegetable matter can ever replace a pound of baked bread, or porridge. To preserve the health and very life of a man, animal-vegetable food is necessary."s6 Odoevskii's ideas of proper daily diet proved to be those considered most adequate and acceptable to the members of the committee. Although the committee decided it could never truly answer the question of proper diet, largely because further experiment would require access to imprisoned criminals and would be possible only by cooperating with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the figures of Odoevskii seemed the most reasonable and were accepted as a good guide for undefined future action.57

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TABLE 2-Food allotments of different countries' armies

Country

Kind of bread

Daily allowance

Rye equivalent

Meat allowance per day (oz)

France

wheat

1.5 Ib

1.8Ib

11.2

Prussia

rye

1.5 Ib

1.5 Ib

8

Austria

mixed

1.9 Ib

2.0 Ib

9.6

Sardinia

wheat

1.4Ib

1.5 Ib

6.4

Bavaria

wheat

1.5 Ib

1.8Ib

9.6

Belgium

wheat

1.5 Ib

1.8Ib

9.6

Russia

rye

2.7Ib

2.7Ib

6.4 (guards) 3.2 (army)

Source: V. Anichkov, Voennoe khoziaistvo (St. Petersburg: Nikolai Denotkin, 1860), 70.

For some authors, particularly those associated with Russia's military needs, ideas of subsistence were deeply intertwined with Russian national strength. Boltin, for example compared Russian and French consumption patterns. For him, the comparison clearly showed Russian superiority. Frenchmen, he claimed, ate barely half the Russian norm, and furthermore, Paris was among the most impoverished places on earth, where starvation was far more common than in any Russian town or village.ss Experts cited by the Scientific Committee also sought to compare Russia to foreign countries, not without difficulty. In particular, a Colonel Bul'mering noted problems in comparing not only the abstract needs but also the actual realities of French and English industrial workers with Russian peasants.s9 This specific comparison also arose in V. Anichkov's text on military economy. Here, Anichkov looked specifically at Russia's military supplies, comparing Russian provisions with those of several other countries (table 2). According to Anichkov, Russian soldiers were fed far greater quantities of bread and grain than their fellows in western Europe, but generally far less meat.6o Furthermore, Anichkov linked this difference to larger differences between nations. As he put it, "the habits of a people do not everywhere depend on only climatologic conditions, for the quantity and quality of food consumed depends on population density, on differences in industry and especially on the development of national wealth. Thus in densely populated places, with factory production, with the development of prosperity in a people, it uses more meat and less bread."6 1

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Anichkov's presentation was fairly direct, presenting what he believed to be simple fact without rhetorical embellishment. But the situation he described-because it agreed with many earlier accounts of peasant consumption patterns-presented a troubling image to a country that had just fared so badly in the Crimean War. Dietetics was the field that sought to discern just how troubled the state should be. DIETETIKA-NUTRITION AND RUSSIAN

MEDICAL AUTHORITY The Russian state centered its attention on basic questions of subsistence, but dieticians looked not simply at how much food was necessary, but at how the specifics of diet could affect everyday health. For some Russian dieticians, the concerns of the state were minor. As Akim Charukovskii put it, "We continually make a fuss over the acquisition of a piece of bread, over the sufficiency and benefits of the necessities of life, and generally do not think of how to improve and ease the digestion of that bread in the stomach, of how to make use of these fruits of our labor with good for our health!"62 Generally, medical texts covered diet and dietetics prominently, often giving it pride of place for reasons suggested by one of the first articles to appear in the medical journal Friend of Health: Hippocrates himself, the founder of the science, acquaints us with dietetics, a useful science which is necessary for all conditions, with the following truth, said by him: "the actions of dietetic materials are constant, the actions of medicines are transient." From this we conclude, that the first materials must be essentially effective in preserving health and reaching old age, while medicine is only subsidiary. 63

In essence, practitioners of the science of "dietetics" sought to connect health and eating, and in particular to prescribe particular diets to maximize health based on scientific knowledge.64 As they did this, they found the act of combining prescriptive goals based on western science and dietetic principles with the Russian realities they saw around themselves difficult, but also capable of giving them enhanced authority as the only ones who could properly guide their Russian audience. In some ways the most successful, and certainly the most fiery, of the nineteenth-century voices that demanded Russian dietetics for Russian bodies was the now long-forgotten doctor Ivan Zatsepin.6s Broadly trained, he had studied in St. Petersburg and Moscow, served as a staff doctor of the Moscow Cadet Corps, and taught at the therapeutic clinic of the Moscow Academy. He investigated modern European medicine at first hand, and as one of the early Russian medical writers, published a series of books as well as the Therapeutic Journal, an early medical periodical. 66 Because it initially

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consisted entirely of his own translations, compilations, and original work, the journal became a vehicle for Zatsepin's particular views of medicine and Russianness. And Zatsepin's views were notably original. According to the doctor, his very choice to use the journal as a vehicle for translations of foreign works was an ideological one. Russian might had saved western Europe over and over again from barbarians; for its sacrifice, Russia deserved European enlightenment. However, if Russians had to learn European languages to study medicine, their Russianness would be somehow compromised, tainted by the corruption of the West. His translations would save his younger compatriots from such a fate. Zatsepin was guided by the principle that Russians ought to recognize their own worth, and not listen slavishly to western opinion, whatever its supposedly scientific basis: Russians should have authority within Russia. Many of his writings were eventually collected in the multi-volume publication entitled An Attempt to Bring Closer Medical Understandings of Man with Inspirations of Sacred Truth and the Philosophy of Health. As the title suggests, for Zatsepin, Russia's unique role had much to do with a particular conception of the sacred. First, Zatsepin believed that Russians had to free themselves from foreign knowledge. He described the "dangerous superstitions of Russian scholars in general and of medics in particular," all of which focused on the relationship of Russia and the West: I. They think that we Russians are all still infants in the sciences and therefore must limit ourselves only to the imitation of enlightened foreigners. II. They think that current western European enlightenment has been established on firm bases, which we are not yet able to see, and therefore must simply trust in their firmness and with awe accept the fruits of foreign enlightenment. III. Many think as if we Russians are not even capable by nature of western European enlightenment.67

Rather than slavishly following the West, Russians had to recognize their particular role in the world, their particular gifts. He quoted a German philosopher as proof that Russians were the "only true Christians in our time ... here will develop and be revealed a new, true instructive look at things, a new enlightenment, different even from the western."6B In other places Zatsepin discussed the relationship between Russia and the West in yet more forceful terms, arguing that Russians needed to guard against encroaching western civilization, which was destroying the native Slavic purity of the land. In fact, he wrote, western influences were essentially colonizing Russia: as India was to England, so Russia was to Germany. 69 Zatsepin had a particular interest in diet and its influence on both the human body and the human spirit. Initially, he used his journal to keep Russians informed of the generally accepted medical opinions of the day.7°

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However, as his original writing began to appear more and more frequently, his own rather unconventional views became clearer. Zatsepin believed that what was in essence the Russian peasant diet ought to serve as a model for all Russians. He recognized that many believed Russia's peasants to be poorly fed and inclined toward drunkenness but protested that these were unfair and untrue accusations. Zatsepin defended Russian peasants against the charge of drunkenness, claiming that "according to the evidence of foreign writers of various centuries, from the 6th to the 19th, the Russian people has always distinguished themselves from other peoples by their sobriety and moral and physical strength.'' 71 And Zatsepin based his prescription for an ideal diet for all Russians on his description of a sober, strong peasantry guided by the Orthodox Church. He began to develop this idea in journal articles, which he later published separately as On Fast-Day and Meat-Eating-Day Foods in a Medical Sense (and again later as part of his Attempt). He used Orthodox fasting rules to guide his approach to the science of nutrition. At the start of the work, Zatsepin took issue with the reigning medical attitude that meat was the most nutritious, most necessary, and best food. According to him, this attitude was wrong. He believed that "the laws of organic life" proved that meat was not the most important of foods for man, and that furthermore, "this subject is itself the basis of national [narodnaia] dietetics, having such a decisive influence not only on social [obshchestvennoe] health, but even on national character itself."72 Zatsepin went on to prove the importance of vegetable matter in human diets; he looked well beyond Russia's boundaries for some points but for the most part found proof in Russian examples. Thus, for example, he noted that "among our peasants many old men and women, guided by internal feeling, forever refuse meat-based foods, feeding themselves milk, eggs, and various vegetable foods: from this they feel always fresh and easy. Such people for the most part live a long time." 73 Based on such observations, Zatsepin presented a section on "Dietetics and Rules of Life of the Russian People." The act of avoiding meat, something made necessary by the strictures of Orthodox fasting rules, was central to Zatsepin's understanding of peasant food habits. He believed that the "rules of Russian Dietetics are contained in our popular sayings and especially in the testament of Vladimir Monomakh ... the Russian people, following these rules, always distinguish themselves by their moral and physical strength." 74 In later publications (or re-publications), Zatsepin continued to push Russians of all social groups toward a more vegetable-based diet; furthermore, he did so out of a clear sense that Russians had to take control of their own fate, even in the world of medicine. He also recognized that this was a controversial point of view; by the third edition of the work, he referenced a series of reviews that had appeared in various journals, many extraordinarily negative.

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Zatsepin's ideas were harshly reviewed because they stood in direct opposition to the main stream of medical thought in the mid-nineteenth century. Although most dieticians published their findings in journals that addressed a literate, elite audience, their evaluation of the Russian peasant diet overshadowed much of their work. By the end of the 1850s, scientific knowledge was suggesting that the normal peasant diet, based as it was on carbohydrates, might be "sufficient" on some level but was probably not ideally healthy. One statement of this point of view appeared in the Friend of Health in 1857. An anonymous author wrote that humans needed certain quantities of different kinds of nutrients, in particular "respiratory substances (starch, sugar, gum, fat) and plastic (nitrous compounds, like: fibrin and gluten, albumen, casein or syrovin)." Grains and other carbohydrates supplied all these elements, and thus a diet based primarily on carbohydrates could fulfill all these needs, at least in principle. However, such a diet would not be balanced or truly healthy. Instead, it would weigh down the stomach with far too many respiratory substances and would impede working ability. Separate sources of protein were necessaryJs Soon thereafter another medical author, A. M. Naumov, drew on detailed foreign research on the components of different foods and concluded much the same thing, that a diet of bread alone-or even primarily-was nutritionally problematic, and even dangerous.76 This conclusion led Naumov to take a strong stance against a current health fad, vegetarianism. He described vegetarianism as an idea out of England, "a country for the most part eccentric," that had been "founded on the rules of social economy and morality and wanted to protect the lives of animals." In Naumov's view, such goals were simply ridiculous, as modern science suggested that a vegetable diet could not be healthy for either the individual or society. As he put it, "weakness of the physical character [which to his mind could not but follow from a meatless diet] will naturally be accompanied by weakness of the moral and spiritual life." Furthermore, vegetarianism would stand against all human history, against human nature, and would even hurt industry, so much of which had some connection with animal husbandryJ7 Although Naumov was particularly vehement in his disagreement with vegetarianism, his statement was in some ways a culmination of a series of complaints about the idea of choosing to rely on vegetable foods for diet. For example, Akim Charukovskii had earlier written of the negative side-effects of a largely vegetarian diet: "from long-standing and exclusive consumption of mucilaginous materials, a man is made puffy, lazy, weak, pale, cool, and gets a tendency for cachexia, scurvy, scrofula, dropsy, and so forth." 7B Other doctors supplied lists of symptoms that might not have been quite as long but similarly indicted vegetarian diets as essentially unhealthy.79 The other side of the anti-vegetarian argument focused on the benefits of meat. Meat was healthy, according to the leading scientists of the time,

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and diets high in meat were simply better than those that relied on grains and vegetables.so The prolific medical author Aleksandr Nikitin, for example, believed that meat was most necessary in cold climates like Russia's, particularly in winter. In his words, meat "made possible the preservation of health and firmness of strength" in such times of extremity.s1 Other writers echoed Nikitin and suggested that meat was generally more important to people from colder climates, while grains might possibly be adequate for those living in warmer surroundings.sz Perhaps the strongest statement came from Akim Charukovskii. In his examination of "military hygiene," Charukovskii described meat as "the essential and most important article of army rations, for it ... is the principle nourishing substance, more truly than other substances building the strength of soldiers exhausted by maneuvers or by long stretches at attention."B3 Elsewhere, Charukovskii noted that pork was the most important food for the peasantry, though it was also a food considered downright dangerous in warm climates, and less nutritious than beef. Although foreign doctors might judge pork as a lesser meat, in Russia pork was valuable: it was deemed nutritious enough, though admittedly less so than beef, it was able to assuage hunger for long periods, and it helped Russian peasants work harder than their foreign counterparts. 84 As in this description or in Anichkov's tables, the benefits of meat were often expressed in national terms, and individual national groups were deemed better, or stronger, because of diets rich in meat, or disparaged for the lack thereof.ss Even within Russia, one author claimed that "a piece of meat plays an important role in all peasant life: it measures the prosperity of peasants."B6 Because of the connections of meat with wealth and nationality, vegetarianism became a political point due to its apparent connection with the Russian peasantry. A particularly indignant description of the perils of vegetarianism appeared in a Russian review of John Smith's Fruits and Farinacea, the Proper Food of Man. Smith, in his "attempt to prove, from history, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, that the original, natural and best diet of man is derived from the vegetable kingdom," used the strength of Russian soldiers and peasants, who he claimed (with justification) ate little meat, as an example of the health of a vegetarian lifestyle. Smith wrote that "Russian soldiers are a strong people, this is unquestionable, and meanwhile their usual diet consists of bread (rye), cabbage, vegetable oil, porridge and salt. Russian peasants preserve to old age their astounding strength and cheerfulness of spirit; it is said, that they work twice as much as any other peasant, and meanwhile almost never know meat food." The Russian reviewer, Khr. Kozlov, found this claim problematic in several ways. While accepting the Englishman's praise of Russian soldiers, he had to disagree with Smith's basic tenets, rather believing that meat consumption was the key to health. Kozlov also tried to defend Russia against the charge of vegetarianism: "Russian peasants do

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not eat only bread and kvas, cabbage and radishes year round, but in meat-eating times their soups consist of shchi with a dollop of sour cream, eggs with kvas, kasha with butter or milk, farmer's cheese and sour milk; on holidays there is meat, too: in autumn and winter mutton and pork, and in summer chicken." However, even in his defense of Russia's meateating credentials, Kozlov had to moderate his claims: "I speak here of wealthy villages, which make up, however, a small proportion (and these people are stronger and more healthy); but many are of average, and even of poor condition, where there is no longer such prosperity."S 7 Kozlov ended up with a dilemma. While he had to recognize Smith's praise, he did not want to accept the label of Russia as a meatless society, for that suggested backwardness and poor health. But in order to prove his point about the healthfulness of meat, he had to recognize that many Russian peasants, even most peasants, were primarily vegetarian. The apparent schism between current medical thought and actual Russian practice caused other authors to perform curious feats of logic and reasoning. Some authors simply recommended that peasants eat more meat, without examining the means by which such a change might take place.ss Others emphasized the need for moderation in meat consumption, either through direct comparison with Russian examples (like Kozlov), or by suggesting that overindulging in meat could lead to disorders like "rotting fevers."S9 Although Zatsepin certainly developed the most extreme interpretation of diet and religion, and although voices crying out against vegetarianism were probably the more numerous, other writers linked peasant life, vegetarianism, and morality in positive ways. One anonymous author linked meat consumption to towns, where lived people who had "distanced themselves from a simple, natural condition."90 Others looked not simply to fasting, but to the benefits of religion more generally. Some laudatory statements of the benefits of simple foods were tied in with religion. Another anonymous medical writer suggested that the "peace of mind" acquired through the church combined with simple life to promote health.91 Several authors suggested that Orthodoxy's fasting periods served an important purpose not spiritually but practically, because they promoted moderation in meat consumption and other social and economic benefits.n Akim Charukovskii, who firmly believed in the importance of meat, also wrote that "the sainted fathers of our Church, the ancient wise law-givers ... founded the various fasts," with the result that their followers' bodies, as well as the earth itself, remained balanced and healthy. Not only did fasts help individuals maintain a moderate diet, they helped protect livestock during breeding season, thus ensuring continued prosperity for all.93 The physical logic of fasts to both individuals and the state appeared in other discussions, too. Karl Geling felt that humans "incline more toward animal foods, than vegetable, and, if that inclination was

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given free reign, it would have an effect on the moral life of man, would harden his habits, and would produce, at the same time, the devastation of domestic animals." In his mind, the avoidance of such problems was the reason that the church demanded fast periods, to save "not only the moral side of the people, but also in view of the state economy."94 In their search for prescriptive diets, some dieticians looked to the peasant diet as a model for all Russians. Their first task was to find commonalities between the divergent diets of Russians of different social backgrounds. It was obvious, however, that Russia's peasants and elite had such widely differing diets that comparison was nearly impossible. Rates of meat consumption were the best signs of this difference. Even in Anichkov's description of military rations the distinction is obvious. The guard ranks were allotted twice as much meat as were rank-and-file soldiers. This pattern held true in other military institutions, as well. In the 1840s, guidelines for provisioning military hospitals gave radically different rations for officers and common soldiers. Most officers received rye bread and wheat rolls, roast beef, additional beef in their shchi, oat kasha, and allotments of butter, salt, and kvas. A special recuperative menu called for veal or chicken instead of beef plus other sorts of kasha, like farina or pearl barley, but was otherwise similar.9s Most common soldiers received rye bread (wheat rolls only appeared as part of special, medically necessary diets), buckwheat kasha, smaller quantities of beef in shchi, and allotments of salt and kvas. Twice a week potatoes and onions replaced the beef and cabbage.96 According to these regulations, following or ignoring the Orthodox fasts created one of the major differences between common and elite diets. Certainly other differences were there, too. Officers were assumed to require wheat rolls, while soldiers were content with rye bread. But basically, soldiers were expected to follow Orthodox fasting regulations. Their base rations assumed two meatless days a week, in keeping with proper tradition. Officers could receive fast portions, too: plain shchi, poppyseed oil instead of butter, and fish when appropriate, but while soldiers were given almost no choice, the officers' fast menu was to be used only "when the illness allows it and when the sick one wishes it."97 For officers, the strictures of fasting were subject to the whims of personal fancy. The regulations do not simply assume that common soldiers follow the fast rules, but that such actions were their strong preference. The regulations include a note that common soldiers could receive non-fasting portions on fast days "if the sick one himself agrees to it, and if, according to the Doctor, the food is necessary for the condition of the sick."98 So ingrained was religious practice assumed to be that a doctor could not override a soldier and order him to consume meat on a day on which it was not allowed. Despite the obvious differences between social groups, Russian diets did share some traits that required attention from dieticians. In large

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part similarities had to do with foods that seemed uniquely common to Russia, and less so to other European countries. The hospital rations, for example, allotted both officers and common soldiers rye bread and shchi, two dishes considered necessary to a Russian of any social background. For dieticians, these Russian peculiarities had to be cleverly explained, because in some cases they stood in the face of current medical knowledge. For example, rye bread was an obviously important part of the Russian diet. So necessary was it that, according to Anichkov, in Russia "there have been examples, that when armies, located in the south of Russia, due to a lack of rye, have been given wheat bread, people have gotten sick due to its sole use. As a result of that, a law was made, that when there is a lack of rye, wheat may replace not more than one half its proportion."99 Because of this centrality, Russian medical writers often discussed rye before all other foods and were divided in their opinion of it. Those who followed western European medical fashion found rye inferior in nutrition to wheat, which was deemed easier to digest. According to this rationale, in order to reach the same level of nutrition, Russians had to consume more grain than those who ate primarily wheat. Others, however, felt rye was appropriate for Russia because it was "especially useful in winter and in the cold zones of the earth."loo For writers like these, the only real medical concern pertaining to rye was the quality of bread baked from it. With proper preparation, and with proper consumption, rye was perfectly healthy, although A. A. Sokolovskii noted that overly sour bread could trouble "some (but not Russian) overly sensitive stomachs."l0 1 judging rye as healthful also had far-reaching implications: if an appreciation for rye were to spread outside Russia's borders, Russia's grain producers and merchants might find vast new markets for their product. Cabbage was just as troubling a subject for Russian medical writers. In 1852, Ia. S. Chistovich published his translation of a French hygiene text and included copious comments of his own placed in footnotes. In some cases Chistovich intended to clarify some of the original author's arguments, or to bring in other ideas. But in most cases, he was "russifying" the text, bringing in his own opinions and those of other Russian medical figures.102 Thus, for example, he added common Russian foods to descriptions of families of foods: lapsha, a Russian noodle, to a discussion of pasta, and buckwheat to a discussion of grains more generally. While here Chistovich simply introduced Russian variants, in other places he actively "corrected" western ideas of diet and health. In particular, he addressed the vexed question of cabbage, that most Russian of vegetables. The French author noted that preserved cabbage "makes very poor food; besides the fact that it has little nutritive value, it is difficult to digest, it agitates, and continued use of it may upset the stomach and even bring about the actual inflammation of it; therefore one should never use it constantly."103 Although this seemed an unobjectionable sentence in its origi-

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nal context, to a Russian audience, such advice might cause serious concern. What would Russian life be without shchi, without the cabbage preserved for the winter each fall? Chistovich could not let the statement go unchallenged and included a footnote explaining his opinion of the French point of view: "in all likelihood, the author gives his opinion about cabbage simply from hearsay. In all of Russia those who eat shchi never complain about it, and even more would very unwillingly replace it with watery French soups. And sour or fermented cabbage? What could replace it for the Russian people?"l04 Not only was the ubiquitous cabbage troubling, but the Russian mode of preparing it received particular scrutiny. The general medical verdict was that fermentation or salting decreased the nutritive qualities of cabbage (and other vegetables) but improved their acidity, which was helpful in winter.1os In Russian texts, however, the benefits almost always outweighed the drawbacks. One argument suggested that preservation made cabbage easier to digest, while others simply ignored any possible negative resultsJ06 In a tract about military supplies, Roman Chetyrkin noted that preserved cabbage was "as necessary for the maintenance of the health of Russian soldiers as all the preceding foods," which included rye bread, kasha, meats, and milk.l07 Similarly, Dr. Grum-Grzhimailo included cabbage in a list of the best vegetables to feed children, whose digestion, he noted elsewhere, ought to be protected.lOS One of the most common uses of cabbage was shchi, which received attention on its own. Shchi and borshch were considered nutritious enough, but also difficult to digest for those of tender constitutionJ09 Cabbage was also described as a positive addition to diet, not simply something normal. It might be used medicinally, as when doctors prescribed sour cabbage as a remedy for scurvy.no For Russian medical writers, cabbage was simply a good food; the closest any came to criticizing the ubiquitous vegetable was to comment that it might be a bit difficult to digest. Its centrality to actual Russian diets trumped any foreign questions. Dairy products were often considered particularly Russian, but the varieties consumed in Russia, and the variance in medical judgment of those varieties, showed both commonalities and differences of Russia's social groups. On the one hand, milk was generally considered an essential food, one of the most nutritious and natural things for people to consume. Russian medical texts noted that milk, farmer's cheese (tvorog), whey, and butter (in small quantities) were all easily digested and healthy. Dairy products were also the subject of attention from medics looking for restorative potions. At various times, fads for milk cures produced pamphlets and longer works touting such miracle cures, often with explicit ties to their peasant sources. F. Inozemtsev, for example, claimed that the very idea for using milk as a medicine came from a peasant saying.m On the other hand, cured cheeses were deemed far less beneficial. Indeed, one

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doctor noted that only those who had already spoiled their digestion found cured cheeses tasty, and that only a very few gastronomes could appreciate the ne plus ultra of cured cheeses-the notoriously pungent Limburger,112 In the eyes of others, cheeses could be actively dangerous to those living sedentary lives.m Such a description certainly has its nationalist component. Cured cheeses, or at least those most often described in cookbooks, agricultural texts, and medical tomes, were foreign. Limburger, Cheddar, Stilton, Parmesan all appeared on the tables of Russia's elite, if not of its peasants. Therefore, the line drawn between different sorts of dairy products was in many ways a national line. According to these Russian doctors, "native," "peasant," or "Russian" dairy products were healthy, while those from abroad damaged Russian digestion. The differences between the diets of various Russian social groups, and in particular the supposed moderation and national character of peasant diets, provided a source for one type of ideal diet prescribed by many authors. According to these authors, Russia's peasants, whose diets were characterized by the term "simplicity," had something important to teach Russia's elite, who were ruining their health with inappropriate and pernicious luxury. Journalists and other authors credited simple-even "coarse"foods with supplying the supposedly extraordinary strength of the Russian peasant and soldier. Others felt that a natural moderation practiced by peasants was the true key to health and long life; S. V. Drukovtsov, for example, noted that peasants who were content to eat rye bread and water managed to live "to deepest old age." 114 Therefore, according to authors like V. Deriker, living a "natural" life like that of a peasant was far better and healthier than living the artificial life forced upon people by modern society.m Elite stomachs suffered from overly complicated foods; instead, they ought to look to simple peasant diets for better health. Or, as an anonymous journalist advised, "experience shows that a simple way of life, simple food for children, are the best means to the continual maintenance of health."116 Of course, various authors noted that it was difficult to preserve the old ways. According to them, peasants were too receptive to the lures of high society-or to simple gluttony-when faced with abundance. As one article put it, "the working class of people falls apart in health more quickly because they seek not quality, but quantity in food. It is possible to say that in them hunger continues to the extent that the stomach does not fill itself completely. But the less nutritious the food, the faster hunger returns; and therefore, workers are ready to eat ceaselessly."11 7 F. Maier warned of possible problems in peasant diets brought about by insufficient oversight from above. He wrote, "random abundance of some sort of unusual food, like fish, mushrooms, or fruits, often leads to illness. It is impossible to enumerate all such occurrences, when peasants need a warning to be careful."Irs "Moderation" became an important word in

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health writing, as in other prescriptive writings of the time. Indeed, virtually entire books were written on the dangers of "immoderacy."ll9 Although peasants supposedly personified the quality of moderation, the practice was urged on those facing new markets and new foods. According to A. P. Zablotskii's guide to peasant life, "First of all one must remember, that health is maintained through moderation in food and drink, through carefulness and cleanliness."Izo Peasants might normally be moderate in their consumption, but increasing abundance challenged this habit. Holding on to old ways, to simplicity, seemed key to keeping healthy in the face of the nineteenth-century world. For many, the problem of immoderacy-at least among the elite-had been severely increased by one simple thing: the art of cooking. For example, as one author noted, "if the art of cooking, at the present time developed to utmost delicacy, is very pleasing to our senses, then on the other hand it is the greatest enemy of our health, one of the most pernicious inventions."IZI Why? If food tastes good, it becomes more difficult to eat moderately. Prokhor Charukovskii noted that the key for healthy digestion, known by "good housewives and cooks," was to avoid complicated preparations and more than three separate dishes in a single meal; not quite peasant simplicity, perhaps, but simpler than some elite meals. His brother agreed, at much greater length, and proposed similarly streamlined meals as a key to health.lZZ Others took a more measured approach to cooking: "from [foods], culinary art already prepares many dishes, simple and complex, and varies them endlessly, for the satisfaction of the demands of our taste and its lovers, despite the fact, that nature has marked for man, for his existence, health, and strength, food that is as much as possible simple and monotonous, but of good quality and sufficiently nutritious." 1Z3 Certainly some medics pointed out that the elite did not have to imitate their peasants' diet; it made sense that different lifestyles needed different foods, and the diet of townspeople ought to be more "pleasant" than that of peasants. Others, like Parfenii Engalychev and Nikitin, simply noted that too much moderation could be just as dangerous as immoderacy in eating.IZ4 Although these authors do not explicitly mention it, the concern with cuisine and moderation was in a sense a hidden way to discuss a concern with the foreign. A frequently reprinted lubok image shows exactly that. The illustration of a western-clothed noble stuffing himself as literally little people serve him was a copy. The French print that served as inspiration used the Rabelaisian figure "Gargantua" to critique the luxury of the reign of Louis XVI, and Russian engravers later copied the print numerous times. While the image associated foreign foods with immoderacy, many individual writers associated French cuisine, in particular, with the idea of "delicacy." For example, V. P. Burnashev, in one of his children's books, compared French and Russian foods in terms of delicacy:

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The dangers of immoderacy, and the dangers of the West-"The Eat-All and DrinkAll." This late eighteenth-century version of an oft-repeated lubok print illustrates the story of gluttony. Source: D. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1900), no. 70, p. 50. A similar print is found in lu. Ovsiannikov, Russkii lubok (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1962). We have already spoken of the exquisite taste of the French, who are such masters of preparing various sorts of food, giving them all possible names, very often strange ones, but they also have a dish called bul'i, or a good piece of beef boiled in water, and some sort of strong soup with pieces of white bread boiled in it, which is very nutritious, and serves as the basis of their table, which consists of various sauces, roasts with all kinds of salad, and extraordinarily tender pastries. National Russian dishes are shchi, instead of soup, thick buckwheat kasha with fat or butter, ku/ebiaka, okroshka, botvin'ia, suckling pig with horseradish, sour cabbage, kvas of various sorts and sbiten'; and for Maslenitsa bliny, especially krasnye or buckwheat. Here is everything that the not-made-delicate Russian prefers to the delicacy and exquisiteness of the French table, which is not infrequently very dangerous for the stomach and always hard on the wallet.125

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Burnashev only recognized good eating in the simplest and most basic of French dishes-bouillon and consomme. Otherwise, Russian stomachs demanded Russian food. This sort of concern with the idea of refinement and elegance as dangerous to health was increasingly common, and it hid a concern about the influence of the West on native Russian habits. In the late eighteenth century Ivan Boltin expressed the growing concern over the influence of French cuisine on Russian health. He wrote, "many have observed that when we gave up the habits of our ancestors and began to live in the foreign manner, we became weaker, more easily fell prey to sickness, and less often lived to a ripe old age: I believe that the main reasons for this are the abolition of the custom of the bath and the introduction of French cooking." 126 Russians were of course not alone in this condemnation; the journal Telescope published a translated article from the Edinburgh Review that made much the same point (French cuisine "so often produces disorder in the bodily economy").l27 Others took these descriptions further, commenting that the delicate, tender, refined French foods were sapping the strength of those who ate them. These sorts of thoughts were associated closely with social status and the food of the peasantry. French foods were often directly contrasted with simple, strong, peasant foods_Izs Others, however, had a very different take on the tastes associated with French cooking. Some commented that the palates of Russians were not able to appreciate some of the stronger tastes of French cooking, like aged game or Limburger cheese, and, furthermore, that Russians tended to overstate the delicacy of food in France.I29 The inclusion of foreign foods became a sign of status and was even "fashionable," though some continued to worry that the use of these dishes and products was unhealthy for Russians as individuals and Russia as a nation.130 In all these writings, Russians felt conflicted about their relationship with foreign foods and habits and used this conflict to create a newly powerful statement of Russianness. The infiltration of the new habits and attitudes seemed dangerous to some, as they contrasted the greater degree of labor required for much foreign (mostly French) cooking with the "simple," "native" foods. A certain rough quality of Russian food was often, and even traditionally, seen as a sign not simply of national difference but of national superiority. A good example is a description of Russians as a people who, along with Slavs in general, "extraordinarily love raw onion." 131 Not only did real Russians love onions, but another article noted that "of the Russians, only the milksops [nezhenki] do not eat onions ... our great-grandfathers did not know at all of medicinal mixtures, and all because they were able to live, eat, and drink better than us, and also, how they loved onion, garlic, radish, pepper, and such foods!" Furthermore, of such pungent foods, "garlic is a native, heroic [bogatyrskaia] Russian food."132 Here, not only are the sharp tastes of alliums worthy of the tastes of mythical heroes, but they are the foods most healthy for Russians at all times. This vision is contrasted with the weaklings among

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Russians, who believe that onions are too overpowering a taste, and whose tastes have been ruined by their understanding of French refinement. A similar statement of the native healthiness of foods contrasted the Russian with the German. According to one author, "Russian people say: 'Healthy to a Russian, but death to a German.' People accustomed to delicate foods should not generally eat Russian folk foods."133 Again, the rougher Russian foods were considered properly healthy to those accustomed by history and nature. CONCLUSION

"Everything is healthy to a Russian," claimed a lubok print published in 1857. In its image and its message, this lubok incorporates many of the is-

sues that faced medical professionals concerned with food. The image portrays the inside of a peasant hut; on one side of the picture young boys climb on the stove, another sits whittling, and a young girl sits dressed in finery. On the other side, three figures surround a low table covered with a white tablecloth. Over the table stands a peasant woman, arms crossed. On her left sits a fine figure of a man, dressed in a frock coat, with eyeglasses and a watch chain dangling from beneath his waistcoat. He is apparently talking with the figure sitting across from him, a peasant man (in surprising checked trousers) with a classic beard and bowl haircut. While he converses, the peasant is also feeding himself from a large wooden bowl and holding a large lump of dark bread. A verse tells the story: a doctor is trying to stop Uncle Andrei from eating the shchi, for if he eats too much his stomach will ache and his life will be forfeit. Andrei responds that he simply must eat two bowls of soup, only then will he be satisfied. "We are a strong people, and know what we need for food." Though many medical writers doubted this fact, at base, the belief that Russians knew best what they ought to eat transcended most medical texts. The Russian diet, whatever it truly was, suited the Russian body. While certainly not uncontroversial, the basic idea that Russian medics ought to have authority over Russian medicine and Russian bodies reflected larger concerns of the first half of the nineteenth century. Nicholas I and his Europhobia, the Slavophiles and their return to the simplicity of the past, even the Westernizers who wanted to modernize Russia for a new great future, all had a stake in the debate. The particular structures of the Russian state forced it to find its own way of dealing with the new worry of public health. Because of certain habits of Russian peasants, Russian medics had to define subsistence, with reference to but not total reliance on foreign medical knowledge. And because of the diverging paths of Russia's peasants and elite, Russian dieticians had to take all the differing ideals into account as they created their own school of national dietetics. Thus, these various actors had first to consider what made diet Russian. For that information, they relied not only on their own observations of

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"Everything is healthy to a Russian" (1857). Source: Pierre-Louis Duchartre, L'imagerie populaire russe et les livrets graves, 1629-1885 (Paris: Griind, 1961), fig. S. 117.

current practice, but on widely diverging sources on Russia's past and present. Russian historians and ethnographers, as well as foreign travelers, whose writings were often imported back in to Russia, described Russian diet in ways both critical and sympathetic. Whatever the point of view, however, these individuals sought to create an idea of what it meant to be Russian, at least as far as this could be defined by what a person ate. Although such a definition certainly had its nutritional aspects, it also spoke more strongly to Russia's culture, and in particular to the awkward position of Russia's population between past and present, between East and West, and between peasant and noble.

CHAPTER

THREE

DESCRIBING THE RUSSIAN DIET Ethnography, History, and Cultural Definition

hen foreign travelers visited Russia in the early nineteenth century, they often found the foods they ate surprising. Edward Turnerelli discovered that among the elite, at least, everything was far more familiar than he had expected: "instead of the horse-flesh, black bread, and train-oil, which I thought would be my only nourishment, I beheld in every house I entered, hospitable boards, loaded with choice and dainty viands, and generous, rare wines, the best and most expensive that the fields of France, Spain, and Germany could furnish." He also described the food of common townspeople as something rather different: "black bread, a soup of cabbage called tchtchi, and the national beverage quass," all of which Turnerelli found disagreeable. Turnerelli did not simply present his observations but interpreted them, considering them symbolic of the Russian character, and proof that Russia was not the "entire mass of evil and iniquity, without ... one solitary virtue, one fair feature to adorn the monstrous abortion" of much foreign vitriol.l Although Turnerelli was sympathetic, other travelers contributed to that very vitriol, with their "revelations of Russia" or other tomes lambasting not only the evils of the autocracy but the everyday lives of every-

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day Russians. At the same time, Russians themselves were investigating their everyday lives with new interest and from new perspectives. Well aware of foreign attitudes to their country, from the vitriolic to the grudgingly positive, they sought to create their own interpretation of everyday life, an interpretation that proved Russia's cultural worth. To do so, they looked both to present observation and to the story of their past for new evidence. As a result, a wide range of Russians contributed to the creation of "the Russian table." Russia's past was a subject of particular interest in the early nineteenth century, as old sources were "rediscovered" and reprinted. "History," too, came to mean not simply tales of battles, but tales of everyday life as well. When the Periodical of the Imperial Moscow Society of Russian History and Antiquity published an account of past everyday life, a supplement to the Domostroi, the editor looked to a young historian to interpret it.z The supplement, the "Books That Tell What Foods People Put on the Table throughout the Year," consists of little inore than long lists of foods served on particular dates and thus required some context. Ivan Zabelin, then barely thirty and just starting his career as a historian of Muscovite Rus', introduced the text by bringing up its larger importance to modern Russians: "From this curious supplement we learn all the table customs of our ancestors, their gastronomic taste, completely different from ours and having been preserved to this time only in particulars." Zabelin went on to describe some of the peculiarities of the lists: according to him, the lists contained surprising numbers of dishes featuring fish, a taste for swans, relatively few other meats, and "onions, garlic, pepper, saffron and sometimes savory" as the only seasonings.3 For Zabelin, these lists of foods, even if they were simply names of dishes with no instruction or explanation, provided a tantalizing glimpse of Russia's unknown and exotic past, of the true nature of ancient Russian habit. Zabelin thought this true ancient past was just that, located in the past, but other authors believed that all around them were living examples of Russia's past glories. Zabelin's mentor, the Moscow University professor Ivan Snegirev, combined his interests in Muscovite history with an interest in the everyday lives of Russia's peasants. For him, Russia's peasants, and to an extent Russia's lower estates more generally, served as daily reminders of where Russia had been. A. Tereshchenko took this idea farther and justified his survey of everyday life in part with the rationale that "foreigners looked at our habits and way of life, for the most part out of curiosity; but we are bound to look at all this not only of curiosity, but as the history of popular life." 4 In other words, Russians had to concern themselves with larger questions of everyday life; they had to become the true authorities on such questions. Foreigners got things wrong, relying on error-filled accounts for all their knowledge of Russia. Only by seizing control themselves could Russian scholars give Russia its proper place in the world.

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Of course, in order to make themselves not simply those who lived everyday life but those who investigated it, Russians had to think about the connections between the present and the past, and between Russia's different social estates. A book reviewer at Notes of the Fatherland agreed in part with Tereshchenko's thesis, noting that "he who studies the history of the Russian people to any degree knows that habits that are now preserved among the common people were more or less general habits of ancient Rus'. And because ancient Rus' is poorly explained, so even the current popular habits cannot be understood to the degree that they present common life since ancient days.'' 5 This idea was a fairly common one. In a text for children, V. P. Burnashev romanticized the "character of the Russian man, not yet infected with half-enlightenment," and described "the way he lives, describing both the poor muzhik and the wealthy merchant, still living Russian-style, not having exchanged the habits of ancient times for fashionable innovations." 6 When it came to food, simple peasant foods, however defined, were the most "national" foods according to this mindset, for they were connected to the foods that everyone, from richest to poorest, ate in olden times/ The juxtaposition of these ideals posed problems for early nineteenthcentury Russians. The dishes listed in the old text were nowhere near those listed by Burnashev, for example. Burnashev reported: Let us look at the table of the Russian common man: he eats a lot and loves healthy, nutritious, and simple foods: bread, meat, shchi or other hot soups, porridge; for holidays pirogi, in fast periods fish and mushrooms; there is the accustomed food in winter; at other times of the year he consumes many turnips, radishes, carrots, onions, cucumbers, in general all garden vegetables. Onion, kvas, bread and salt-these are the elements from which the poorest peasant makes himself a multitude of various dishes. To such an undemanding stomach add too, that the Russian does not worry at all either about the time or the place of his breakfasts or dinners. He eats where he happens to be and when he feels like it.S

This was not the opulent world of saffron and swans described in the ancient text but, rather, an attempt to put the best possible light on what other authors called the "crude [and] monotonous to the point of dry mouth" foods of Russia's peasants. 9 Furthermore, as romantic as the linkage between modern peasants and ancient nobles might be, modern life had intervened in ways that were as yet difficult to interpret. While the reviewer of Tereshchenko's work agreed that there were elements of continuity that deserved study, he disagreed that modernity had completely left the Russian people (narod) behind: Does he really think that we, together with him, live in the time of Vladimir Monomakh, and not in the nineteenth century? The everyday life of the Russian people does not at the present time consist only of habits that have still been preserved-and even then not everywhere-among the simple

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people. What about the life of the educated part of the people [narod] that now for the most part makes up our way of life, even though it [does not follow old traditions]? But let us assume that The Everyday Life of the Russian People relates to our ancient, pre-Petrine life. Do only these habits really make up that lifestyle, is our nationality [narodnost], our life really only expressed in them? Evidently no. Consequently, Mr. Tereshchenko's essay must be understood as an essay on popular [prostonarodnye] habits preserved among the lower class of our society.JO

In other words, modern Russian social life was hardly simple; it included not just different ways of life for different social strata, but a mixture of habits from the past and present spread unevenly among the variant social groups. Only by untangling these habits could Russian diet as a whole be defined, beyond any social or chronological divisions. DEFINING PEASANT DIET

Few peasants of the early nineteenth century were literate, and still fewer used their literacy for any but the most practical reasons. Thus, elite Russians and travelers supply most descriptions of peasant diet. Recent work on travel literature has suggested that although some travelers sought to give full, accurate descriptions of the places they visited, many others were content either to generalize about societies and places based on a few observations, or used their accounts of foreign places to construct arguments about their own homelands.1 1 Certainly, too, nineteenthcentury travelers were apt either to condemn Russia or to praise it on political grounds, and they tended to report observations that supported their generally negative or positive assessment. Nearly everything the Marquis de Custine saw on his famous trip seemed evidence for his condemnation of the repressive Russian state, although he found the cuisine generally decent, with a few exceptions.1z Russians took particular offense at travelers who failed to pay sufficient attention to basic facts and were often dismayed that readers of travel accounts gained strange and inaccurate ideas about Russia. In 1839 the Farming Gazette published an article titled "Cabbage Soup of Mosquitoes," which reported, incredulously, on a chain of mistakes in translation. An English article had mentioned that Russians ate many mushrooms. A French translation incorrectly reproduced the English mushroom as moucheron, and a report that Russians ate many bugs was born.B Ethnographic and other descriptions of peasant life share similar tensions. Some amateur ethnographers sought to be purely scientific, to label their observations precisely and claim only knowledge of a particular locality; others attached their observations to grand philosophical statements about peasant or national life.14 In practical terms, the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, founded in 1845, served as a center for ethnographic research within the empire, as well as outside its borders. The society, which W. Bruce Lincoln has noted played an integral role in forming the

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"enlightened bureaucrats," actively encouraged investigations of Russia's peasantry.ls In principle, reports collected under the auspices of the society were to contain only pure observation, free of explanatory or didactic commentary. The manuscripts of reports that did not follow this directive show strong editorial hands; in one case whole swathes of rambling commentary were crossed out, and in another case commentary attracted marginalia damning it as "nai:ve."16 Despite these efforts, as the manuscripts suggest, descriptions of peasant diet were linked to larger, more general statements about Russian life, or the social order, or the path of civilizations, just as much as were travel accounts.17 In both cases, observations of food served as evidence for authoritative statements about Russia, and in both cases, the authors were often passionately invested in emphasizing that very authority. MONOTONOUS, SIMPLE, AND CRUDE

Whatever their possible biases, two major themes appear throughout these accounts of peasant diet: on the one hand, observers were struck by the monotony and limitations of peasant food; on the other, observers searched for sources of difference, of ways that Russian diets varied between regions, over time, or based on economic standing. The first strand of thinking is perhaps best expressed by two common Russian folk sayings that deal explicitly with the basic questions of food and sustenance. According to one, "bread is our father; kasha (or water) our mother." Another appeared in several variations: "shchi and kasha are our life/ mother/ food." 18 The image of peasant diet-or lower-class diet more generally-as an unending and little varying cycle of bread, kasha, and shchi was a very powerful one. R. E. F. Smith and David Christian describe "The Established Pattern" of peasant diet as one that was largely uniform throughout Russia, and largely monotonous in its content.19 Over and over again, ethnographers and other writers presented an image of everyday peasant habits as essentially monotonous and limited. Many general accounts of Russian peasant diet present a limited array of foods: sour rye bread, kasha, and shchi; kvas as an everyday drink; soured milk or cream, other vegetables, and meat in limited quantities, all governed by the Orthodox calendar. The traveler Robert Pinkerton, who lived in Russia "in the service of the Bible Society," thought that "the food of the Russian peasant differs much from that of the lower classes in any other country in Europe" in large part because of the influence of meatless fast days throughout the year.zo A fellow Englishman, George Green, visiting a few decades earlier, judged the difference more harshly, noting that "the manner of living and laying among the lower class of Russians is harder and coarser than that of almost any other Europeans."21 Both described similar basic foods; Green mentioned "coarse black rye bread,

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which Pinkerton described in greater detail: it was "usually well leavened; and possess[ing] a degree of acidity, which, to the stranger, is not at first agreeable, but is considered indispensable to suit the peculiar taste of the Russian. The loaves are round, from eighteen to twenty-four inches in diameter, and six or seven inches thick. This rye-bread, commonly called tschernoi hleb (black bread), is the staple support of the common people."ZZ Both also described shchi. Green identified it as "a kind of soup thickened with oatmeal, and a mixture of sour crout," quite similar to Pinkerton's "kind of broth ... made of water, sour cabbages chopped small, with a piece of pork or beef, boiled up together. In the time of their fasts they use oil in it, instead of butcher's meat."Z3 Dairy products, especially soured milk and cream, supplemented this basic diet, as did occasional-very occasional-helpings of meat. One traveler thought Russian peasants "live[d] almost entirely on black bread and milk, which they have in great plenty," although others, like von Haxthausen, disagreed.24 But simplicity was not only a matter of ingredients; methods of preparation and preserving also marked peasant diet as crude. The act of cooking, Claude Fischler remarks, "transfers nutritional raw materials from the state of Nature to the state of Culture," and everyday peasant preparations involved as little transformation into culture as possible.zs Peasants merely boiled grains or cabbage, or prepared sour bread that rises in the simplest way. The ethnographer Kapiton Rozanov used this basic simplicity as a source for humor, as he described a meal of four different courses he ate in a peasant's hut. Rozanov's hostess, Klavdiia Egorevna, announced that she had prepared a quartet of different shchis for her guest's delectation. Rozanov expressed his amazement that a peasant woman would have the time to prepare four separate dishes, and that such variety could be found in a peasant residence. "But yes, my lord," she replied, she had prepared "gray shchi, 'empty' shchi, shchi with dried bread, and shchi with milk!"Z6 Even peasant preserving techniques were marked by simplicity. The sour, fermented cabbage prepared every fall had few steps and few ingredients: the heads were first chopped up, then put in a barrel in layers, bruised and sprinkled with salt or ashes, then tightly covered. Although this method was not infallible, one author noted, "if the lid is often doused with brine, then the cabbage will be preserved for the duration of the winter, even though it will acquire a not totally pleasant odor."Z7 Others described salted pork and beef, smoked or rendered fat, salted or dried fish, and soured milk.ZS But for the most part, Russian authors worried that their peasants were not just simple, but too simple, that they failed to make use of all the possibilities that preserving techniques could bring them, and that as a result "the farther [the peasant] goes into winter, the worse in quality become his vegetable foods which have been long preserved, and the more barren becomes his table, finally cut down to bread, porridge, [and] milk."Z9

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In some cases, didactic texts tried to increase or improve the preserving techniques currently in use by peasants. The early nineteenth century, after all, did see significant changes in preserving methods, as canning and longer-term storage became ever more possible. Elite Russians were advised to read the works of Nicolas Appert, whose inventions had allowed dramatic changes in diet.JO For the most part, texts aimed at peasants limited themselves to known foods and methods, simply supplying "better" or "tastier" ways of preserving the same cabbage or beef. These improvements, it was thought, could dramatically improve peasant life.31 One investigator, inspired by a French dehydrating method, tried to find a way to dry sour cabbage to keep it edible longer. He wrote that he first "tried to search the rich store of Russian popular practical experience" but found nearly no mention of drying cabbage among the peasantry, and only one old woman, a widow of a low-ranking army officer, whose method was simplicity itself: "it's easy-take it and dry it."3Z In many ways the description of peasant diet as simple and crude supported the idea of Russia's peasantry as the "simple people" (prostoi narod), in the phrase so often used by the elite. These foods added up to a simple diet and a simple way of life, appropriate for a "simple" people. In one case, a branch of the Russian state actively discouraged diversifying and complicating peasant diets. In 1850, the Department of Agriculture of the Ministry of State Domains announced a competition for manuals promoting vegetable gardens among peasants. It planned to award the winning entry a gold medal and a prize of three hundred silver rubles. But most entries were deemed unacceptable for various reasons ranging from poor grammar to problematic content. One internal review found that several entries suffered by forgetting that the manual was intended for peasants. In one case the author forgot that "using apples for compote is appropriate for more wealthy tables," and in another, the reviewer could only conclude that "cauliflower, Savoy cabbage, broccoli, endive, artichokes, asparagus and so forth do not at all belong to the number of vegetables cultivated in peasant gardens."33 Additionally, descriptions of monotony reflected a sense of the uniformity of the Russian peasantry throughout the vast expanses of Russia. Ethnographers reporting on different regions often described very similar local diets. Some directly addressed the notion of sameness. As one Mironov, an ethnographer whose account of Kostroma province was published in the provincial News, put it, the food in the province was "common, as in other Great Russian provinces: the same sour rye bread, the same kvas, often resembling vinegar, the same sour cabbage soup with milk on meat-eating days and with cereal or 'empty' on fast days."3 4 Other accounts of Kostroma province imply sameness by repeated insistence that peasants ate only the "most simple food," as a Geographic Society ethnographer put it. He described a diet of bread, porridge, occasional

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treats of noodles or pirogi, and very little meat. He did, however, note one peculiarity of the region: "in the composition of foods there is nothing particular, except shchi made from 'gray' [i.e., that which would normally be trimmed and discarded] cabbage."3S Such shchi might be "different," but it was hardly the basis of a distinct regional cuisine. THE INFLUENCE OF AGRICULTURE

The specific circumstances of peasant agriculture caused the most basic variations in peasant diet, controlling not simply the sorts of foods available for consumption, but also the labor available to prepare it. During the summer agricultural months, Russian peasant women played many roles in the fields, not just in the households. Although men and women did not do the same jobs, they did both contribute significant labor to the larger household economy. Women were particularly associated with haymaking and the harvest, when their skill with the sickle and the intensity of their labor proved their necessity in the fields. Ia. Dorogov, a landlord who developed an interest in agricultural improvement, was shocked by several elements of peasant society when he began to run his estate himself. In particular, he found the role of women troubling: "I could never be an indifferent observer of that suffering position in which the peasant lives, particularly the women, even those pregnant ones, during the harvest of the grain with sickles."36 Dorogov was not alone in his judgment of women's labor; their work was essential in many ways, but other observers were troubled by its surprisingly heavy demands. Perhaps more common was a basic understanding of women's work as an accepted and integral part of the yearly cycle of peasant life. Generally, women's labor was recognized as half of the work of a household. In a calculation of normal, or average, "labor days," one agricultural writer found that women's labor accounted for half a peasant household's labor in an agricultural year. Even the basic unit for allocating land and duties, the tiaglo, recognized the importance of women's agricultural labor. The tiaglo consisted of a husband and a wife (or another male/female pair), and all agricultural obligations assumed that both men and women had important roles to playY Specific examples confirmed that women played important roles in the fields. One amateur ethnographer collected a detailed description of farming in Kostroma province. He found that during June and July, when planting and hay mowing predominated, women and men worked approximately equal days. Later in the summer, during the height of the harvest, however, women worked more days than their male counterparts. Of course women's labor varied within Russia; in parts of Kostroma province women were particularly likely to perform heavy agricultural labor because so many men left villages to work in towns, while those in other areas were deemed less likely to perform such onerous tasks. Still, the general image of

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the peasant woman was as a peasant worker. Even artistic representations of peasant women often focused on their labor; some romanticized paintings by Venetsianov, for example, still show women in the fields or with their tools. And when the weekly periodical Sel'skii listok published a series of etchings that were meant to show the varieties of labor in the peasant agricultural year, women's labor figured heavily.Js These specific patterns of agricultural labor led to seasonal variation in peasant diet. A correspondent of the Department of Agriculture made this point clear: All summer long the ovens smoke very rarely, for [they bake] bread only once in two weeks, and workers eat cold foods, which consist of bread or oat flour, and for the most difficult labors, like harvesting or hay-mowing, in order to save bread, of which they eat a lot, they make a mash from various rye, oat and buckwheat flours, not having sifted them, mixed in kvas, and they eat it raw, which serves as proof to what degree nature exhausts itself, when it is possible to be satisfied with such food.39

In part this change was one of practicality. Because the growing season was so short, peasants spent particularly long hours in the fields in summer, often staying there for meals (and even overnight, in some cases).40 An ethnographer from Kazan' province, a certain Seliverstov, linked work to diet explicitly: "in summer, in the working times peasants cook very little food, because everyone [i.e., women, too] is at work in the field. Only small children stay home."41 Not all observers actually made this connection. In a description of Kursk province, one author noted on the one hand, that "in food the Russians are not as fastidious as the Ukrainians; on fast days they satisfy themselves with kvas with onion, kasha and bread; on meat-eating days, they add to this shchi with pork fat, and use meat on holidays. The Ukrainian, on the other hand, likes to vary his food: ... [he is] not satisfied to sup on foods prepared for their dinner, but cook something new." 42 Elsewhere, the author noted that Russian women were far more likely to work in the fields, but he failed to make a connection between these two observations.43 Certainly many accounts describe different diets in summer, but again ones that were themselves quite monotonous. The correspondent of the Department of Agriculture had described tolokno-powdered oats, mixed with kvas or water when in the field-which was perhaps the most common summer food, whether plain or garnished (according to some) with a bit of sour cream or a few snips of wild-growing green onions. So common was it that in parts of Kazan' province where peasants were more likely to plant barley than oats, tolokno was nonetheless imported.44 Alternately, peasants simply ate bread, baked periodically, with the same green onions as garnish.4S These foods were initially reactions to the specific circumstances of

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summer field work, but by the nineteenth century they had become entrenched beyond those circumstances. According to one travel account, even peasants living and working in the capitals maintained the same seasonal variation in foods. "Of what consists their daily meal? In summer, of cold quass, with bread or groats, and green onions shredded in it. In winter, uninterruptedly, soup with chopped cabbage and fat,-in fast time, hemp oil." 46 Agriculture did not simply influence work patterns and thus seasonal diet; it obviously also had an effect on the products consumed in peasant society. Even in Kostroma province, part of the non-black soil region, where agriculture did not always meet the needs of the local inhabitants, in large part consumption depended on what was produced. In his description of Kostromskii region, N. Kolychev mostly listed the same sorts of regular foods (shchi, kasha) found elsewhere in the province and among Russian peasants. But, he also noted one relatively major difference: peasants often used barley rather than buckwheat for their kasha and even bread, because they rarely cultivated buckwheat.47 Thus, the fact that barley was more common than buckwheat in many parts of northern Russia affected local peasant diets in ingredients, if not in basic form. After all, the difference between barley and buckwheat porridge is insignificant in terms of preparation; barley porridge is hardly a different class of food than buckwheat. Vegetable gardening, however, could have a somewhat larger effect on peasant diet. In Kostroma province, far to the north, not all "common" vegetables grew. Cucumbers did not always ripen, so short was the summer growing period, and several authors lamented the low degree to which vegetable gardening had developed.4B Others reported more abundance: N. Kurnatov believed that "every peasant busies himself with gardening, and each has a well-fertilized, particular piece of land, where he plants rutabagas, black radishes, turnips (more often in a burnt-out spot), potatoes (not many), beets, and such vegetables in quantities, that all this grub, without purchases in the town, is sufficient for the entire winter." 49 Such a yield still constituted a relatively small number of vegetables, and a similar . lack of variety also appeared in descriptions of consumption. Cabbage was common, as were radishes and horseradish. But according to Mironov, green onions, carrots, turnips, and cucumbers were "considered a treat," and other accounts specifically noted that beets and turnips were rare. so The influence of agricultural production on consumption is made apparent in a comparison with Kazan' province, where good black earth allowed significantly more variety in both. Throughout the province, peasants cultivated not only the same vegetables as those grown in Kostroma province, but also cucumbers, onions, squash, and beans, and in the southernmost regions melons and watermelons.s1 This relative abundance was reflected in reports on peasant diet, although not without caveats. Peasants in Kazan' were reported to eat cabbage and cucumbers or even, according to an archived ethnographic report, "peas, beets, potatoes, cucumbers,

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radishes, rutabagas and carrots." This report, though, continued: "Other garden vegetables can be found at only a few peasants, as gardening is little developed. Vegetables, other than potatoes, barely last until December."sz Another account explicitly linked more abundant production to more abundant consumption, noting that among Old Believers in Kozmodem'iansk region, peasants regularly ate "peas, porridge, noodles, sour cabbage, cucumbers, steamed turnips, boiled carrots and beets, and in some years soaked apples and salted mushrooms, when there is a good harvest of all these products," on fast days.s3 According to a few amateur ethnographers, the relative agricultural wealth of Kazan' province supplied its peasants with richer everyday foods. I. Singileevskii reported that in the most agriculturally rich part of the province everyday hot food is: now kisel' of peas-zavarikha, now buckwheat bliny, oat kisel', praised by Zhukovskii, berry kisel'-Russian sauce, consisting of a solution of malt-kulaga-mixed with berries, and this mixture placed on the stove all day and all night until morning. Turnips steamed on the range make a treat for adults and normal food for children. Weekday dinner and evening foods: meatless shchi with garnish, porridge with butter or milk, of which, with a multitude of cattle, peasants have no dearth, sometimes buckwheat pancakes, left over from breakfast, pirogi either without filling or with carrots, turnips, or cabbage, with ground hemp seeds, vatrushki [cheese-filled pastries], and sour milk. 54

This was a far more developed and varied diet than any described in Kostroma province. But not all agreed that this was the norm in the province. The ethnographer, Seliverstov, reported that although holiday food might be more elaborate, everyday food, especially in winter, was limited: "In fast times they eat cabbage and gray shchi, on the holidays as a rule with hemp-seed oil. Some preserve mushrooms in the autumn. They salt bolot'viki, maslianiki, ryzhniki, belanki, gruzdi, suroeshki, osikoviki, and white mushrooms (the last called koraviaki by the peasants)."Ss Agricultural differences do not entirely explain differences in diet between the regions. In some parts of Kazan' province peasants grew yet more varied vegetables: peas, parsley, parsnips, celery, lettuce, and cauliflower. Yet other than peas, these foods were rarely if ever mentioned in connection with peasant diet-they were purely production for sale in Kazan' or other towns.s6 More surprising were differences in animal husbandry and meat consumption. According to official statistics, the peasants of Kostroma province kept far more cattle than their Kazan' fellows, while those of Kazan' kept far more swineY The greater prevalence of pigs is reflected in reports on diet; while reports on Kostroma almost never mention pork, or refer to it as a luxury, the peasants of Iadrinskii region in Kazan' province were so likely to consume pork rather than beef that a local folk saying held that in the yard the pig might be foul, but on the

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table it ruled supreme. 5B Generally, however, ethnographic reports from Kazan' province were far more likely to claim that peasants there ate meat with some regularity. From the Kostroma reports it is quite clear that meat consumption was rare in that area. Those from Kazan' province, however, reported not simply more meat in everyday meals, but more salted or smoked beef or pork.s9 In other words, although they produced less meat per capita, the descriptions of diet suggest they consumed more. This discrepancy in meat consumption may be partially explained by several factors. For one, many residents of Kostroma province followed a particularly strict interpretation of the Orthodox fast calendar. While most peasants ate no meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, those in Kostroma province also often avoided meat on Mondays. To follow this stricture even had its own verb (ponidel'nichat'), and was particularly common among the older inhabitants.6o Another possible cause was trade. The Marshal of the Nobility in one of Kazan's regions noted that local peasants kept more livestock than the provincial norm. The reason, he claimed, was that they sold off excess cattle or sheep in winter for extra money. According to many sources, Kostroma's peasants were more closely tied to towns and markets, a fact that caused some concern. In part this was out of necessity; the poor soil meant that many, if not most, peasants could not produce enough grain to sustain themselves year by year. However, by working in towns or otherwise earning income, they were able to purchase additional grain or supplies. In addition, proximity to markets and towns gave them reason to increase their livestock holdings, even if not their consumption of meat.6 1 Another factor in this discrepancy might simply be a bias in the sources. The Russian peasants of Kazan' province bore a special burden in the eyes of some. They lived alongside many nonRussians, which meant they were in principle to lead the "backward" others toward enlightenment. And because meat consumption was clearly linked with advancement and prosperity, Russians could not be seen to eat less meat than their non-Russian counterparts. RUSSIANS AMONG OTHERS

In an annual report, one governor of Kazan' province described "the primacy of the Russian tribe and the beneficial influence of enlightenment" in the province but lamented the fact that the local non-Russians "preserve up to today many traits of their particular character and have not yet blended into one general tribe, into one people, having one and the same religion, morality, and habit."62 Russians were supposed to lead, to incorporate other "tribes" into a single way of life. But they had not yet managed to russify the non-Russians in the area. It often proved difficult for authors to keep an unbiased eye when looking at Russians next to nonRussians. Russians were the leaders of the Russian state; therefore, the official

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discourse placed Russians at the top of the empire's hierarchy of peoples. Russians were "primary," presumably the leaders in the eventual unification of peoples. In the words of another writer, the Russians would serve as the "cement" to bind these peoples who had remained separate over centuries.63 This sort of bias was often tested by observations in the field. In multiethnic provinces like Kazan', observations showed that Russians were affected by their surroundings and picked up others' habits just as they spread their own among non-Russians. This in itself was a source of concern, but even more problematic were fears that Russians were not simply failing to lead but lagging behind others in economic position or even morality. Perhaps the most extreme description of problematic Russian behavior came from Aleksandra Fuks, the wife of a Kazan' University professor, a life-long Kazan' resident, and an ethnographer in her own right. According to Fuks, Russian behavior that she politely described as unseemly frequently occurred in areas with a mixed Chuvash/Russian population. The Chuvash honored their dead with a ceremony that involved leaving food in their graveyards as offerings or gifts. According to Fuks, Russian peasants often scavenged the graveyards after such ceremonies, taking the offerings of food for themselves. In fact, she claimed, Russian peasants came from as far as ten to fifteen versts away in order to take part in the scavenging.64 Another observer believed that Russians had also been affected in their everyday life by contact with non-Russians: "the Russians settled among them [Tatars, Cheremis, Chuvash], too far from the center of Russian life, can not but be affected by the influence of their neighbors: in this manner, teaching the Tatar drunkenness, they learn from them horse-stealing and sloth .... That is why they are here less conscientious than in the central provinces." 65 Such conclusions were dangerous. As Russians in Kazan' province had been living among other peoples for decades or longer, how they reacted to these others, and how the others reacted to them, could be considered a test case for the strength of Russian national culture. Although their worries were rarely stated clearly, many of the province's governors, as well as others writing on the region, often brought up the basic questions of how the everyday life of Russians in Kazan' province differed from that of Russians in older parts of the country. According to one line of argument, the Russian peasants of Kazan' province were exactly like all other Russian peasants. The authors of a government-sponsored statistics book noted that in Kazan' province, "the way of life of the Russian inhabitants is almost identical with [that found among] those [Russians] of other Great Russian provinces." Furthermore, according to these authors, Russians were clearly the most advanced of the peoples in the province: "In Kazan' [province], [the Russians] are sharply distinguished from the other tribes by moral and mental qualities, and also by the better construction of their home life, orderly cottages and household structures."66 V. A. Sboev, who wrote on both the peasants of

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Kazan' province as a whole and the Chuvash in particular, certainly would have agreed. He noted that "in general characteristics [the Russians] have preserved the Great-Russian Slavic type: the same physiognomy, the same language, the same beliefs, the same morals and habits."67 While others did not necessarily believe that Russians were exactly the same, many did firmly assert that Russians played the leading role in Kazan' province. One writer called them the "bonding strength" that held the province together; others thought that they lived, in general, much better than their near neighbors.6s Variations between the different ethnicities of Kazan' province were based, according to observers, on a wide variety of larger social and cultural differences. The most basic was religion. Most Tatars in the province were Muslims, although some were (more or less) baptized in the Orthodox church.69 While most avoided pork-and a number of sources agree that they did-others could, in principle, eat the same variety of foods as Russians. Some held to their beliefs strictly: one ethnographer noted, "the most sociable Tatar will not eat meat with a Russian; the animal must have been slaughtered by a Tatar who, while cutting the throat, says a prayer ... in the name of God." Later, the same ethnographer claimed that Tatars frequenting a Russian traktir (inn) were likely to bring their own meat, rather than to eat the meat of the houseJO However, even in the early eighteenth century some saw a more fluid situation. An eighteenth-century ethnographer claimed that some Tatars, even Muslims, willingly ate pork while among Russians in towns. Later authors claimed that whatever their religion, Tatars ignored their dietary restrictions. If Muslim, they ate pork at will; if Orthodox, they ignored fasts.7 1 Compared with Russian peasants, who-it was claimed-kept fasts strictly, such behavior suggested moral backwardness. The Tatars' unwillingness or inability to hold to dietary regulations placed them lower than Russian peasants in the grand hierarchy of peoples. A rather different interpretation of religion figured in Russian accounts of the Cheremis and the Chuvash. The traditional religion of both these peoples demanded regular sacrifices of animals, or occasionally other foods, followed by a feast of the slaughtered animals. Peasants reportedly banded together to purchase animals for ritual slaughter when one was not available from among their storesJZ While the slaughter was generally tolerated, or at least ignored, by most officials, its persistence among baptized Cheremis garnered the state's attention. In one case, a local body informed a Kazan' court of a situation common in Tsarevokokshaiskii region (uezd): in the forest near the swamp a wood fire burned; over it the meat of a foal and a sheep were roasting, and [nearby were] two live geese and five live ducks prepared for sacrifice, two pieces of honeycomb, mead in a beetroot, and for the consumption of the food, several spoons and cups; by the side of the fire were placed three icons ... and a copper cross, at the entry of which into the forest many Cheremis ran upJ3

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It was this conflation of the pagan with the Orthodox that was particu-

larly troubling to the authorities, who felt that any civilizing mission of the church or Russians was clearly failing to make a deep impression.7 4 A half-way Orthodoxy, comprising traditional rituals with new beliefs, was simply unacceptable. In some ways, descriptions of non-Russian diets were quite similar to descriptions of Russian diets. The diets of some of Kazan's ethnic groups were similarly monotonous and crude, for example. One ethnographic account found the diets of several of the peoples so similar that there was no point differentiating between them: In general, all Chuvash, Cheremis, Votiaki and Mordvy are not able to prepare tasty and healthy food, that is, neither to cook shchi and soups, nor to bake bread, which they often roast in the ashes. Their usual food: salma of wheat, buckwheat, and even rye flour (bits of dough, fried hard in butter), or liashka of oatmeal (a thin kasha with sour milk) with sour milk, turnips, onion, potato, cabbage, and so onJs

The cuisine of these peoples was far below even that of Russian peasants: no soup, no bread, and a somehow lesser example of kasha. Often, different ethnic groups were considered separately, but even then these peoples were treated as more crude than Russians. Ethnographers described the food of the Chuvash as coarse, rude, and monotonous. The Chuvash could not bake proper bread, and according to Aleksandra Fuks, "the wealthy Chuvash eats just as poorly as the poor one." 76 The reason? One ethnographer claimed that "for a Chuvash food is a natural necessity, and not a pleasure: bread and water is his food." 77 But Russians found Chuvash lack of taste for meat to be most unusual. According to their accounts, the Chuvash rarely ate meat and did not consider it a particular treat. They ate fowl of all sorts, but almost never beef. As the Russians saw it, the Chuvash considered meat a supplementary part of diet, rather than a main component, even on holidaysJB So monotonous was this diet that, according to a newspaper article, the Chuvash particularly enjoyed bazaars because there they had a chance "to eat better than their own monotonous homemade dishes."79 But some claimed that the Chuvash sought to keep themselves separate from the other peoples of the region, even going so far as to grease the wheels of their wagons with butter in order to avoid having to purchase other oils from outsiders.so Whatever the attraction of bazaars to some, clearly they made little impact on the home lives of most Chuvash. Ethnographers reported that the Cheremis were even more frugal, and even miserly, in their domestic life. The tendency toward the simple was such that one author commented, "among them, the wealthier one is, the worse he lives."B 1 The usual diet of the Cheremis was quite simple, often

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consisting of only "bread, oat porridge and sour milk, as well as some garden vegetables." As among the Chuvash, meat was extremely rare, so much so that one ethnographer believed that its lack made the Cheremis "lean." Holidays were greeted with more elaborate, but still remarkably scanty foods. A harvest festival, for example, might include roast squirrel or rabbit stuffed with oat porridge. For Russian ethnographers, the Cheremis were difficult to interpret. On the one hand, they were reportedly far more hospitable than many of the other peoples of the province; although this was not necessarily a sign of advancement, it did suggest some positive traits. On the other hand, ethnographers reported that the Cheremis were most ready to give up solid food in order to procure alcohol, and even in the eighteenth century a traveler described their willingness to sell off much of their own produce.sz The two smallest groups in the province, the Mordvy and the Votiak, had similar diets, interpreted in almost completely opposite ways. Both ate crude, monotonous food. The Mordvy ate black bread and sour milk "year round," occasionally supplemented by raw carrots and turnips-in this they had not even progressed to cooking their vegetables. On holidays, they prepared pies and ate small quantities of meat. In the fall, they prepared a sort of mutton jerky, in order to preserve meat for eating on the road.s3 Aleksandra Fuks claimed that the Votiak ate "the most crude food, that is, that which no one [else] purchases; all the better [food] they sell, and try to have silver, gold, and bury it all in the ground." Others described a diet of porridge and crude bread, supplemented by milk and eggs.s4 But while ethnographers described both these people as having particularly crude, monotonous diets, the Mordvy were deemed a significantly more developed people. Indeed, some ethnographers favorably compared them with Russians, as good agriculturists, as a people who, when they converted to Orthodoxy, actually kept the Orthodox fasts with attention. According to a Kazan' governor, "if the Finnish tribes are fated to disappear into the Russian people in the end, then the Mordvy will disappear before all others."ss No such praise accrued to the Votiaks; instead, commentators noted their peculiar lack of development, made all the more apparent by their diet. When ethnographers turned to the largest non-Russian group in the province, the Tatars, they described Tatar food not as a more monotonous or crude diet, but as one inferior to Russian diets in other ways. According to ethnographers, the most characteristically Tatar food was salma. One writer called it "noodles of wheat, rye, pea or any other flour except oat. In salma they usually boil mutton, perhaps goat, but horsemeat-rarely." Another described this "national dish" and a variation: "wheat flour is mixed with butter, and they cut this dough into long pieces, which they boil in water and eat with sour milk, and if a chicken is boiled in the salma and chicken eggs are put in whole, then this food is called tokmach."B6 This dish, if it were truly common, could easily be read as proof

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of Tatar advancement. It required more meat and more complex preparation, both signs of higher levels of cultivation. However, Tatar diet was read instead as lesser in a moral way. Russian peasant women worked hard in the fields, while Tatar women did not. Although in other circumstances Russian women's labor brought criticism, in this circumstance it became an excuse for less-developed domestic comforts, while Tatar women's lack of labor became a source of criticism.s7 Similarly, salma was a sign of Tatar tastes for all things rich and sweet, or, as a state ethnographer wrote, for "those things that have no substance."ss Contrasted with the hearty Russian taste for sour things and salt, which proved a heroic essential nature, Tatar taste was a sign of indolence, not of any true advancement, as was also the Tatar taste for horsemeat, a most distasteful food for Russians.s9 Their willingness to consume this meat seemed a sign of utter backwardness to Russian observers.9o HOLIDAYS AND THE UNUSUAL

Whatever worries for ethnographers lurked in the Russian peasant diet, its monotony, at least, was sometimes relieved by holidays. Feasts and festivals were among the only times peasants regularly enjoyed the variety that some ethnographers sought to highlight. As a result, ethnographers were particularly interested in peasant holidays, and lists of holiday foods-or even just infrequent treats-figured in many accounts. In some cases this resulted in long lists of dishes, as in the continuation of Mironov's account of Kostroma province: sometimes kasha, sometimes milk, tvorog, fried eggs, pottage, noodles, thickcooked peas, stewed and fried mushrooms, steamed turnip; on holidays pirogi with filling of kasha, with meat, with eggs; bliny, pancakes, flat cakes; mutton, not roasted, but steamed in the oven; boiled beef with horseradish; chicken in noodles, fish fried together with eggs, and the absolutely best gastronomic dish-boiled pork. From some sort of prohibition peasants do not eat veal, nor do they eat hare; green onions are considered a treat, as are carrots, turnips, and cucumbers.91

For the peasants of Kostroma province, the most common special food was meat in nearly any form. Meat could be a gift; the peasants of a village in Galichskii uezd, for example, gave regular gifts of money, game, geese, eggs, and lamb to the local district police officer on holidays.9Z According to the ethnographer Ioann Pobedonostsev, on holidays peasants prepared "shchi with beef, mutton or pork, noodles boiled in milk, scrambled eggs, roasted mutton, buckwheat or barley porridge, and pirogi with poppy seeds."9 3 Simeon Kostrov listed a number of dishes served on holidays during meat-eating periods: a round pirog with mutton; a sheep's or calf's head; meat jelly; tongue with horseradish; shchi with meat; thin

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kasha or soup; noodles; roast mutton; roast suckling pig or chicken; round loaf with butter; and pirog with berries and honey. Noteworthy here is not

only the amount of meat consumed but also its efficient consumption: peasants used many parts of the animals they slaughtered, even if they rarely preserved meat for later usage. Holidays sometimes fell on fast days; when this happened, the dietary restrictions took precedence over the festival, and special fast-day foods were prepared, including cabbage, mushrooms with horseradish, fish (during some periods), shchi, potato soup, noodles with mushrooms, peas, fried fish, potatoes and mushrooms, and a pirog with berries.94 In these instances the festive was shown not by the common consumption of meat, but by the degree of difficulty of preparation and the use of other relatively scarce products. In addition, some foods carried specific cultural significance. As a result, meat was eaten for festive occasions not only because of its rarity but also because it resonated culturally. On the other hand, some meats were always avoided because of their cultural significance. Veal, for example, was never eaten in most parts of Kostroma province, according to reports, as doing so was considered "sinful."9s Other foods were often specifically associated with certain rituals beyond the bounds of holidays. Weddings, funerals, and christenings all demanded certain foods be served. At christenings, for example, porridge was often served first. Weddings usually had multiple days of meetings and dinners, at each of which certain foods and drinks formed part of the ceremony.96 It was much more likely that scarce supplies be used to make sure the ritual foods were available than that they be omitted from the ceremony. Similar patterns appeared in Kazan' province. As in Kostroma province, pirogi and other more complicated preparations marked festive times, as did larger amounts of meat. On holidays peasants served meat as a dish by itself, rather than as an element in soup. The roast was often beef, mutton, or pork, and one source notes that if a suckling pig was roasted, it was usually served stuffed with porridge.9 7 Pirogi were joined by vatrushki, another form of pastry filled with farmer's cheese, and other combinations of dough and fillings. Notes on festive foods include mentions of pies or pastries filled with cabbage, fish either salted or fresh, grains, chicken and other meats, carrots or peas. In one region a particular meat-filled baked pastry was called a kurnikha, after its nominal usual filling, chicken (kuritsa). These were often prepared for particularly special events, such as weddings, but according to one account, they were often filled with pork or mutton even under the same name.9s As in Kostroma province, other foods served specific ritual functions. Among the peasants of Sviiazhskii uezd, for example, wedding feasts always included a pig's head, scrambled eggs were always eaten at the completion of the plowing, and funeral meals included buckwheat blini with honey. At christenings the father only was served porridge mixed with salt and vodka, which he had to eat in order that

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he suffer as his wife had.99 In some villages the pig's head was decorated with paper streamers and ribbons and placed upon a bed of boiled beef and pork. The supplementary meats were eaten on the first night of ceremonies, with the head saved until the second night.loo As in Kostroma province and other parts of Russia, beer and vodka were important parts of any celebration as well, with, according to one account, wealthy peasants serving up to four buckets of vodka and fifteen of beer for a single festive day. 1m As Russians began to write more and more about their own peasants, and about their own everyday life, they consistently focused on that life as indicative of some larger truth. By presenting Russian peasant diet in a particular light, they showed the peasants as variously hard-working, as morally backward, or as clever and well-suited to their surroundings. These attempts were all the more important when comparing Russian peasants to others. Writing about a slightly later period, Robert Geraci has described the uneasy place that Russians held in their own empire, and the ways that this uneasiness manifested itself. Russians viewed their empire as a zero-sum space, where the advancement of one people meant the regression of another. Thus, "to reproach and punish the other was to exalt the self," he claims.loz Russian officials in Kazan' province had reason to worry about the role their "own" people played within the province. The ethnographers reporting on the other peoples of the province helped to promote the idea of Russia's leading role through their presentations and interpretations of diet. In so doing, they promoted their own authority as interpreters of Russian life, and also the authority of Russians more generally within this large empire. Of course, such authority was in principle held even more by Russia's elite. Thus, authors during this period also tried to define Russian food more generally, as it was consumed not simply by peasants but by nobles as well. They sought continuities between the two large groups, or perhaps more often, ways to bridge the chasm that had developed between them. DEFINING RussiAN

FooD

Zabelin may have believed that the foods listed in the companion to the Domostroi had been largely forgotten by modern Russians, but he and others did believe that there were essentially Russian foods. Enumerating them, however, was not simply difficult but politically and culturally weighted. By the nineteenth century, deciding on what was really Russian about certain foods or food habits required examination of both the present and the past. The simple and festive foods of the peasants were often considered the best forms of national foods, as they were connected in the minds of many to the foods that everyone, from richest to poorest, ate in olden times,I03 Thus foods like shchi and kasha, and drinks like kvas, consumed by peasants, merchants, townspeople, and members of the gentry

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alike (although in different forms), could readily be understood as Russian by their history. So too were special foods like bliny, pirogi, and the many other varieties of dumplings and pastries that featured as festive or otherwise special foods. The larger category of "dumpling" also came to include foods of possibly unfamiliar origin that were quite quickly adopted into Russian cuisine. Such was the case with some discussion of pel'meni, small meat dumplings now usually attributed to Siberian origins. In 1814 an article in the local Kazan' News described dinner in a Tatar household; the author described penneni as an unusual and natively Tatar dumpling. By 1859, however, an account of Tatar food habits described that people as "great lovers of Russian penneni."104 Other signals of Russianness, however, were in principle harder to transfer between classes. While the peasantry still kept to Russia's fasts, by the early nineteenth century, it seems, few nobles did. In the mid-eighteenth century a noble might have to petition the church to be freed from his fasting obligations, but by the nineteenth, the rhythms of the fasting calendar had lost their centrality to many nobles_Ios Although the rigors of the fasting schedule might have become ineffective, its emphasis on vegetables, according to many, had not. Although medical writers often doubted the healthiness of such a diet, others celebrated the fact that Russian peasants, in particular, "really loved their vegetables." Their willingness -or even their particular desire-to tend vegetable patches marked Russian peasants as more advanced than some of their non-Russian counterparts.J06 Even among the gentry, vegetables held an important place on the table. Descriptions of noble meals often include long lists of vegetable dishes, or salads. Even "peasant" vegetables like cabbage, cucumbers, and mushrooms had particular resonance for all Russians. Because "Russianness" could be judged in different ways, writers on food concentrated on several aspects of the food system that could be read as specifically Russian. Some looked at specific ingredients, others at prepared dishes, and yet others at food habits. Russian food, they decided, had specific characteristics in all these categories, and could be fruitfully compared with food habits and preparations common in other parts of the world. To begin, certain foods were considered as very much natively Russian. Mushrooms, an important part of fast-day meals, were called "almost the most necessary food." 1 07 Sour cabbage was so common that cookbook authors apologized for including recipes for its preparation.ws In general, sour and salty foods were also touted as common loves of Russians.J09 While bread was considered a sign that Russia was part of Europe, the fact that Russian bread was usually made of rye seemed a clear marker of difference. Russians were described, variously, as "great lovers of eggs, of poultry, and, of course, of meringue," and as people who, along with Slavs in general, "extraordinarily love raw onion." Cucumbers, too, appeared in many descriptions; one French visitor claimed "a Russian, to whichever

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class he belongs, can neither breakfast, dine, nor sup, without a fresh or salted cucumber."llO Many of these tastes were attributed to peasants specifically, but some were also extended to members of the elite. Movement away from these tastes was even read as movement away from Russianness. Specific preparations were also seen as uniquely Russian, and many appeared in the "real" Russian meals presented to foreigners. Botvinia and shchi, and pork with horseradish and sturgeon were common fixtures of these meals. Botvinia, especially, became a symbol of Russian cooking, perhaps because it encompassed several traits: it contained sour kvas, the quite common (at least among the elite) salmon, and beet greens. It was also served cold, a trait, noted by some, that was a novel part of Russian summer cuisine, necessitated by the summer heats.m One list of national treasures included it as Russia's greatest gift to world culture and cuisine: "Russian botvinia, English engravings, Russian sour cabbage, Italian ice cream, these are the concoctions which in other countries they can only imitate."llZ Bread, a staple on all tables, was deemed national not only because of its main ingredient, but because of its preparation as well. Some worried that written works on bread failed to address Russian baking traditions, noting that Russian bread had its own character,113 Preparations common in provincial life, too, became a sign of the truly Russian, as opposed to the foreign veneers of the capitals. From tales of travelers racing through the Russian countryside provisioned with frozen shchi and a few kalachi, to descriptions of better kvas in the provinces, provincial life was supposed to preserve tradition.114 Of the provinces, some felt that Siberia was the place with the greatest ties to the old Russian past. The cookbooks of Ekaterina Avdeeva, a native Siberian, brought this opinion to the fore. In particular, she added to the question of the provenance of foods like pel'meni, still not quite common in the capitals and European parts of Russia.m According to writers like Avdeeva, these provincial dishes held on to the truly Russian. In some cases, foreign reception of these foods helped mark them as Russian. Botvinia, for example, received much comment by foreign visitors, little of it positive. The English visitor Richard Southwell Bourke, for example, wrote of his surprise at the "very good looking green soup, called 'badvineh,"' which turned out to be "an iced mixture of salmon, parsley, pickled cucumbers and vinegar, instead of what I expected it to be, good hot pea soup! It was not nice, so I with difficulty swallowed the first mouthful, and put down my spoon with so serious a face, that it caused great merriment to all near me."116 Botvinia was the bane of more than one foreigner's existence in Russia. Another Englishman described it as "kvass, (the vehicle) kislistchi, salt-fish, craw-fish, spinage, salt-cucumbers, and onions. These form a mixture (a mixture with a vengeance!) which is used and served up with a piece of ice in the middle." 117 Perhaps simply due to its shock value, to its uniqueness, botvinia became a particularly vibrant exemplar of Russianness to foreign minds.

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In other cases, Russians concocted meals specifically meant to show off their cuisine to foreigners. A French visitor described his meal at the New Trinity Restaurant in Moscow, the "biggest and best provisioned" in the capital.llB His meal began with caviar, then shchi, "a national soup that everyone in Russia devours with relish, from the muzhik to the boyar; it is ... a sort of soup of cabbage ... but excellent, I must admit, me who has no sympathy for cabbage soup." Pirogi of meat and fish came with the shchi, and several courses of meats followed. Suckling pig with horseradish came first, then bitki, "a sort of hash of meat," then Volga sturgeon, "this justly celebrated fish." Grapes and aromatic tea finished the meal, which was accompanied all along by champagne.119 An English visitor noted a similar, but even more complex meal. His "real Russian dinner" consisted of stchi and borsch soups, the one with cabbage, the other with fermented beetroot; Rastingai and Crougloi Pirrog (a patty with fowl and eggs); stewed sterlet; quails slowly roasted in a stew-pan, and covered with thick sour cream; stewed pork with mushrooms and truffles; jelinottes and white asparagus; Kascha and Kascha pudding; fromage, caviar, compotes, Astracan grapes, and Crimea apples; confitures, sweet wines, and draughts of Kwass, or Kislistchi, the former being a species of brewed fermented liquor, prepared from rye-flour and rye and barley malt, of which the latter is a strong effervescent variety.1zo

This, too, was an extremely elaborate meal, clearly thought out as a showcase for Russian dishes and Russian products. Russians were using food as a way of showing off their country, both by the wealth of its products and by the luxury of its tables, in both ingredient and preparation. They also distanced themselves from the peasants they owned. Habits, too, were classified as Russian. While foreign visitors were often surprised by the zakuski (appetizer) table, Russians often commented on its centrality to entertaining and dining. The terms zakuski and zavtraki (breakfasts) were often used somewhat interchangeably, and both were given weight in cookbooks and other discussions of food. E. A. Avdeeva noted that celebratory breakfasts, rather than dinners, were quite common in Russia, largely because dinners cost more,121 The Russian style of dinner service, too, continued as the dominant mode of serving a meal. The Russian way-in which servants brought individual plates of pre-portioned foods to diners, rather than holding large trays of food for individuals to serve themselves-was extraordinarily labor intensive, so much so that some felt it could only be used in the Russia of free serf labor.12 2 At the same time, however, many chefs considered it the best way to serve food as they wanted it to be served. Even abroad, the demands of French haute cuisine brought increasing attention to form and style, which meant that it was better to arrange individual plates than to create a large intricate dish that would soon be destroyed by everyone's grasping spoons. The ordering of

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courses was also culturally defined. For example, A. I. Lobanov-Rostovskii, in his collection of menus, wrote of his difficulty in giving French names to courses because of the uniquely Russian habit of serving a cold entree after soups and before the hot entree. 123 Despite all these continuities with past practice, visitors like Theodore Faber often went on at length about why it was perfectly possible to "think oneself in the middle of Europe" when faced with Russian meals, at least in the capitals. He wrote The ordinary bread is as white, as well baked as in Paris. The salad is seasoned with the finest oil of Provence or of Italy.... The cheese of Parma is an indispensable need in all kitchens; one never serves the Macaroni of Italy without adding in its perfume. Nothing is more common than that article. A housewife speaks of her supply of Parmesan, like in Germany one would speak of the supply of onions or of parsley. The cheeses of England, of Holland, of Switzerland, are the ordinary dessert. But if one wants to make it more elaborate, you find there apples from Stettin, bergamots and reinettes from France, Borstof from Leipsig, transparent apples from Moscow, the superb apples from Astrakhan, grapes from Crimea, pineapples, peaches, and apricots from the greenhouses of St. Petersburg.JZ4

And this author was by no means alone. Other travelers were similarly amazed at the variety of foods available to them, especially in the capitals; Russians agreed, describing the various foreign establishments and foods available in their towns. Clearly to all, at least in towns and among those who could afford it, foreign foods had become a normal part of Russian life. By the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of foods from abroad had become accepted as part of Russian cuisine.125 In some cases, foreign preparations found favor. Salad, for example, although only introduced into Russia in the eighteenth century, was well established by the middle of the nineteenth. In a description of the best way to prepare salad, the food writer for the Journal of Generally Useful Information suggested that cooks avoid "Gallicisms." Even though he admitted that salad was "itself not of completely purely Russian provenance," there were by this point Russian salads. At times, too, the foreign word was applied to simple Russian preparations; an article in the Farming Gazette referred to "our generally popular winter salad," salted cucumbers,126 Certain individual foods had also become quite common. Asparagus, for example, was even presented as part of a "real Russian meal" served to one traveler in the 1820s. As a writer in the Farming Gazette noted a few years later, "asparagus here has already become quite assimilated, and has become an almost common vegetable, appearing even on non-luxurious tables." 127 While salad and asparagus were foods that could be produced on Russian soil and, therefore, were accepted with little debate, other imports were

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more economically problematic. Tea, of course, had become a supremely ordinary drink, so much so that in 1837 it was claimed to be "necessary in Russia, almost like air." By that time, a law governing eating establishments had even recognized the centrality of tea to the lives of Russians of all estates, not only of the elite. It allowed common kharchevni to sell tea, on the grounds that "the use [of tea] has become almost a thing of prime necessity. Passing craftsmen and people of every type have grown accustomed to it and have a need in our severe climate for a drink that can warm them." 1ZB Other foreign foods became so popular, and so generally accepted as part of normal food, that some observers began to worry about their effect on Russia's balance of trade. In 1833, for example, Russia imported 470,000 rubles of cheese, as well as 6,093,986 rubles of fruit and 98,600 rubles of oysters.IZ9 Cheeses became so popular that, in the 1830s, journals began to feature articles that laid out in great detail the best methods to reproduce foreign specialties. They described the best methods of preparing Parmesan, Dutch, and Swiss cheeses-all popular, in great demand, and expensive to import.130 Presumably, if Russians could prepare some of these foods themselves, they would be less likely to demand expensive imports and thus would improve Russia's international financial situation. In addition, domestic production might help make these foods more "Russian." Certainly a great mixture of foods from different nations shows up anecdotally, particularly in travelers' accounts. Gustave de Molinari gave a lengthy description of dinner at a noble house, beginning with zakuski of caviar, salmon, sardines, and gruyere; moving on to a table set with Chateau Lafitte and Sauteren, where every place was supplied with both white bread and sour rye bread, and where shchi ("a sort of liquid sauerkraut with a piece of beef in the middle"), ukha, or botvinia were likely to appear.I31 Even a description that focused on the poverty and unpleasantness of Russian society described a mixture of foods; Germain de Lagny recalled filthy, greasy napkins and "a whole charnel-house of various insects" swimming in the soup but also described a mixture of foreign and native foods.13Z The mixture appears not just in reports of meals but in descriptions of Russian town markets and merchant arcades. Travelers were frequently amazed at the variety of wares sold in close proximity in the arcades. Edward ]ermann concisely described the St. Petersburg merchant arcade: "Would you breakfast? From the potato to the oyster, from cheese to pineapple, you have your choice."133 And shops, too, held a multitude of offerings. St. Petersburg's "fruit shops" began to sell "everything that might please the tastes of a gastronome." 134 Even in provincial towns like Kazan' individual specialty food shops supplied their customers with foods from all over the world. Shop owners advertised their wares in the local newspapers, often purchasing full-page spreads, ornately designed. One shop owner advertised an impressive range of wares: three kinds of Chinese tea; coffee from the Levant, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil; chocolate; nuts; candy;

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preserves; macaroni; caviar; oils; cheeses (including Parmesan); sausage; sardines; vinegar; mustard; and truffles.13s Household and kitchen records from noble families show some of the ways in which this multiplicity of options manifested itself in real kitchens. The Polianskii household-a household that reported monthly "personal expenses" of at least several thousand rubles-left behind a series of notebooks containing monthly and sometimes daily kitchen expenses from 1819 through 1827,136 The first, a notebook of daily kitchen accounts, was kept in a small leather-bound book with a heart-shaped piece of paper cut out and glued to the front cover; although later books lacked this bit of whimsy, they still showed remarkable care over the expenses of the household, and particularly the kitchen. In most ways, such accounts of the household obviously differed enormously from any description of peasant life. This household, for example, consumed much more meat, and kept Orthodox fasts only partially. Although they did purchase fish regularly, they certainly also purchased beef or other meats almost daily; the weekly fast days were clearly not being kept. Furthermore, while in principle the household should have been fasting for weeks before Easter, in reality they consumed beef regularly. The records show that the single period in which the household purchased only fish was Holy Week itself. On all other days of Lent, beef appears in the register.13 7 The household normally consumed a mixture of domestic and foreign provisions. Monthly accounts always listed expenses on coffee, tea, sugar, and red wine; often, too, foreign cheeses, olive oil, and imported fruits like oranges and pineapple were purchased. Occasionally other imported goods figured regularly in the accounts; for some time in 1825, for example, the household almost daily purchased 25 kopeks' worth of prunes "for the Englishwoman."138 But more generally, even on days when the household entertained guests, most provisions were more or less of domestic origin. Festivities were usually marked by greater quantities of food; while everyday expenses generally ranged from 6 to 16 rubles, on one day, the kitchen spent 121 rubles 72 kopeks on ingredients, including 15 pairs of grouse, large quantities of beef, fish, butter, flour, sugar, 80 eggs, and 20 lemons to feed guests of the household,139 The lemons were the only really "foreign" food on this list, something that holds true more often than not. On a random average day (i.e., a day on which expenses were closest to the household's average daily expenses for the month), a fairly similar situation is apparent. There is little unusual or particularly foreign in this list. The regular purchase of meat, butter, eggs, cream, and vegetables characterized the registers; in addition, the household purchased and prepared large quantities of preserves of various kinds. Purchased preserves (varenie) were supplemented by homemade. Several times a year, the registers list purchases for the brewing of kislye shchi. And from time to time a note mentioned purchasing extra quantities of, say, cucumbers for pickling.1 40

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Other evidence shows noble families negotiating the situation in similar ways. The Iakovlev family, for example, recorded its kitchen expenses under broad categories, many of which mirrored the sorts of foods usually consumed by the Polianskiis. Grains, preserves including sour cabbage, fresh fruits and vegetables, sugar, tea, coffee, and wines all appeared in their registers. This family, however, appears to have followed the fasting calendar more closely, or at least to have paid lip service to it. Their registers listed the categories "fast-day" (which included mushrooms and fish purchases) and "meat-eating" day (meat, poultry, eggs) as a standard way of organizing their expenses.1 41 The categories at least still had meaning. The Golokhvastov family also apparently ate in much the same way as the Polianskii family. Their household registers show the same frequent purchases of the same staples, occasional purchases of large quantities of ingredients for preserving, occasional splurges on pineapples or truffles, and particularly large quantities of purchases for celebratory meals. Someone in the family had a particular taste for cucumbers, as "cucumbers for the table" were a daily purchase at some times of the year. But, too, bottles of French wine, pounds of Parmesan or "Italian ham," canapes ordered in from a Moscow restaurant joined with the more homely delights. 142 CONCLUSION Andrei Wachtel has suggested that Russian literature-particularly the act of translating-became the source of a new image of the Russian nation as an imperializing and assimilating one.143 Incorporating foreign literary works into the Russian canon helped suggest the power of the Russian state, and its ability to borrow from abroad without losing its sense of self. Something rather similar developed on the tables of Russia's elite. By choosing to eat foods labeled Russian, even the westernized elite could still think of themselves as tied to the land. Or, alternatively, the persistence of Russian foods even among those whose dress, carriages, and even language had shifted enormously displays a real connection between Russians of different social estates. Whether mere fa\=ade or real habit, the mixture of foreign and native foods struck many foreign visitors as deeply disturbing. Although they sometimes lauded the great number of dishes in current rotation in Russia, many were discombobulated by juxtapositions like "pineapple and salted cucumbers, Perigord pate and sour cabbage, Burgundy and kvas." 144 Theodore Faber found this particularly remarkable; as he put it, in France "each province regards the wine of another province as a foreign wine," while Russians were surprisingly open to the foreign.14S For Russian authors, however, this mixture was a source of pride. Combining foods-and more to the point, seeing those foods as somehow connected and constituting a coherent whole-created a new sense of a Russian

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cuisine beyond mere Russian foods. Creating something new out of tradition and innovation was a new way of defining Russia. Authors applied this metaphor of combining "ancient Russia with Europe" not only to private meals or to traktirs, but at times to agriculture and industry.146 While agricultural or medical authors sometimes found the mixture a concern, culinary authors saw this mixture as a positive good. An anonymous culinary author noted that all countries had their national cuisine and posed the question, "which cuisine is best: Russian, French, German, Italian, or English?" The answer? "The best table is a mixed one, that is, consisting of dishes of all peoples, prepared in the French style."l47 Or, as Burnashev put it, "Everywhere in Russian homes the table is a mixture of the French and that o(Nizhnii Novgorod, and this is very good."14s In practice, however, this mixture had to come from somewhere. To a certain extent, the new array of foreign foods and foreign preparations was simply a matter of economics and markets. But it was also described, theorized, and debated in the growing world of practical literature. From agricultural writers to cookbook authors (who were often one and the same), Russians actively sought to control the reception of all these foreign foods and practices, and to negotiate their integration into Russian society. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, this negotiation brought new and powerful authority to some (notably the "middle-class housewife" who took over the field of cookbook writing) while others (the housewife's counterpart, the gentleman farmer) fell by the wayside, unable to make their ideals and priorities reach a larger audience.

CHAPTER

FOUR

SEARCHING FOR AN AUTHORITY Encyclopedists and the Art of Translation

uring the reign of the self-consciously enlightened Catherine the Great, Russian authors began to publish ever increasing numbers of books devoted to household and estate management, often carrying on the broad encyclopedic goals of the Enlightenment. Perhaps the best example of one of these authors with encyclopedic breadth was Vasilii Alekseevich Levshin. Over the course of his seventy-five years, Levshin not only published an astonishing number of books but also published on an astonishing array of topics. He wrote novels and stories in the various fashions of the time: sentimentalism, satire, even folkloric nationalism. Among literary historians, he is best known (or perhaps only known) for his collection Russian Folk Tales, in which he sought quite clearly to create for Russia a genre comparable to western (particularly German) tales of knights and chivalry. Indeed, he noted, "tales about knights are nothing other than our folk tales about bogatyrs." 1 He wrote or translated the libretti to operas and straight plays. And, too, he compiled, translated, and composed many books "oneconomic themes," the contents of which were remarkably wide-ranging. All told, he published more than eighty separate works, in nearly two hundred volumes.z

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Levshin wrote about flower gardening, about caring for horses, about medicine. In particular, though, he published a series of encyclopedic works on household or estate management that guided readers not simply through care for agriculture and the larger world of the estate, but in responsibility for the household as well, particularly the kitchen. As an encyclopedist and a translator, he was fully a part of his eighteenth-century enlightened milieu as he sought to make all knowledge accessible to his Russian fellows. But, also, he was at times increasingly interested in Russian nationality and sought explicitly to define Russian cooking, or Russian cuisine, in the context of general European cultural and scientific norms. Levshin thus published among the first Russian cookbooks and the first Russian agricultural texts. In so doing, Levshin influenced the development of these genres, presaging two kinds of writing that often remained tightly linked, even as each also gained its own peculiarities and particularities. Levshin shared with other late eighteenth-century authors an awareness of the possible power of text both to record reality and to promote change. According to Thomas Newlin, the equally multi-talented eighteenthcentury writer Andrei Bolotov did not believe that his work as a successful estate manager was itself sufficient service to the state; instead, it was his work as an enlightener, his work as an author of agricultural and other texts, that he deemed truly important.3 In this he was like many other Russian agricultural reformers, who believed print ought to be the most important focus of their attention. In principle, via periodicals and other agricultural texts, publishers could encourage individuals to innovate and spread knowledge of how to reform rationally and scientifically. In practice, some journals had difficulty even finding subscribers and were victim to the same apathy that condemned many specific efforts at change. Even the enthusiastic Bolotov later remembered the time he spent compiling his Economic Magazine with both regret and satisfaction: I had very slight gain, and the experience of so many years showed me that our public was still full of ignorance, and knew not how, nor yet had become accustomed to value people's labor, and the Fatherland was quite ungrateful. The best reward I had for the entire vast task I had undertaken was my own consciousness of having labored not at something empty, but at a useful business which would in time turn to the advantage not only of our sons and grandsons, but even great-grandsons and remotest progeny; and that I for my part had been useful to my Fatherland. 4

Agricultural authors like Bolotov and Levshin, many of them faceless and even nameless, took seriously the goal of encouraging individuals to innovate and sought to explain not simply how to go about such innovation, but also why Russia needed to change in certain particular ways.

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Many of these same authors also dabbled in cookbook writing and, particularly, translating. Cookbooks play important and varied roles in the development of not only culinary cultures, but cultures more generally. Some codify particular foods and techniques as a national cuisine, while others specifically introduce culinary practices from other places. Some cookbooks are aimed at the professional cook, others at people who cook in their homes. Most cookbooks traffic in ideals, whether the ideal of a national cuisine or of a perfectly run, perfectly tasteful household.s As such, cookbooks both reflect and affect the economic and cultural bases of the societies that produce them. If these are traits of individual cookbooks, the mere existence of cookbooks in a particular culture suggests traits of that culture. As the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has put it, "cookbooks appear in literate civilizations where the display of class hierarchies is essential to their maintenance, and where cooking is seen as a communicable variety of expert knowledge."6 In the Russian case, by all accounts western food predated western-style cookbooks, but cookbook authors and translators nonetheless wanted to make the arrival of western food in Russia rational, by making themselves the authorities on the subject, presenting and explaining foreign methods and ideals. In presenting a unified picture of internal and external domestic life, Russian authors and translators drew principally on foreign works. They quite clearly found England's agricultural revolution exciting and wanted Russia to be a part of it. They knew that foreign cookbooks had long provided opportunities for innovators to describe not simply changed culinary habits, but changing social mores, too. As translators of these works, Russian interpreters saw themselves as playing a central role in the development of a new Russian society, in a way as arbiters of what that society would be, based on particular selections from foreign works, combined in a new "Russian" whole. At the same time, however much these men sought to align themselves with foreign authorities, and by so aligning to give themselves power in a Russian context, through the eighteenth century they were also caught up in far more traditional Russian structures. This was not simply a matter of the continuation of Russian institutions like serfdom, but something rather deeper. The teachings of the church, in particular, as much as they might have started to fade for the elite in practice, remained in principle an important part of the written world of Russian food. And, too, the very encyclopedic nature of these household and estate manuals, containing as they did advice and instruction on all parts of the domestic economy handed down by a male voice, echoed, if it did not draw directly on, older Russian advice literature like the Domostroi. There, patriarchal and religious authority reigned, and continued to reign, through the eighteenth century, although with significant changes in both the person of the patriarch, now an Anglophile gentleman farmer, and in significant aspects of religious practice, now reduced to rules, if not the reason, of the fasting calendar.

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CREATING GENTLEMEN fARMERSTHE TURN TO THE COUNTRYSIDE In the fields, Stepan Mikhailovich found everything to his mind. He examined the rye-crop; it was now past flowering and stood up like a wall, as high as a man; a light breeze was blowing, and bluish-purple waves went over it, now lighter and now darker in the sunlight; and the sight gladdened his heart. He visited the young oats and millet and all the spring-sown crops, and then went to the fallow, where he ordered his car to be driven backwards and forwards over the field. This was his regular way of testing the goodness of the work: any spot of ground that had not been properly ploughed and harrowed gave the light car a jolt, and, when my grandfather was not in a good humour, he stuck a twig or a stick in the ground at the place, sent for the bailiff if he was not present, and settled accounts with him on the spot. ... He paid a visit to the peasants' fields also, to see for himself who had a good crop and who had not; and he drove over their fallow to test it. He noticed everything and forgot nothing.?

Sergei Aksakov described the fictionalized version of his grandfather, Stepan Mikhailovich Bagrov, as a good householder and manager. His estates flourished-though they failed to bring in much income-and his success in the new lands of Orenburg prompted others to follow his path. He served as a friend and advisor to the newcomers, even loaning grain to those just starting out. He took pride in his horses and his mill and showed them off to visitors in all their particulars. And, as in this passage, on his good days he took a great interest in the minutia of his lands, even to the point of investigating not simply how the current crops grew, but how likely future crops were to grow. Of course, he was hardly the norm even within Aksakov's tale. Among his relatives were men who abused their serfs or who spent their time drinking and slowly fading away, caring for nothing and no one around them. Stepan Mikhailovich, however, was in many ways one possible example of a late eighteenth-century Russian gentleman farmer; one half-illiterate, one prone to excesses of temper, but one who had chosen life in the provinces, on the estate, and sought to make his life there comfortable. The late eighteenth century saw a shift to the countryside among Russia's elite, and an increased appreciation for the role of the gentleman farmer modeled on idealized English practice. After Peter III freed the nobility from service, even if many continued to serve the state out of loyalty or poverty, certainly some took advantage of the opportunity to retreat to their estates; in addition, as Priscilla Roosevelt has noted, the new provincial system established by Catherine also demanded that nobles spend more time in the provinces. As she further notes, Russia's nobles, An-

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glophile though they might be, differed in many ways from the English gentleman farmers they in some ways copied.s The noble estate became, at least in principle, a retreat from the wider world, a pastoral space for contemplation, for leisure, for hospitality. The architecture and formal gardens of these noble spaces created something new for Russia: pleasure palaces intended to show off wealth or rationalized buildings to promote inner virtue.9 Or, as in the case of the uneducated Stepan Mikhailovich, country life could be connected to an old-fashioned sense of patriotism, "a patriotism rooted in an idealized, pastoral vision of the 'Holy Rus 11 of yore."lO But the English model demanded something else: enterprise, or "a willingness to experiment with new crops and new agricultural techniques ... to expand production, to invest in capital improvement."ll Arcadius Kahan credited a version of this attitude, a desire to intensify agriculture and increase profits, with bearing some of the "costs of Westernization" rung up by the gentry during the eighteenth century.lz It was this streak, in particular, that found its best expression in the agricultural journals and texts of the period, as foreign, often English ideals were translated for new Russian audiences. Management and household guides had certainly appeared in Russia before the eighteenth century. The Domostroi, a series of instructions aimed at guiding the households of members of the Muscovite elite, is the most famous pre-Petrine guide. This household manual, most likely written in the 1550s, "reflects the life enjoyed by the fortunate few of a new nation at a time of relative calm and comfort." 13 The Domostroi governed a town household most of all, with advice on keeping not simply the household, but all its members, in order. Rather than discussing agriculture, the guide gives far more instruction about purchasing, selecting, preserving, storing, and serving foodstuffs. And it even contains a recipe, of sorts, under the heading "Instruction from the Master or Mistress to the Cook or Steward, on Cooking Food for Meat or Fast Days for the Family, the Servants, and the Poor": Chop cabbage, greens, or a mixture of both very fine, then wash them well. Boil or steam them for a long time. On meat days, put in red meat, ham, or a little pork fat; add cream or egg whites and warm the mixture. During a fast, saturate the greens with a little broth, or add some fat and steam it well. Add some groats, salt, and kislye shchi; then heat it. Cook kasha the same way: steam it well with lard, oil, or herring in a broth.1 4

Although the Domostroi and other manuals existed, by the end of the eighteenth century they had been essentially forgotten, to the point that the Domostroi had to be "rediscovered" in the mid-nineteenth century. Also, practically, its advice had little to do with the sorts of social and agricultural developments of the eighteenth century. New circumstances demanded new knowledge.

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In his memoirs, Andrei Bolotov recalled the importance of such new advice. As a young nobleman, Bolotov took advantage of his emancipation from service to retreat to his country estate. There, he immediately set about improvements, hoping to make of his estate an idyll. In addition to the practical matter of investigating the specific circumstances of his estate, he also, "not wanting to run my estate so blindly and with such carelessness as many do," found as much information on the subject as possible and spent a winter sifting through it for the best and most applicable advice. Out of the multiplicity of sources, he came up with a set of principles of estate management that, he felt, served him well over the succeeding years.1s More generally, in the agricultural works published from the 1750s through the end of the century, including those published by Bolotov himself, agriculture was presented in fairly regular ways: side-by-side with other concerns ranging from the rarified to the mundane, generally translated from foreign sources, and as a result of both those trends, requiring sifting and interpretation by its translators or, more often, its readers. Among the first journals to feature agriculture as a major topic were the Monthly Papers of the Academy of Sciences. During the 17 50s, the periodical included a series of articles on agriculture alongside articles on many other topics of interest, presaging several of the ways in which agriculture would appear over the next century. The texts themselves were an odd batch, generally translations of foreign articles on specific subjects, ranging from scientific articles on sleep, to odes, to ethnographic accounts. Coverage of agriculture was eclectic; the goal was not to provide the final answer on how to farm, but rather to supply individual translations (usually) in order to, as one translator put it, improve the "general good-standing of states" through attention to particular interests.16 Although some articles discussed agriculture broadly, as in a "Letter on Farming" translated from the Journal Economique, others discussed single subjects, like viniculture, or potato cultivation, or the realities of particular regions. The language used by the various authors and translators was straightforward and matter of fact. Even though the authors deemed agriculture important to state economies, their attention was to the specific issues they addressed, not to some larger theoretical understanding of the place of agriculture in world civilizationY Although agriculture was generally not understood as a philosophical topic in the Monthly Papers, it was considered a subject tightly intertwined with science and rationality. That linkage is particularly clear in the "Problems" set by the academy for public discussion. Beginning in 1763, the journal regularly published these problems, questions that had relevance to Russian advancement, asking readers to send in their solutions. The phrasing of the first problem put agriculture in a grander light than many other articles in the journal, noting that agriculture was the "primary base of the good-standing of the state." However, the set problem was far more

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specific, asking readers to suggest better methods of oversight in order to help individuals (and only by extension the state) gain the maximum possible income from agriculture. The Academy of Sciences addressed this issue because science, in the form of a "scholar, although he himself is not a landlord, not an agriculturist, in this matter may give useful advice."lS Other problems were more specific and more explicitly practical. At one point, the academy asked its readers to devise the best possible drying barn for use on Russian estates. At another, it asked for investigations of animal husbandry. This general question included a wide range of subsidiary questions. It was not simply breeding better animals that the academy found desirable. It also addressed consumption: Russians had acquired a taste for cheese, and Russia had yet to produce enough good cheese to supply that taste. As the problem noted, "the cheese that we produce in the country does not deserve that name."19 The estate management books and journals produced during the reign of Catherine II were similarly practical, pragmatic, and wide-ranging in content. Some clearly aimed to teach those newly interested in overseeing their estates what the role entailed. S. V. Drukovtsov published two volumes on estate management that gave advice not only on agriculture, but also on consuming its products-on cooking. In the first, published in 1772, he focused on managing peasants and people and on the kinds of oversight a good manager ought to have, basing his work on unidentified translated sources. The subtitle of the second volume suggests a broader coverage: its advice was intended "so that any landlord (khoziain) may know what he ought to do in which month."ZO Such an arrangement was common. N. P. Osipov also used a calendar device to organize his Pocket Book of Estate and Household Management. Among its first words of advice: "in a word a good landlord and housewife should lose not one minute of time in idleness and emptiness. "Zl And, indeed, his calendar, like Drukovtsov's before him, called for intense work all the year through, within the household and without. Both authors also assumed that those turning to agriculture had essentially no knowledge of the tasks that might face them, and thus led them step by step through the agricultural year. Judging by the number of editions, their work appears to have had success. Although Gary Marker has noted that "sales of other utilitarian books were sharply lower than those of the laws/' which found great popularity during Catherine's reign, some of these Russian publications did appear in multiple editions, at least.zz Between 1772 and 1788 four editions of Drukovtsov's Economic Instructions appeared; the Economic Calendar appeared three times; and Osipov's Handbook appeared twice. On the other hand, Osipov planned a multi-volume Curious Manager, or Collection of Various Experiments and Inventions. The first volume appeared in 1792. No further volumes followed.Z3

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Andrei Bolotov's contributions to the Russian literature on estate management are characterized by their lack of a clear pattern or system. First in the journal Sel'skii zhitel', then in its successor the Economic Store, Bolotov presented a very personal and idiosyncratic mixture of advice and instruction. He began the second journal with an address to his readers, warning them that the journal might appear to lack rhyme or reason. He agreed that articles would follow one after the other somewhat at random-indeed, he noted, the journal was more governed by "disorder" than any thought of order-but hoped that his readers would patiently read beyond what they thought they wanted to know, in order to expand their horizons.z4 Bolotov also relied on his readers for articles; he requested they write him with reports of their experiences and experiments, and promised to print them. He did, often with some comment or with an answering article on a related topic. Although it lacked any central focus, the Economic Store nonetheless is characterized by several tendencies. First, Bolotov's personal interest in gardens and orchards is quite evident, as many articles focus on topics related to those larger themes. Second, although Bolotov later recalled his services to the journal as service to Russia itself, such language is relatively rare in the journal itself. Although articles do occasionally make reference to the "usefulness" of some particular technique to the "fatherland," these are almost always specific, practical comments. In an early article on beer brewing, for example, Bolotov noted that better brewing techniques around Russia could lead to fewer imports, a clear and measurable benefit to the nation.zs And finally, although Bolotov rarely presented straight translations (at least obviously), much of the content of the journal came from foreign sources. The phrases "foreigners say" or "from foreign essays" appear in many articles, and Bolotov usually presented these foreign teachings without significant comment. At times, Bolotov also directly addressed his readership, attempting to guess at the reception of his work. In his later memoirs, Bolotov remembered his second journal as quite successful: he claimed it had around four hundred subscribers at the outset, "and in that number many were princes, boyars, generals, and bishops."Z6 Early in the journal's initial year, he also included the first of a number of articles addressed to women, "a little something for lady readers." As he noted, "I do not doubt that my little pages are worthy of reading not only by men, but by some individuals of the fair sex, and especially those of them, who do not consider it a shame to bear the title good housekeeper."Z7 In this, and in most of the other articles explicitly addressed to women-most of which were titled exactly that, "for the ladies"-Bolotov gave instructions for the preparation of various cosmetics, suggesting a relatively limited conception of the possible role of such "good housekeepers." The problematic question of the reception of both Bolotov's journal and other agricultural publications volumes is complicated by the fact that in many ways the advice given in these texts fit poorly with Russian

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contexts. Some authors explicitly addressed this problem. Levshin, at the beginning of his General and Complete Management, noted that many foreign works contained much advice that was not applicable to Russian circumstances.zs But others simply translated, leaving foreign works largely unadjusted. For example, in his various translations, Drukovtsov described a peasant world, in particular, that seems far removed from Russian (or any) peasant life: "in the garden the peasant wife should have various fruits and vegetables, apples, pears, cherries, plums, raspberries, currants, rowan-berry, cherry, cabbage, cucumbers, onion, garlic, horseradish, radish, rutabaga, turnip, carrots, peas, beans, parsnip, parsley, mushrooms, every berry, potato, and by this means can satisfy her family well all winter long and have something other than animal foods." 29 Such a picture of abundance was clearly far from any reality, particularly in northern Russia. So too was his advice that landlords should teach all peasant children, both boys and girls, reading and writing, "through which they will come to know the law."3D Lurking here, too, was a problematic picture of the role of women. According to these sorts of descriptions, peasant women were confined to the garden and household, spending no time working in the fields, generally an inaccurate picture of the Russian countryside. But also problematic were descriptions of the role of elite women. The women who were to join their husbands out on the estate were to become paragons of wifely duty, raising children, teaching them love of God, of order, of work, and according to N. P. Osipov, watching over the household, the garden, and domestic animals and poultry. That is, women were not to be estate managers in their own right, as some Russian women actually were, but merely hard-working helpmeets for their hard-working husbands.31 One reason for such almost slavish translation is that for most of these writers, the process of compiling or writing guides to estate management was simply part and parcel of the time in which they were living; they had no specific ideology other than a general sense of being part of a rational, scientific Enlightenment, without national boundaries. As Levshin put it, "not being content with ... simple agriculture, we invented thousands of arts, thousands of various methods for the absorption of the gifts of nature and the increase of our needs. In this way architecture, cooking, luxury, trade, war, medicine and so on, developed to use in various ways animals, supplies, gold, lead, saltpeter, timber, and in general everything that comes from the bowels of the earth."3Z In other words, humankind had progressed to the point that it did not simply use the products of the earth in their basic forms, but altered them essentially through the arts and sciences. Agriculture, architecture, cooking, war: all had changed and altered in the fact of the progress of history. Other writers made this link yet more explicit. Osipov addressed his Pocket Book to "most honored farmers/' praised the philanthropy of Catherine and her actions to improve agriculture, and noted that in "the current Enlightened century" "every rational man" had to realize the importance of farming in a modernizing economy.33 The

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still-young Free Economic Society shared in this enlightened outlook; articles published in its journals also placed themselves in the "current Enlightened times." The sense of rational change was a purely pragmatic concept for many writers. Ivan Boltin noted that changes in agriculture were simply changes in civilization that accompanied progress along the path of nations. Rational, advanced farming techniques were one of many elements of true enlightenment.34 The writers believed in their enlightened state and trusted to the process of civilization to spread that enlightenment to their currently unlearned brethren. The turn of the nineteenth century brought two changes in agricultural literature after the flurry of publication under Catherine. First, the period was a low point for Russian agricultural periodicals and literature more generally. Also, among the fewer works published an ideological shift occurred, as an increasing mix of pride and concern arose, specifically about Russia's agricultural state. Very few agricultural journals appeared from the 1790s through the early 1800s. Bolotov ended his Economic Store; Levshin continued to publish, but generally on more and more specialized topics: in 1810, for example, a Kitchen-garden Calendar translated from the German.3 5 Furthermore, eighteenth-century pragmatism and optimism was giving way to more pessimistic accounts of Russia's agricultural wealth. One early nineteenthcentury Russian statistical work made two points: agriculture had given Russia independence from foreign exports, and thus something to celebrate; at the same time, Russians had not yet made the best use of this abundance, and thus Russia was in danger of falling behind.36 In a series of articles, Vasilii Karazin similarly promoted the idea that Russia had lagged in agriculture but could well develop if its nobles would commit more forcefully to their role as managers and improvers.37 Foreign travelers, too, were amazed at the agricultural wealth-or agricultural potential-to be found in Russia, but also at its backwardness. William Tooke, like many others, believed that with proper development, Russia "might be not only completely independent in regard to her primary requisites, but also entertain the probable hope of keeping the generality of trading nations in a constant dependence on her."3B This was a glorious dream, one that Russian authors increasingly turned to over the next several decades. However, it was a dream with a possible problem. It required a newly Russian sense of agricultural reform, something that did not yet exist. Instead, the problem of translation still lurked. TRANSLATION AND THE RUSSIAN IN LATE EIGHTEENTHCENTURY CULINARY LITERATURE

As it first developed in the late eighteenth century, agricultural literature was often bound together with advice aimed at the household, and particularly at the kitchen. And, again, Aksakov's semi-fictional Stepan

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Mikhailovich serves as a guide. Stepan Mikhailovich reigned not just over the fields, but also over the table at Bagrovo, where his favorite dishes"haggis, roast ribs of pork, and porridge made of green rye"-were the norm. But even this old-fashioned master put aside his tastes in the name of propriety when occasion demanded. Thus, for a banquet honoring his new daughter-in-law, A chef had been procured, of special skill in the culinary art. Materials of all sorts were provided in abundance-a six-weeks-old calf, a pig fed to monstrous proportions, fat sheep, and poultry of all kinds. It was the custom then to place all the courses at once on the cloth; and the table at Bagrovo could hardly hold them all or support their weight. Cold dishes came first-smoked hams seasoned with garlic; next came green cabbage soup and crayfish soup, with forcemeat balls and rolls of different kinds; then fish salad on ice, sturgeon kippered and sturgeon dried, and a dish heaped mountain high with crayfish tails. Of entrees there were only two: salted quails aux chaux, and stuffed ducks with a red sauce containing raisins, plums, peaches, and apricots. These entrees were a concession to modern fashion; Stepan Mikhailovich did not like them and called them "kickshaws." They were followed by a turkey of enormous size and fatness, and a hindquarter of veal; the accessories were preserved melons and gourds, apple chips, and pickled mushrooms. The dinner ended up with round jam tarts and raised apple pies served with thick cream. All this was washed down with home-made liquors, home-brewed March beer, iced kvass, and foaming mead.39

Meals of such luxury and richness were not the norm for Bagrovo, but they were part of the fashion of the time, even on the provincial estate. While Aksakov made much of the distinction between town and country life-a distinction noticeable even when the town was a provincial place of no particular renown-the fashions of the time were certainly not lost even in the far off reaches of the empire. And cooking instructions were one of the ways in which these fashions were transferred beyond the capitals. Although in the eighteenth century it often appeared side by side with discussions of agriculture, the literature on cooking nearly always found its subject more ideologically problematic. For one, improvements in cuisine were on the one hand more common, and on the other were not necessarily the purely positive development that many saw in agricultural reform. Already by this period an appreciation of elements of western cuisines had clearly become the norm among some strata of Russian society. In his ode Felitsa, the poet Derzhavin mocked the tendency of Russia's nobles to eat well and to consume foreign foods:

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Where the table shines with silver and gold, Where there are thousands of different dishes: There is the famous Westphalian ham, There are chains of fish from Astrakhan, There fruits and pies stand; I wash down waffles with champagne And forget everything on earth Among wine, sweets and aromas.4o

With this list of foods, Derzhavin was satirizing the mores of Russia's highest circles, where luxury had corrupted the enlightened world created by (in the context of the ode) the moderate, wise, circumspect Felitsa/Catherine.41 In a similar way, authors of cooking texts found themselves negotiating warily between describing luxury and promoting moderation. But, too, the very idea of a general enlightened culture, perfectly acceptable in the context of agriculture, was more problematic when it came to food. Certainly even agricultural texts had to deal with applying foreign texts to Russian conditions, but that did not as a rule change the very basic nature of their approach to improving agriculture-rational agriculture was rational agriculture, no matter the specific circumstances of climate. However, within the realm of cooking, even by the end of the eighteenth century a challenge to the supremacy of enlightened or foreign cuisine began to appear-and a challenge clearly understood to possess an ideological dimension of preserving Russianness. From their very beginnings, Russian cookbooks proper were tightly linked to foreign works and translations. The culinary historian V. V. Pokhlebkin identified Vasilii Levshin's Russkaia povarnia (Russian Cooking), published in 1816, as the first modern Russian cookbook. Although others have mentioned earlier texts, they have basically agreed, noting that Levshin's work was "written during a surprisingly brief French fall from grace in Russia after the burning of Moscow by Napoleon."42 This is, simply, wrong. True, Levshin's Russian Cooking of 1816 was debatably the first stand-alone volume of Russian cooking to appear. However, it was simply a repackaging (a frequent fate of Russian culinary works) of a work originally published as part of a larger effort two decades before. The earlier text highlights well the role of translations and foreign foods in early Russian culinary literature. Between 1795 and 1797, Levshin published a six-volume encyclopedic culinary work; the later volume Russian Cooking was one section lifted from the original text and presented as a standalone work. Whatever the subsequent importance of a cookbook on Russian cooking, even the title of the original gave the subject rather less weight: The Cooking, Serving, Candy Making and Distilling Dictionary, Containing in Alphabetical Order Detailed and True Instructions for the Preparation of Every Sort of Food (rom French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English Cook-

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ery, Pastries, Desserts, Preserves, Salads, Waters, Essences, Spiced Vodkas, Liqueurs, Double Vodkas, and the Like; also for the Ordering of Tables with Plans, Menus, Servants, and the Like and with as an Addition, in Separate Paragraphs, a Complete Bourgeois and New Cookery; and in the Same Ways Austrian, Berlin, Bohemian, Saxon, and Russian Cooking. 43 Not only does this text serve in many ways as the best example of the kinds of culinary literature being produced in Russia in the late eighteenth century, but the placement of Russian cooking in this title, at the end of a long list, also suggests the place of Russian cooking in Russian cookbook publishing around the turn of the century: swamped in a sea of foreign translations, a mere garnish to the larger meal. Two kinds of cookbooks regularly appeared in the late eighteenth century: slim volumes on a single subject, or, more commonly, vast encyclopedic works that either presented many aspects of culinary culture, as in the Levshin volume cited above, or that included cooking as one element of household or even estate management. Virtually all borrowed-or stole-from foreign sources. The possible exceptions tend to be the slim volumes, and particularly the "Russian" works of N. P. Osipov. Osipov produced a series of works including The Old Russian Housewife, Housekeeper, and Cook and The Russian Economic Vintner, Brewer of Beer and Mead, Vodka Master, Kvas-Maker, Vinegar-Distiller, and Cellar-Keeper, which focused on preserves and other staples.44 In the course of his titles he uses both forms of the adjective "Russian": the ethnically derived russkii (to modify the housewife, housekeeper, and cook) and the state-defined rossiiskii (to modify the various male figures of the second text). In so doing, Osipov emphasized these individuals' Russian credentials but also suggested, even if inadvertently, the difficulties in defining "Russianness" in a multinational, contiguous empire. And, indeed, Osipov described a culinary world stuck between a traditional past and a new present. In practical terms, Osipov's Russian texts focused on both cooking for the table and preserving foods for later consumption; at the same time, they presented both traditional foods and newly inherited concoctions. In the Old Russian Housewife, Osipov arranged his recipes (and household cleaning tips) in alphabetical order. He presented four recipes for shchi (here spelled shti), a basic recipe for a pirog with a list of various fillings for the pastry, hearty recipes like an ukha and sal'nik, and even basic recipes for kasha (but not bliny). 4 S The great majority of entries, however, deal less with preparing foods for the table than with preserving foods for later use. In this attention to preserving rather than preparing for the table, he echoes the balance of the Domostroi, which was similarly weighted toward the cellar and pantry. This was certainly also true of the Russian Economic Vintner, which appeared in two editions. The second version was "new and complete" and "now re-examined, systematically organized, expanded in many places not only with new articles, but even with whole

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chapters, and increased to twice the previous size." 4 6 Here in particular Osipov reached beyond the Russian context suggested by the titles of his works. In the two volumes of the second edition, Osipov presented vodkas of all sorts, other liqueurs, syrups, wine, beer, and mead. He included a short section on kvas and kislye shchi, both staples tackled in the Housewife volume, as well. He examined wine, explicitly discussing foreign and domestic production of the beverage. And he presented a series of "various homely [domashnye] drinks": punch (described as a variety of the traditional Russian sbiten1, cider, lemonade, coffee, orgeat, and hot chocolateY Even in a "Russian" text, foreign foods and drinks found a prominent place. This trend toward inclusion of foreign food is even more startling in another slim volume-in this case a forty-page-long title, The Lenten Cook, or the Preparation of Various Fast-Day Foods, published in Kostroma in 1796. The volume was simply a list of recipes with little in the way of introduction or explanation. All but the last few recipes were fish dishes, ranging from pastries to soups to entrees. They appear to be dishes for definitely Russian tables, because they often call for species of fish common in Russia, and the book included recipes for ukha, for shchi, and for borshch. But they also show the ways that foreign foods and techniques had begun to penetrate the country. One recipe for a fish soup with sturgeon also called for macaroni. A series of recipes for sterlet variously demanded white wine and cloves, or truffles, or olives. "French bread" figured as an ingredient in several recipes. At various points words derived from foreign terms were translated for readers who might not know the newest culinary jargon. The last recipe, an oxyrnoronic fast-day dessert, was for waffles.4s The Lenten Cook foreshadows some of the ways in which other works, in general explicitly translated from foreign sources, dealt with the disjuncture between foreign cuisine and Russian cuisine. The larger encyclopedic works that appeared during Catherine's reign drew heavily on foreign sources, either carefully describing a single source, or cobbling together material from various places. The title page of the 1786 New Complete Cookbook made clear that it had been translated by one I. Navrotskii, but it did not explore the origins of its "710 instructions, by which anyone may prepare desired foods with the best of taste."49 Similarly, Levshin drew on a series of separate foreign works for his Cooking Dictionary, none of which was clearly identified in the text. Levshin addressed the need for translations in order to fill a gap in Russian publishing: "We still have too few books in our language concerning the Cooking Arts, but those that are known to me have been accepted with great acclaim. This encouraged me to satisfy lovers of the table and of taste with a Complete Cooking Dictionary, which I, laboring for many years, have collected from the newest Cooking books published in German and French, and also old and new notes."so Navrotskii and Levshin also took a dominant position as the ar-

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biters of their cookbooks, if not as their ultimate authors; their positions as translators and compilers took precedence over any foreign authors, whose names simply did not appear. The translator A. Sokovnin, however, subordinated himself to the original author of the work he translated and discussed the process of translation in a preface. As he noted in a preface, he felt the Cookbook of Master Chef Andreas Christian Krisp had to be translated "into the Russian [Rossiiskii] language for the good of society." According to Sokovnin, a worthy master of the household was obliged to balance his search for good taste with concern for the household economy. This included knowing "what goes into a given dish, in what way to prepare it, and what food is made of."Sl Krisp's text met that goal. Whatever their sources, translators had to deal with a series of issues in adapting foreign texts to Russian audiences. Most cookbooks introduced foreign foods and terms; only some authors actually defined them. The use of foreign foods was virtually never explained, but new techniques or preparations might require a fuller discussion. S. V. Drukovtsov, who perhaps has the best claim to be the first modern Russian cookbook author, included a three-page appendix, an "Interpretation of Cooking Terms," at the end of his Cooking Notes. He assumed some words, like bul'on (bouillon) were already familiar, but he translated others, like konsomme, in this case as "clear bouillon with bread."SZ Similarly, Navrotskii included a lengthy guide to basic cooking techniques-56 of 404 pages-at the start of his New Complete Cookbook, introducing readers to possibly unfamiliar foreign terms and ways. The definitions interspersed in the Lenten Cook suggest that some of those recipes may have been translations. In other cases, larger issues demanded explication. Levshin, in his Dictionary, defined not simply foods, but also figures associated with food. For example, a kanditor was a figure who ruled over candy making, preserving fruits and other supplies, brewing coffee, and making chocolate, ice cream, and other "culinary drinks in general."S3 Other issues were more abstract, and based in differences between Russian and western European social structures. The best example involves the translation of the French classic by Menon, La cuisiniere bourgeoise. This book, published first in 17 46 and reissued thirty-one times through the rest of the century, was among the first of French cookbooks to address the non-professional reader, and it started a new school of writing about food in France.s 4 In some ways, it was easier to translate the contents of this cookbook than its title. At least two editions of an identical translation appeared in Russia.ss First, Levshin presented his readers with a section on "Meshchanskaia Cooking" in his Cooking Dictionary. A decade later, the Newest Cookbook for All Statuses appeared.S6 Although according to its full title this second book had been translated by an anonymous translator from a German original, it is nearly exactly the same as the "Meshchanskaia cooking" of Levshin's Dictionary: both start with a list of

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menus, then move on to virtually the same list of recipes, from soups to sauces. Thus, a single French work appeared in Russian under multiple titles. Both titles sought to convey the idea expressed by Menon's original. Levshin translated quite literally, representing bourgeoise as meshchanskaia: this was a moderately accepted translation, but one that misses clear differences between the French bourgeoisie and the Russian meshchanstvo. The later anonymous translation used the phrase "for all statuses" instead of a word associated with a class or estate. In some ways, the phrase conveys the idea of the original more clearly. Menon's text was for all statuses (to an extent), presenting foods for the upper reaches of the increasingly powerful third estate. Certainly the Russian meshchanstvo was too narrow a group to convey this sense of a growing, developing, economically powerful segment of society defined less by social position than by estateY Yet another issue focused on what was often considered a question of nationality: religion. Russian Orthodox fasting traditions were more severe than those of western Catholicism. While western Lenten meals could contain dairy and fish, during some fast periods Russian Lenten meals ought properly to contain no animal products at all. In principle, this meant that careful translators had to make note of whether the Lenten foods they described fit Russian needs. In practice, during the eighteenth century, at least, many authors failed to address this issue. Levshin, in the course of presenting another section on then modern French cuisine, fell into this trap. In a section on "New Cuisine," Levshin presented a series of Lenten soups and sauces. However, because they included sometimes generous quantities of butter, they were not truly applicable to Russian circumstances.ss Elsewhere, too, authors simply presented Lenten foods without comment on their applicability to Russian religious circumstances, or by ignoring the need for Lenten foods.s9 Although Orthodoxy posed a problem for translators, it also led to the appearance of Russian cooking in Russian cookbooks. Of course, certain individual dishes became symbolic of Russian cooking-what would a Russian cookbook be without shchi? The most clear marker of a cookbook as "Russian" came to be its organization, not necessarily the specific recipes it contained. Other national cookbooks have similarly defined internal organizational patterns. The French sections of Levshin's Cooking Dictionary, for example, are arranged almost identically: they begin with bouillons and soups, move on to all sorts of meats in separate sections, then variously address vegetables and side dishes. More generally, French cookbooks had by this time separated out most baking from other kinds of cooking. Recipes for starchy foods dropped dramatically, while those for green vegetables rose somewhat. Those for beef and veal also rose, while recipes for sugared dishes rose until 1542, then fell dramatically. Thus, French cookbooks of the late eighteenth century featured few breads or rolls, few sweets, large numbers of meats, and moderate numbers of vegetables.6o

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The first element of what would become the Russian system initially appeared in the work of Drukovtsov, who in his Economic Instructions, presented a section on cooking that drew on the Orthodox fasting calendar rather than on the French system for organization. Although Drukovtsov made no claim to present "Russian cooking" in particular and indeed felt obliged to include an index of foreign terms at the end of his other work, his use of Orthodox practice as an organizing principle more clearly marks this book as something different. Drukovtsov did not state explicitly his organization; rather in a section titled "short cooking notes," he simply presented foods containing meat, divided into soups (here sup rather than the older pokhlebka); "sauces," which here mean prepared meat dishes rather than individual sauces; cold foods; roast meat ("although everyone knows how to roast meat"); and baked goods involving dairy products.61 The "notes" next turn to dishes with fish, beginning with fish bouillon, then fish soups, fish "sauces," and baked goods with fillings of fish. The penultimate section, "On fast-day foods," includes many dishes with mushrooms and walnut oils. The last two pages present an "Economic meal for eight people," a menu based around a calf's or sheep's head.62 These recipes, at least in their organization, were closely tied to something actually Russian. Even within this organization inspired by Russian Orthodox tradition, Drukovtsov included many "foreign" foods. In the Economic Instructions, recipes for fish pies, waffles, and gelatins all found their place. In his longer, expanded Cooking Notes, Drukovtsov presented an even more complex assortment of foods, and he also moved away from the organization of his earlier volume. As some writers had linked agricultural change to the process of civilization, Drukovtsov linked modern cuisine to the progress of peoples. Although the human body can be satisfied physically by very simple foods, a point he illustrated by looking at the peasantry and their limited diet, modern society tended to make people of wealth unsatisfied with plain fare. As the life of luxury increased, he wrote, "our habits and manners, and with them also our tastes, have changed such that we seem unsatisfied and not sated by monotonous and simple foods, those made up not of various things and without many spices."63 He urged Russian lords to pay attention to their estates, to become true "economists," and Russian ladies to pay attention to the kitchen, and not "to consider it base to go to the kitchen and watch over both the cleanliness of the cook, as well as the dishes and the kitchen itsel£."64 Practically, the Notes begin with a discussion of basic information, here about dealing with meat and poultry. A section on soups follows, then a lengthy one on "sauces." Again, a single recipe is given for roasts. All discussion of fish is subsumed under one heading, "On fish foods." There are no recipes for fast-day foods, which are, arguably, the most characteristic of the foods demanded by the Orthodox calendar. Also missing are recipes for baked goods and sweets. This omission makes the book seem more like foreign works, in which baking was separated out from other forms of cooking.

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Although Drukovtsov largely abandoned the Orthodox organization in his second cookbook, the idea returned in the work of Levshin. He, too, divided his "Russian cooking" into two sections: meat-eating and fast-day. But that was only the beginning of the innovations of Levshin's work. First, Levshin here presented "Russian cooking" as a separate cuisine, ready to stand next to the other specialized cuisines included in his encyclopedic Dictionary. Levshin was well aware that such an action had an ideological component. He began the section with an expository introduction, noting: Acquaintance with foreigners, which has begun here for a while, has acted in the same way on the purity of Russian manners and on the taste of the table. Simple foods, prepared from ingredients found in the fatherland, should have yielded to those of foreign soils, quite complicated, although imagined with great innuendo, the unprofitable, stuffed with many spices unusual for us, but for that also those dangerous to health in preparation, such that even news of Russian dishes has completely been destroyed. One cannot here present a complete description of Russian Cooking, and must be satisfied with only that which could be collected from what remains in memory: for the History of Russian Cooking, unlike that of other European [cuisines], was never committed to writing, nor to print.65

In this description of the current situation of cooking in Russia, Levshin claims that truly Russian recipes have been largely forgotten, that foreign cooking had made such inroads among those with access to it that anything and everything traditional was put aside. Oddly, this passage in some ways echoes the introduction to his section on the French "New" Cooking. There, too, he described a world in which the old and traditional was overcome by the new and refined. In the case of French cooking, however, written cookbooks had long provided a repository for recipes and techniques. Here Levshin paints a picture of an elite so completely fascinated with the West that the traditional Russian was completely forgotten. While this was certainly an exaggeration, and Levshin's purported discomfort with this influx of foreign foods certainly had not stopped him from easing their path by translation, this image would persist in many forms through the next half century or more. More practically, Levshin also codified the second organizing principle of Russian cookbooks: a specific order of courses he claimed were traditionally Russian. According to Levshin, Russian dinners consisted of four courses: a cold dish, a hot dish or soup, stews or roasts, and some sort of filled pastry or other hearty baked good. He organized his presentation of foods first by the fasting calendar, and second, within each fasting category, by these four courses. Levshin also noted that Russian tradition expressed importance not so much by the exquisiteness of foods served at festive times, but by the quantity of foods served.66 Perhaps as a result, he

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did indeed present a wide array of choices for many of these days. In the "Table in meat-eating times/' he presented fifteen cold meat dishes and twenty soups, including several varieties of shchi, borshch, and burak. Thirty different stews and roasts appeared, evenly divided between the two sorts of preparations, and nearly seventy varieties of baked or other grain-based goods, including porridge, bliny and other forms of pancakes, kisel' and noodles. The fast-day recipes depended on nut and other vegetable oils, mushrooms, and vegetables. Granted, some sections were conspicuously small-he presented very few recipes for full-lenten stews and roasts, for example-but all fast-days were covered. In the early nineteenth century, Russian authors and translators introduced other types of cookbook writing with far-reaching implications. In 1808, I. Glazunov published the Cooking Calendar, or Self-Teacher of the Art of Cooking.67 It was arranged neither alphabetically nor according to Russian menus or fasting habits. Instead, it was arranged chronologically, like many agricultural or estate management series. This was something new, at least in the realm of cookbooks. Each month was divided into several sections. First came menus for each day of the month written out with instructions. For example, the first month, April, contained menus for thirty dinners and thirty evening meals. Every seventh meal was labeled "for guests" and included extra dishes. The usual dinners were a simple set of a soup and a meat dish, while the special dinners added two meat dishes and one non-meat dish. The evening meals for normal days were a single food, usually involving meat or eggs, while the special meals were much more elaborate, with soup and two or three meat dishes. A section placed after the one on dinners gave four recipes under the title "On pastries for every special dinner and also for times without ceremony, when called for." In each month these menus were followed by "Cooking notes," which gave advice on what foods should be preserved when, as well as some general advice on foods likely to be in season at a given time. Not only did this pattern marginalize the fasting organization of other cookbooks, it ignored the very need for regular meatless meals in the monthly calendar. The Cooking Calendar also explicitly addressed a new sort of readership: "dear ladies," in the words of its publisher. He introduced the first volume with a description of its value to these discerning readers: this book ... is your own possession: for the internal economy of the home, and consequently of the kitchen, storage pantry and cellar, everywhere and immediately depends on the lady or housewife of every home. When the master of the household occupies himself with business and the external economy, after his labors he returns to the embrace of his spouse: her home then strengthens him with healthy and delicious foods-and how pleasant is food prepared by darling hands!-for not the quantity, but the pleasantness of foods better restores after exhaustion, and keeps the body in healthy condition.6s

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The ideas expressed here were not new, but they were newly packaged. Eighteenth-century authors, too, had written of the duty of the wife to provide for the comfort of her husband; many others had proclaimed the kitchen and pantry the domain of women. Still, here these ideas, of the kitchen as a place where women of a certain status might actually do some work, participating fully in the internal workings of a household, were combined with the idea of possession. It was not simply that women were left with this arena, but that they possessed it fully. The publisher, of course, also condescended to these readers in this introduction. The hands doing the preparing were "darling," after all, and the cookbook at times took on alecturing tone. For example, a recipe for sour cabbage was prefaced with the comment that "no matter how usual and commonly known this preparation is, it sometimes happens that in some households there are made in this situation mistakes ... and so I do not consider it extraneous to here thoroughly describe the production of fermented cabbage."69 Nevertheless, here women's roles were imbued with a new practicality and importance. Also in 1808, perhaps the most national cookbook to appear in this period was published, and it was one that pushed the social boundaries of Russian cookbooks. Entitled Popular Cooking, the text from its very first pages sought to be something different. It was not for the elite, not for the belle monde of Russian society. Instead, its anonymous author hoped to present its readers with the best ways to eat inexpensively, but with satiety. There were methods best suited to feed "simple people and soldiers," according to the titleJO Practically, the author presented one basic method-using bones to brew a rich base for soup-and then a wide variety of soups built on that foundation. He noted that Lenten food was almost always less nutritious and suggested using large fish bones to replace others when possible. This was very basic food, and the author explicitly distanced himself from anything more: "to other well-known popular Russian foods here I will not refer, for they are well enough known in every household, and also my intention is not to present instructions for peasant Russian cooking, but, as the title itself shows, to teach methods of cheap, filling, and also tasty preparation of food." 71 While this degree of simplicity was never the norm, the idea of looking beyond the highest reaches of Russian society would become a central issue several decades later. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of these varied works had relatively good success. The copy of Navrotskii's translation (the New Complete Cookbook) now in the collection of the Russian State Library in Moscow was apparently well used at some point in its history. The inside front cover has been signed by a long-ago owner. Fekla Gribova penned her name with a large flourish, and dated the book 1814. This signature suggests several things about the readers of these cookbooks. For one, Gribova was a literate woman in the early nineteenth century with responsibilities for cooking. Although one possible owner of such books was the lady of a household, who would be meant to use the book as a way of guiding her

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servants, Fekla's name, with its connotation of peasant origin and vegetable associations, suggests she was likely the cook herself, and perhaps one with some degree of culinary training. Although this book was one that included a lengthy section on preparatory techniques, it certainly still required a reader who was already familiar with the basic techniques of cooking. Also, a book first published in 1786 found a new owner in 1814, either because original exemplars were still being sold then, or because it had passed from hand to hand. In addition to the care with which some readers received these books, the history of their reprints also suggests that some enjoyed popular success. In 1825 the fifth edition of the New Complete Cookbook appeared, although by this time Navrotskii's name had fallen by the wayside. The numbering of recipes is identical between the works, but the 1825 edition includes a new section, titled "On new foreign inventions in the culinary arts," which contains recipes for Saxon, Austrian, "Slavic," and Bohemian foodsJZ Also, as noted earlier, a separate Russian Cooking, or Instructions on the Preparation of Every Sort of Genuine Russian Food and on Preparing Various Preserves for Storage appeared in 1816. The new cookbook presented a modified version of Levshin's earlier Russian Cooking. The stand-alone text cut a few recipes, largely in the last sections on pastries and other grain-based foods, and added a lengthy series of sections on preserving techniques for meats, fish, vegetables, and fruits. It included the same call to preserve Russian cooking, a passage that likely had a rather different meaning in the still-new glow of Russia's victory over France, perhaps even a call to arms. Practically, Levshin's call to arms would not be heard for several decades. In the interim, two major trends affected the development of Russian culinary and agricultural literature. The first trend saw an increasing separation between the two genres. Eighteenth-century authors who often addressed both agriculture and cooking gave way to nineteenthcentury authors who focused on either the kitchen or the fields. In addition, this separation fell along gender lines. Initially, both genres were masculinized. Agricultural literature rarely spoke to women, and women's roles were increasingly marginalized. Even in culinary literature, although women were sometimes addressed as readers, more and more authors addressed professional chefs, generally defined as men. During the first third of the century, in this context of separated spheres and ever more masculine approaches to both, the literatures developed in different ways. Agricultural writers moved beyond an appreciation of enlightenment and progress to a position demanding real change as part of the duty of Russia's landlords and even the state. And cookbook writers for a while gave up on the idea of discussing Russian cooking, instead turning almost exclusively to translated works of master chefs. It was only in the second third of the century that a strong female voice rose and claimed authority at least over the kitchen. Before then, the male voices that produced even much of the eighteenth-century material dominated, if not always successfully.

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Master Chefs, Gentlemen Farmers, and Progressive Patriotism

uring the first half of the nineteenth century, culinary and agricultural writers increasingly tangled with the question of responsibility and authority, in the kitchen and around the estate. Their discussions of rational agriculture and cooking were conducted, however, in separate spheres, because the late eighteenthcentury encyclopedic works that combined attention to internal and external household economies, production, and consumption had now been replaced by specialized works.! Levshin's Russian Cooking was the last more or less original cookbook to appear in Russia until the 1830s. In the interim, and even into that period, translated works by master chefs predominated in the culinary publishing world, presenting a very specific image of what the culinary arts were. Trained, professional chefs were the true authorities, according to this model; the few images of traditional female cooks or housewives that had appeared in the late eighteenth century almost entirely disappeared. Instead, the gastronome, the gourmet man, was the ideal local translator of the foreign way of cooking, as his stomach (and pocketbook) led him to foreign

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chefs for pleasure, not simply sustenance. At the same time, Russian agricultural writers and the Russian state itself began to take the question of responsibility over agriculture far more seriously. During the 1820s, in particular, agricultural writers developed the idea that Russia's nobles had a duty to the state and to its citizens to pursue an active role in improving local agriculture-to become authorities on the subject, and authoritative on their estates. As of the scare of the early 1830s, the Russian state, too, began to encourage individual involvement in agriculture to a far greater degree. And aside from the general information on specific reforms and improvements, many authors dealt with very basic questions of authority and responsibility. One of the most prolific, if least remembered, of these agricultural writers was V. P. Burnashev (1812-1888), a man whose career in some ways traces the fate of the arguments over authority and reform. He began his career at a time when agriculture was a compelling interest in Russia; his reputation faded as theories of an ideal Russian nation shifted away from such a rural path. As a young man, Burnashev served as a bureaucrat in various ministries, including the ministries of Internal Affairs and State Domains, and later worked as the director of an agricultural school. At the same time, he was a prolific and busy author, publishing not only under his own name but also anonymously and under a series of pseudonyms.z In the 1830s and 1840s, he published numerous agricultural and industrial texts and educational books for children and peasants, and he also edited or contributed articles to journals like the Economist (Ekonom), published by Faddei Bulgarin, or journals of the Free Economic Society. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, his work almost faded from view. He continued to write, but no longer on agricultural topics. His last works were memoirs of famous people he had known in his youth, and a few books for children or peasants published in the 1880s. He died "in poverty," according to one account, knowing that his work never received serious attention from the literary establishment or from criticsthat he was considered, as one posthumous encyclopedia article put it, a "dilettante-agronomist." 3 Figures like Burnashev demonstrate both the depth and the range of interest in agricultural matters in the early nineteenth century, and also the difficult path that faced most reform-minded individuals. Even more than Levshin several decades before, Burnashev faded into obscurity and irrelevance. Levshin's obscurity came after death, Burnashev's while he still lived to recognize it. A similar fate met the dreams of agricultural reformers generally. They had attempted to create a nationalist and patriotic discourse in support of the idea of agricultural change, imagining Russia's best future as a place where modern, rational (and western) techniques, interpreted by a nobility that took seriously its duty to improve agriculture, supported an essentially Russian and essentially agricultural way of

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life. Even in his writings for children, Burnashev wrote eloquently about the important role agriculture played in Russian national life, but also of the need to improve it, to learn from the West, in order to preserve that role. In the 1844 edition of his work A Walk with Children around the World, he wrote not only of national pride but also of the need for national correction in agricultural matters. At the close of a discussion of Europe, and just before moving into a discussion of Russia itself, he wrote, "yes, we should be glad that we are Europeans, and even more, that we are Russian Europeans." He lauded Russianness above all but recognized Russia's essential tie to Europe. However, he also recognized the need for reform in Russia-at least in agricultural matters. Burnashev compared Russia to England, where, he wrote, "a peasant innovates, and does not follow blind and often disadvantageous habit; [where] he does not say, like the greater part of us in Holy Rus', 'our fathers and grandfathers did not do this, so why should we.'" 4 He recognized that England was in a flourishing economic state, while Russia lagged behind, and felt that agriculture was at the base of this inequality. Even in passing, in a children's book, Burnashev took the opportunity to tie national strength to a spirit of innovation in agriculture. And he also addressed the question of who innovated, and of who guided the process. In England even a "peasant" could innovate. But in Russia, higher authorities had to force change upon a resisting mass. Who exactly that higher authority was, however, remained a question. DEFINING PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM

Compared to the pragmatic writings of the turn of the century, a more coherent ideology of Russia's agricultural destiny-and of the role of rationalization and reform in that destiny-developed in the 1820s. The new ideal stressed that agriculture was generally an important part of national economies. In the first issue of the Farming Journal, the official periodical of the Moscow Agricultural Society, G. Fisher wrote, "farming is the one solid foundation of popular wealth, and the source of the moral and political happiness of States," and similar statements appeared in the journal's articles over the next several years. Mikhail Pavlov, later an independent agricultural publisher, suggested that although the political world was a complicated one, at base all states strove to increase their "social well-being." Wealth was the quickest and best means to that goal, and "agriculture surpasses all [other] means serving to create wealth."S This was neither a new nor an uncommon idea; over the next decades, it often appeared in first editions of journals, or in introductions to agricultural texts. Nor did this belief in the general importance of agriculture limit discussions to Russia. Instead, it followed eighteenth-century practice by placing Russia among other nations subject to the same laws.

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As they developed the general recognition of the importance of agriculture to all nations, Russian authors began to express two ideas that focused on Russia itself and echoed observations made by foreign travelers earlier in the century. First, just as travelers had marveled at the possibilities presented by Russia's vast spaces, Russian authors began to focus on the idea that Russia had certain "limitless sources of abundance, among which the land is the most important and most reliable," an idea that resonated with many looking for sources of national pride.6 According to this idea, agriculture was particularly important to Russia because of the country's essential nature. One member of the agricultural society, N. S. Stremoukhov, believed that Russia's great resources could make her "the true granary of the greater part of the world." However, this benefit, "which not one people in the world had guessed," would only come with work and improvement.? This was the second realization, which also echoed the comments of many foreign travelers. Russia had a brilliant agricultural future, certainly, but needed work, needed "proper improvements" to get there, because Russia's position on a continuum of agricultural improvement lagged.s The need for "proper improvements" seemed yet more important because of the obvious and widening gap between Russian techniques and those of Russia's European competitors: improvements would-at a much more basic level-allow the nation to survive in the nineteenth century. "Improvement" and "perfection" became watchwords for many authors, initially as part of a general plan and then increasingly as part of a patriotic worry. Russians reported on the flourishing condition of European agriculture, and on the unfavorable comparison to be made to their own agriculture.9 As the agricultural writer Nikolai Shcheglov wrote in 1825, western Europe had "completely changed" its agricultural practices, progressing toward perfection; Russians, on the other hand, "barely surpass[ed ... their] ancestors" in this arena.lo With this as the European example, Russia simply had to improve, or the West would continue to play too dominant a role in the world. According to this idea, Russia's lack of progress was actively harmful; G. M. Iatsenkov, writing in 1834, exclaimed that "for a long time our agriculture has remained at the stage of youth, to the uncountable loss of the State!"ll As Russian agricultural writers developed the idea that their country had to rationalize in order to preserve and enhance its place within the community of European nations, they increasingly viewed the task as a moral duty for Russia's landlords-its nobles-and not simply as an economic or political job. In the first issue of the Fanning Journal, improving agriculture was described as a "holy duty" of Russia's landlords, and soon other authors further developed a religious metaphor for agricultural improvement.12 Part of the "holy duty" of landlords was to be true leaders on their estates, to watch over their peasants carefully, to care for them, and to ensure their moral and economic improvement.B According to the

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writers who reminded landlords of their duties, peasant and noble morality were closely joined; both might be lazy, both might not put their all into agricultural production. In 1837, Petr Shemiott linked the religious and moral worth of the Russian people and the Russian state to the Russian land and its productiveness. He described Blessed Russia, the Promised Land of the real world! Rich in nature, abundant with the means to meet the necessary demands of people; a land rewarding labor, producing plants peculiar to all countries of the world, and great individuals, and a heroic people, consecrated with the rules of truth, philanthropic, hospitable, enterprising, aspiring genially towards true knowledge, hard-working, steadfast in misfortune, loving the fatherland and the God-given Tsar-in a word, a people, in all moral ways, the very best in Europe. The Russian people, guided by autocratic power, the most dependable form of government for creating the prosperity of millions of people, with its innate capabilities and disposition towards all that is useful, makes up one patriarchal, happy family, guided by the Father-Autocrat. 14 ]ust as agriculture itself was open to improvement, just as peasants could

be taught, nobles, too, were in need of perfection both economically and, especially, morally. Rationalizing agriculture ought, in principle, to perfect the imperfect peasantry. Russia's reformers firmly believed that, as S. Chaplin put it in a short pamphlet on agriculture, "farming is the most important subject of the State Economy, and not only because of the necessity of its products, but also because of the moral influence on civility, which deserves attention and perfection." Peasants were supposed to farm; they were led morally astray by any work in industry or off the land (at least during the summer). Agriculture was the proper response to one writer's rhetorical question, "in what way may peasants enrich themselves in honest fashion?"1S The author Stremoukhov, who believed agriculture could improve Russia's international position, also thought it could help in other, more internal ways. In 1829 he noted that certain methods "could raise our Agriculture to a high level of perfection, and with that [could] promote the Enlightenment of the nation [natsii], and the preservation of the morality of the people."16 Mikhail Pavlov took the metaphor further: traditional agriculture was a "trade" practiced by those without learning; science, though, was the "sun" that would illuminate the "dark bodies" of practice. Pavlov's terminology was too spiritually inclined for one reader; a reviewer exclaimed, "Here's a strange book! Transcendental, speculative farming!" Even so, such language became so common that reviews of other texts often mentioned "holy Rus"' and its agricultural destiny or referred to belief in the need to reform agriculture as a "faith," awkwardly combining the rational and irrationalY

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This complicated ideological framework supported further agricultural advice not only to combat noble apathy and peasant ignorance, but also to confront the hostility of voices that denied that agricultural reformers could speak for Russianness. Some writers, particularly in the decades of Official Nationality, simply emphasized the essential Russianness of their plans of reform, but others spoke, as A. P. Zablotskii put it, "in defense of the existing, age-old order," "armed with all arguments of practice or of mere routine." 18 These were men who wanted to preserve Russian traditions in order to ensure a properly Russian future. Not all phrased their objection to change in this way. Some simply felt that change was unnecessary or impossible, given the abundance of land and the institution of serfdom. 19 But others thought the problem lay in the source of innovation: the West. N. Murav'ev wrote a letter to the Farming Gazette commenting that the only viable results came from "purely Russian understanding of Russian good. Russia is a land so excellent in all its relations, that foreign concepts of farming do not fit in with her."zo Even if some agreed in principle that innovation was a good, they worried that the way many Russian reformers went about it was wrong, with plans based on nothing but a superficial knowledge of foreign books and no real understanding of science or technology.zr Over the next several decades, other authors (and sometimes the same authors) continued to use these various tropes to explain the continued importance of agricultural literature and of agricultural improvement: Russia could be ever more perfected, and reformers had to be vigilant in their defense of progress. Authors continued to laud Russia's particular gift for agriculture, but also its perpetual need for improvement.zz They spoke against those who sought to minimize Russia's agricultural backwardness, those who believed that there was no longer a need for improvement in Russia. A few believed, as Arsenii Zakharov wrote in 1839, that Russia had engaged wholeheartedly in progressing to enlightenment "by means of true, if slow steps."23 But others worried that whatever their efforts, Russia's agriculture was still "in a primitive state and at an alarming [state of] inferiority" and reiterated the point that Russian nobles, as "fathers of an enormous family" of serfs, were duty-bound to serve their land and government well by investing in and paying attention to agriculture. 24 Questions of responsibility and authority returned to the forefront of discussion, as the perpetual disregard by Russia's nobles became, again, a major issue. First, the state itself joined the world of agricultural publishers and authorities, as it began to produce periodicals aimed at possible innovators. Second, the quite literal question of who was responsible for agricultural improvement became a subject not simply of agricultural writers but of the state. And finally, examples of individual "improvers" seemed to demonstrate the problematic nature of this responsibility in the current world of Russia under serfdom.

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A STATE AUTHORITYTHE fARMING GAZETTE

For many would-be reformers, the best weapon in the struggle for improved agriculture was the printed word. The very act of publishing a journal was, to many of these Russians, a statement of commitment to the ideal of improved agriculture. In very early discussions of what they could do to improve agriculture in Russia, members of the Free Economic Society concluded that "it has long since already been known, that periodical essays are quite conducive to popular enlightenment in general and to the spread of the most useful information."ZS Publishing, particularly in periodicals that could keep up with the most recent innovations, was possibly the most useful task, and sometimes the only task, for the reform minded. 2 6 According to N. M. Lisovskii's survey of Russian periodicals, forty-seven journals and newspapers devoted primarily to agriculture appeared between 1765 and 1861. Most agricultural periodicals were shortlived; 55 percent lasted less than five years, and only 28 percent lasted more than ten years. The longest-lasting agricultural publications were associated with major institutions: the Farming Gazette (1834-1917) was published by a series of state ministries; the Farming Journal (1821-1859) by the Moscow Agricultural Society; and the Free Economic Society published a series under the title Works (1765-1894, with several interruptions). Some of the shorter-lived journals, on the other hand, were clearly labors of love by individuals. The Russian Farmer (1838-1839), for example, was almost entirely based on the writings of its publisher and editor, Professor Mikhail Pavlov. In addition, the thick journals of the early nineteenth century often included sections devoted to some combination of agriculture and industry, and industrial journals of various sorts often addressed agriculture as Russia's primary industryP A survey of the number of agricultural journals in print at any given time shows the clear impact that the agricultural crisis of the early 1830s had on agricultural publishing: the number of journals spiked in its aftermath. The vague moral concerns that arose in the 1820s seemed puny in the face of a real agricultural crisis. The agricultural press had faced the task not simply of informing its readers of improved methods but also of convincing them that a problem existed. With the crisis, however, the agricultural press received a huge influx of attention, in part by the state. Until then, the press had had limited direct involvement in agricultural improvement, but the crisis of the early 1830s woke its interest not only in popular sustenance, but in other, broader improvements as well. Text was its first tool. In late 1833, the special committee devoted to agricultural matters concluded that "the introduction of improved methods is by itself difficult enough: it demands basic knowledge, and all methods of farming used in

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foreign areas must first, by reflection and experiments, be adapted to the climate and localities of Russia. But here such information is not yet widespread enough and-even more-due to the strength of ingrained habits, we have not enough belief in the necessity of change."ZB The committee concluded that text was the answer and soon drafted a plan for a new Fanning Gazette. Its goal would be to awaken and strengthen our belief in the necessity of the gradual introduction of improved farming, to spread general information about this, to point out those sources, from which one may gain basic knowledge of Agronomy, adapted to the moral and physical peculiarities of Russia, to inform where it is possible to receive the necessary material means for this, setting all this out in an easy and pleasant form, so as to bring in more readers.z9

The Gazette would not simply help improve Russian agriculture, it would help in the more basic task of creating a problem-or of creating recognition of a problem. Belief in "the necessity" of improving agriculture had to be "awakened"; not everyone in Russia believed that agriculture needed improvement. The new periodical would create awareness while also addressing specific plans for change. Unlike individuals interested in improving agriculture, the Russian state had the means to make its goal of publicity a reality. Even for it, however, getting a new periodical in print and keeping it solvent was a major task. The first issue of the new Fanning Gazette appeared on July 5, 1834, just over six months after the committee first set out plans for its publication. Funding posed an initial problem. Although a new periodical was relatively cheap, agriculture had no accepted place within the current ministerial structure, and therefore no obvious source of financial or administrative support. N. S. Mordvinov, the chairman of the committee, found a home for the Gazette under the auspices of the Ministry of Finance. As Mordvinov noted, that ministry was already home to a department of manufacturing, and "in Russia farming is the first and principle manufacture."30 After some debate, this logic held sway. The Ministry of Finance funded the Fanning Gazette until 1838, when the new Ministry of State Domains took it over. The committee next debated content. Despite an initial caution that the goal of the Fanning Gazette was not "the spread of full and exact information about agriculture and estate keeping," the committee soon drew up a plan that was extraordinarily inclusive. The Gazette was divided into a whole series of regular sections, including government notices, agriculture, fields, pastures, gardening, forestry, animal husbandry, country architecture, uses of agricultural products, experiments, history, statistics, meteorology, and, as if these did not cover enough topics, "miscellany." In order to entice landlords to change their ways, the journal was to feature

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agricultural adventures from around Russia, not just information and ideas imported from the West. These were to be examples "of their successes or of mistakes made, but without any reproach."31 In addition, the journal included basic reports on weather conditions, harvests, and prices around Russia, in part in order to provide absentee landowners a sense of what was really going on back in their villages. Practically, however, the editorial board had some difficulty in finding articles on such a wide range of topics. At one point, it negotiated access to the library of the Free Economic Society, and it used the clout of the Ministry of Finance to request data from other ministries. And it encouraged and received articles from readers.3z Readership posed a final challenge, and possibly the most serious. In order to find subscribers to the new Gazette, the Ministry of Finance sent out a printed announcement in April 1834. A total of 6,263 copies were sent to each provincial governor, to all government departments within the ministries of Finance, Internal Affairs, and Popular Enlightenment, and to each Marshal of the Nobility, each provincial office of the Ministry of Finance, and each uezd treasury. The ministry also translated the advertisement into German for circulation in the Baltic provinces. The text ofthe advertisement included the price of a subscription (one silver ruble for each half-year of the twice-weekly newspaper), a statement of the goals of the publication, and a strong hint that everyone ought to subscribe. As a gesture of goodwill, and in an attempt to spread the word, all Marshals of the Nobility received a free subscription.33 Over the next several years state officials continued to urge subscriptions on as many people as possible. In principle, for example, Marshals of the Nobility and other officials were encouraged not only to read the Gazette but also to act as news agents in their regions. In practice, not all understood this duty. One Marshal of the Nobility reacted to his free subscription with surprise and wariness. After receiving his first copy, he wrote to the ministry, "I did not order any newspaper and did not send in any money, and furthermore I have no need for such a thing, as I have no peasants or land at all, and consequently do not bother with farming."34 In early 1835, the committee tried again; its manager, A. M. Kniazhevich, sent a form letter on behalf of the Ministry of Finance to all provincial vice governors, exhorting them "to use from [their] side, too, all possible diligence in increasing the number of subscribers to such a generally-useful publication."3S The committee's particular hope was that peasants, too, might read the journal. In late 1835, the ministry wrote again to the provincial vice governors, suggesting that they approach officials of the local state peasant administration. Unlike the Marshals of the Nobility, however, the ministry did not offer these officials free subscriptions. Rather, the Ministry of Finance suggested they be told "that the Government ... has appointed for this publication a most moderate price. As for the money demanded for this, it does not follow to include it in common fees, but it is possible to

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collect it from those peasants who express a desire to read the gazette."36 In an attempt to make at least state peasants familiar with these materials, by 1837 all officials at the smallest volost' level were required by state decree to subscribe to Farming Gazette, and it was suggested that any "leftovers" from the board maintenance fees pay for the subscription feeY Although this did not end the Gazette's struggle for subscribers, the fact that its publishing body could create a demand by force certainly helped its longevity. Even if Russians as a whole were possibly loath to subscribe to purely agricultural periodicals, the numbers of agricultural texts published, between the new agricultural journals and the agricultural sections in thick or other economic journals, grew substantially after the 1830s. Whatever their limits, these publishing efforts do demonstrate that Russia possessed a group of citizens committed to the idea of improving agriculture. Such citizens-men and women-belonged to societies and subscribed to journals. They experimented on their estates and wrote about the results.3s They read foreign journals and translated their contents for publication in Russia. They often read carefully, making notes in the margins of journals and books, weighing the advice of different authors.39 They were true believers in many ways, believers in the possibility of developing, reforming, and even saving Russia through agricultural growth. But also, these few experienced voices were in danger of being drowned out by the explosion itself. As early as 1825 a reviewer noted that although Russia had no lack of agricultural publications, the quality of the output generally failed to meet true scientific standards.4o Over the next decades, worry about the true value of agricultural improvement texts began to crescendo. If agriculture was an essential part of the Russian national economy, bad advice could do serious damage not only to single estates but even to the nation as a whole. By 1851, one journalist, N. M., felt the situation had become dangerous enough that the state ought to watch over agricultural books, ensuring that all publications truly help Russia improve.41 Russians of the time noted this double interpretation. While one author might suggest that the sheer number of editions and versions of agricultural books was proof enough of their popularity, another warned that publishers often replaced the title page in a work that had not sold well and called it a new edition to give an impression of popularity. 42 The very faddishness of agricultural improvement did not necessarily encourage doubters to take the subject seriously. For those invested in the idea of agricultural improvement, however, having a growing and vibrant press, whatever its drawbacks, was a sign of the very improvement they sought to encourage. One anonymous author claimed "agricultural periodical publications are not only important, but even necessary for the success of agriculture," because only they helped create an atmosphere conducive to improvement.43 At base, Russian advocates of improvement believed that text would help create something their country lacked: individual effort. They seemed to agree with a

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French traveler whose many criticisms of Russian agriculture came down to one major complaint. He wrote, "private initiative ... is just that which I would like to see dominate here. It is, do not forget, one of the principle forces of England. In that rich country, in fact, ... all prospers instead of declining; and yet, it is not public schools that abound, but it is better than that: it is private interest which acts as leader." 44 Through their writings on agricultural matters, advocates of improvement hoped to encourage just this private interest. However, they had to fight against apathyand even hostility-toward their goals. As a result, agricultural writers had first of all to convince readers of the need for agricultural improvement, and only then to supply specific remedies for change. WHO

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RESPONSIBLE?

Among the many questions addressed by the agricultural literature and by the Russian state was a most basic one: who had authority over agriculture? Noble landowners themselves? Their hired overseers? Or the peasants who actually cultivated the land? In an effort to find individuals willing to take control of Russia's agricultural destiny, authors and the state itself addressed different social groups and even considered laws meant to encourage agricultural authority. Their efforts led to a broadening of the intended audience of agricultural literature, but also to a particular narrowing of attention to the kind of change necessary. Russia's landowners were obvious targets of agricultural literature; it was they who had been instructed in estate management in the late eighteenth century, they who possessed the literacy to read the journals, they who did indeed join agricultural societies, and they who had a "holy duty" to Russia's land. Although much of the effort of the state aimed to increase pride in agriculture, through awards and discussion of the agricultural soul of Russia, the words failed to overcome the idea that agriculture was simply hard, largely unrewarding work, and that life in the country was a bore. One Russian exile used harsh words: according to him, "the life of a [landed] proprietor is monotonous and insipid." 4S Eduard Kolbe, a supercilious visitor to Russia, reported that "the majority of the rich Russians leave their estates to the management of foreign or serf stewards, for a study of agriculture is in their opinion inseparable from the scent of manure, and they cannot lower themselves to that."46 If these observations were true, Russian landowners had not moved far since the late eighteenth century, when a writer of household manuals defended his life on the estate to those who thought such a life was one of unending boredom.47 Some authors exhorted nobles to care about agriculture purely for pragmatic reasons, in the cause of self-enrichment, but more found such advice abhorrent. A. N. Zhukov suggested that improved agriculture could make "peasants prosperous citizens of mighty Russia," while also making

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landlords themselves "rich consumers." In the very titles of their agricultural guides, both Aleksandr Putiata and Aleksei Ianov promised increased incomes to those landowners who followed their advice. 4 B Such pure concern for monetary gain was anathema to most agricultural writers. Reviewers heaped scorn on Putiata's and Ianov's works, finding them grasping and possibly harmful. In addition, they were hypocritical; the reviewer Stepan Maslov found Ianov's work particularly loathsome because Ianov tried to take the moral high ground. Ianov claimed to have published his work "wishing [to be of] use to my Fatherland." Maslov, however, noted that Ianov's claim was undercut by bad advice, bad grammar, and an exorbitant cost (10 paper rubles for a "little brochure"). 49 More often, even discussions of economic gain were linked, somewhat sincerely, with larger moral issues. One late eighteenth-century author wrote that it was "shameful and reprehensible" to buy agricultural products when one could produce them oneself, while another suggested that although getting involved in one's estate might require a shift to life in the country, such a life "might be less brilliant with urban luxury and noise, but it is infinitely more touching, happy, and useful." In the 1830s, a reviewer gave such a renunciation of the world an even greater moral worth. He noted that those nobles willing to give up some of their luxury in order to invest in agriculture were "true son[s] of the fatherland."SD As A. N. Zhukov put it, with proper attention, the Russian nobility could more properly serve the "Great Monarch," could work for the "good of our fatherland," could be "the first estate on the field of honor, in the Courts of justice and on the plowed fields; [could] serve, for all estates, as an example of good education and generosity!"Sl In essence, agriculture could help nobles become better exemplars of their position. Improving agriculture would secure the essentially Russian character of rural life, with paternalistic landlords guiding their peasants firmly, but with a general improvement at heart. Alternately, perhaps peasants could be the new authorities in the countryside. In a series of works aimed at a peasant readership, this ideal seemed a possibility. The journal Sel'skii listok, which directly addressed peasants, featured the figure of just such a literate peasant elder, guiding at least his family, on the masthead of the first issue of 1861. This elder read aloud to his gathered family; later images on the masthead showed the family at work at both traditional and more rationalized tasks. The attempt to combine images of tradition with modernity became a hallmark of agricultural writing aimed at peasants. Burnashev, writing under the pseudonym Boris Volzhin, wrote one of the first peasant agricultural guides. His Village Elder Miron Ivanov told the story of a family of peasants who, by the end of the tale, find God, compost, and potatoes.sz Other collections followed in short order, usually in multi-volume works filled with chatty advice and admonitions on subjects ranging from agriculture to geography to housekeeping, all seasoned with a dose of religion. In the mid- and

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late 1850s, more formal economic manuals were published, including A. P. Zablotskii's Handbook for a Literate Peasant, and A. S. Zelenoi's Attempt at a Book for the Literate Peasantry.s3 Throughout the period, journals addressed peasants, as well. The Farming Gazette, in particular, attempted to reach out to peasants, as its editor requested that peasant readers write in to tell of their successes. A few did, and their letters were faithfully published. These letters were, however, published as oddities, not as examples of general change; often, as if admitting their very rarity, the journal published peasant letters with a particular comment on their value and an additional request for more.s4 The works mentioned above, addressed as they were to peasants, received both more state oversight and more state support and, yet, still faced problems finding readers. Country Readings, for example, was reissued twice in its first year, with a total circulation of 15,000 copies, of which 6,000 were purchased by the ministries of State Domains and Education. The rest were sold through bookstores; according to one account, peasants themselves went into bookshops to purchase the work.ss The state did more than circulate the books it preferred, however. The Scientific Committee of the Ministry of State Domains carried out an investigation into "popular" agricultural books, hoping to weed out poor advice and support the good. The committee was not thrilled with what it found. It reported that many books were poorly written, many others labeled "popular" were not, and that, without care, novels and other undesirable influences might have more of an effect than the popular books currently available.S6 According to the committee, although individual volumes might have some success, didactic agricultural works as a whole were not nearly as popular as other booksY Agricultural reformers directed their efforts toward landowners and, to a lesser extent, toward peasants, because they were the two groups most associated with agriculture, whose livelihoods were most often dependent on agricultural production.ss But neither group was likely to accomplish widespread change. Practically, it seemed clear that most landowners simply did not care about agricultural reform, and those that did were not always successful at reforming, however committed they might be. Several authors emphasized that Russian nobles were not to be blamed for their inability to engage in active reform efforts; they were taxed by too little land, too little money, and too much call to service.s9 Peasants were even harder to reach and lacked the education necessary to make the kinds of changes of which the reformers dreamed. Reformers wanted change steeped in rationality and theory, although some, like Mikhail Pavlov, believed that real practical knowledge was deeply important. He even felt that without proper theoretical and scientific underpinnings, practice lacked depth. Therefore, he noted, "it is very obvious, that successes in Agriculture are created not by workers, but by people of higher education."60 Neither landowners

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Peasants, reading. Source: Se/'skii listok 2, no. 1 (1861).

nor peasants were likely to create the new agricultural Russia by their own efforts, whatever the hopes of many reformers. In response, authors and the state began to think about other sources for the kind of oversight that "rational," "theoretical" agriculture demanded, sources that challenged the current Russian social structure. For the most part, all agreed that the present situation was unacceptable. Landlords were far too likely to trust peasant elders with the running of their estates, and elders got little respect from agricultural writers. According to A. N. Zhukov, even the best peasant overseers were only "sober and somewhat honest, barely knowing how to read and write ... can one expect that such people will improve agriculture?"61 In 1847, Baron UnternShternberg elaborated on the problems with elders and discussed the shortcomings of other possible overseers. According to him, peasant elders were poorly educated and thus could do no more than keep track of traditional practices. The "normal Russian overseer" brought in from outside the village was also problematic and, indeed, "even more useless than the elder." The "normal" overseer lacked education, owed everything to his position, and thus was willing to lie, cheat, or steal in order to present his employer with a reasonable return. Foreign overseers were generally well educated in "theory and practice" but "knew not at all Russian life" and therefore had a hard time working with peasants.62 This division also shows the way that nationality touched on the question of authority.

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Many estate overseers were foreigners, but whatever the practical reasons behind such hiring practices, Russians began to worry about the influence these foreigners had over their most precious possession: serfs. Some felt the problem was simply that foreigners were incapable of understanding all the nuances of the Russian landscape and people. As Stepan Maslov noted, "foreigners are rarely good overseers here; because they do not have an understanding of the nature of our peasants ... they are used to hired laborers, whom they may send away and easily replace with new ones."63 This state of affairs led to such serious government concern over the possibilities for agricultural change, and such uncertainty about who ought to be encouraged to pay attention to agriculture, that the state began to question the current social structure. Landlords themselves, many state officers did not want even to recommend that all landlords live on their estates, watching over their lands, let alone mandate it. As a result, state officials and other authors of agricultural plans tended to focus on educating and regulating overseers for estates. They faced a problem, however. As one of the first meetings of the special committee on agriculture put it, "in Russia there is not a legal estate that especially studies agricultural sciences, and from which most importantly can come people capable of being overseers in villages." The head of the committee, Admiral Mordvinov, presented as a remedy the "sacred effort to create such an estate, having requested from the Most High power the right, that people of every calling, having studied improved agriculture and having received attestation of the knowledge of it ... may be freed from their tax-paying condition, if they were in such a condition." The committee agreed that such a goal was laudable but felt that it could not do much about the problem by itself; rather, it suggested that the proposal be tacked on to a proposed project on agricultural schools.6 4 At this stage, however, no such changes made their way into law. The issue kept returning in government and print discussions. In 1841, the Department of Agriculture of the Ministry of State Domains, in a series of reports and letters, declared the lack of a special "class" or "caste" of agricultural overseers to be a particular problem for Russian society and Russian agriculture. Not only were there not enough people serving as estate managers, one writer noted, but those that did exist were themselves without oversight. He discussed private teachers and doctors, who were considered state servitors, and concluded that estate managers ought to receive such a position as well, for "in an administrative way the calling of a manager is no less important, and the circle of his action is much wider and more varied."6S Although nearly all the writers in government circles and periodicals agreed that more good farmers were necessary for Russia to realize its agricultural potential, no one could come up with a reasonable solution. In 1840, one anonymous author agreed that the best solution was to increase oversight of the overseers. He pointed

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out that even free people had to register their residence in the capitals. All overseers, he thought, ought to have to register their contracts and references in provincial courts. The following year, several other authors wrote responses to this plan. One, Iosif Iakobi, disagreed that oversight was most important. For him, the lack of education was clearly the most important problem.66 But, as further correspondents wrote, the cost of educating decent agronomists would be rather high, and landlords were unlikely to let some of their serfs out of other duties in order to learn more about agriculture.6 7 Aside from these practical, structural issues, the process of finding capable, responsible managers to take on authority for agriculture also suffered from a lack of respect. In later government correspondence over the issue, one contributor wrote that the life of an estate manager was one of difficulty, dependent on the whims of others and of nature and was much less likely to bring honor and wealth than other opportunities for educated individuals. Hired overseers ranked low on the social ladder in Russia, wrote K. Golovachev, and Russia could not expect people to flock to an agricultural calling until such jobs received greater status and respect.6s In journals, others wrote that members of the gentry ought not to think such duties below them, especially since they were the ones who really ought to be taking agriculture in hand.69 But practically, the individual experiences of many innovators, fraught as they often were with failures and hardships, kept agriculture marginalized as an occupation and kept nobles, at least, from taking on the positions of authority their past and the state desired. INNOVATION AND THE INDIVIDUAL

In 1849, V. N. Pogozhev sent an article to the journal Ekonom detailing his attempts to introduce new agricultural methods on his estate. His serfs, who lived in the northern Kologrivskii region of Kostroma province, had long ignored agriculture in favor of building boats, but Pogozhev set out to convince them "that agriculture is the first foundation of popular wealth." He had noticed that serfs on neighboring estates had "grain in abundance," but his serfs had to buy grain every yearJO For someone inspired by the rhetorical ideal of agriculture as a sacred duty for peasants and landlords, this was clearly an unacceptable situation. Pogozhev believed that good agriculturists were more advanced than peasants working off the land. As he noted, a good peasant-agriculturist was "fresh and healthy; his horses are stout and strong; his cottage is neat and good-looking," while his own serfs, though hard-working, had "smoky, slovenly cottages. Garden vegetables are cultivated little and carelessly: they plant cabbage, potatoes, onions, rutabaga, turnips; cucumbers, due to the severity of the climate, do not grow [here], that is they freeze [while still] in flower." Even worse, "they sometimes overeat and get drunk, but often eat dry bread with water." Pogozhev blamed old habits for this unacceptable

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state of affairs. All failures were due "to negligence, to bad habits from childhood, to lack of education, to blind superstitions and attachment to ancient practices ... despite the fact that education and enlightenment have already penetrated into many parts of Russia." He gave an example of the attitude of his peasants toward change. When Pogozhev urged his peasants (his "Kologriv fanatics") to set a cowhand to watch over the cattle in the field, they answered "a cow is fated by birth to die or to be eaten by beasts," so a cowhand could do no good. In the face of such backwardness, Pogozhev decided to start with the children of his estate; in his mind, giving them a proper education was the best means to improve mattersJl A year later, Pogozhev reported on the fate of his reforms, asking, "after [I] made orders, persuasions, and exhortations, did my domestic economy improve?" The immediate answer? "Not by a hair, not by a crumb: as it was, so it still is. As before the earth was plowed and sowed without care; as before the peasants busy themselves in winter with forest work and do not set out for field work until the middle of May; as before they live messily, poorly; as before they let cattle into the field without a cowherd." Despite this sad list of non-improvements, Pogozhev also claimed, "I have not lost patience, [I will] coolly overcome all obstacles and constantly move toward my goal-to establish an orderly estate. My motto: Russians do not step back." He found some solace in the fact that he had managed, as he put it, "something useful." He had introduced common fields, had reduced the number of household serfs on his estate by switching a number of them to field work, and had switched his peasants to rationalized labor duties. At the same time, he had not managed to begin educating peasant youths as he had hoped, and all his ideals had been tempered by experience. Where once he thought his serfs overly reliant on "winter tasks" like boat building, he now realized that the very short growing season of his very northerly estate made such a division of labor sensible. Pogozhev had shifted his goals from the exalted to the mundaneJZ Pogozhev was one of the many landlords who wrote in to agricultural journals to tell of their improvement efforts, and he was one committed enough to the goals of agricultural improvement to air his mistakes in the name of education and enlightenment. In so doing, he fulfilled a goal of the editors of many of these journals, to publicize all efforts, no matter their success. This kind of public sharing-or, often, public self-criticismseems to have served multiple purposes. Officially, according to the publishers of journals and some reviewers of agricultural works, publicizing individual efforts, successful or not, was of great educational use for Russia as a whole. Writers often followed this path; in one case, Aleksei Korenev, writing about his efforts prompted by other articles, expressed "heartfelt thanks" to those who had shared their experiencesJ3 Only rarely did an author suggest that not all failed experiments were useful as learning experiences-major failures were simply bad and harmful, and any benefit

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from experience was far outweighed by losses.74 Despite such fears, and despite cautions that experiments should be planned in order to minimize the possibility of failures, Pogozhev's second report was typical. Although he had not lost all hope for agricultural improvement, the overarching message of his report was certainly one of wariness, of uncertainty. Indeed, so common were reports citing failures that one article author joked that Russians were overly inclined toward that outcome. He noted, "for a long time here the idea that mistakes teach has become a saying, and if this saying has come true for us, then Russian landlords, it seems, have for a long time been great experts in Agriculture."?s Of course, other landlords were able to report greater successes, although rarely without frustrations. Arsenii Zakharov, who had been rewarded for collecting subscriptions to the Farming Journal, also introduced various innovations on his estate in the Galich region of Kostroma province. He wrote in to the local provincial newspaper about his efforts to encourage harvesting grain with scythes rather than sickles. He noted that he had always considered grain harvesting an "Egyptian work" because it seemed such an ancient process. Although he had been warned that peasants preferred working with sickles, and that scythes wasted grain, Zakharov believed that in "our century of improvement" there had to be a better, more efficient method of harvesting. Inspired by the Farming Journal, Zakharov decided to introduce a particular kind of scythe. Although he claimed that the young happily used the scythes, others refused or used them poorly enough to ruin some of the grain. He discovered that scythes were associated with "women's work," as they were the instruments traditionally used to mow hay; male serfs were both uneasy and unskillful using the unfamiliar instruments. Initially, Zakharov noted, he "closed his eyes" with frustration but then kept after them. Eventually, enough peasants accepted the technique for Zakharov to call his experiment a successJ6 Many others had similar stories. A landowner from Kazan' province self-deprecatingly wrote to the Farming Journal that he was "not one of the number of landowners who truly occupy themselves with farming/' but that nonetheless he had had great success introducing a modified version of a newfangled crop rotation. Two brothers, Aleksei and Il'ia Minin, reported on their experiments in Pskov region, where agriculture generally remained unimproved, and another pomeshchik credited all his new enthusiasm for change to the Farming Journal (and threw in a call to other individuals to help out "our beloved Fatherland" by their efforts). Some landowners reported on relatively minor innovations like new farming implements or new strains of grain. V. Bogushevskii described his efforts to introduce a new foreign strain of rye on his estates; although his estate was too far north to see major change, he still felt the experiment had been a success. Arsenii Volzhenskii attributed his successes to one simple method:

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proper fertilization. Other reformers attempted serious restructuring of their entire estate economies. Despite these various approaches to reform, all sought the positive in their experiments, even when some elements failedJ? Many of the reports sought to show that anyone could make a difference in agriculture, but practically, most contributions were made by noble men. A few peasants wrote in, as did a few women. Elisaveta Gotovtseva contributed several articles to the Farming Journal about her agricultural experiments on her estate, reporting on new methods of fertilizing and of feeding calves in winter. Gotovtseva announced that her agricultural efforts sprang from her "passion for economic experiments and observations," suggesting that her efforts were at least as rational and enlightened as those of her male counterparts. Gotovtseva's experiments also appeared in the Farming Gazette, but not in her own voice. Instead, Arsenii Zakharov praised her as one of the most enlightened of Kostroma province's landowners, and the first to dry out swamps for farmingJB Despite this example, women's work for agriculture was more often treated as an oddity, and thus as something to be reported and commented on in much the same way as peasant contributions. A similar narrowness of vision affected a major effort on the part of the Russian state: to improve agriculture by means of exhibitions and competitions meant to show off and encourage innovative farming. In principle, exhibitions and competitions would encourage reluctant landowners, and even peasants, to put more effort into agriculture by giving them a definite reward: public acclaim and prizes. In March 1841 a member of the Scientific Committee wrote, "there is no doubt, that such a hope [of receiving reward or recognition] may make many members of the highest estates turn to the study of rational agriculture faster than any other method ... and may give the State a new class of enlightened proprietors, whom we do not have." 79 A December 1841 report recommended the government sponsor such exhibitions for three major reasons: the government could itself see the successes of agriculture in Russia; the exhibitions would bring together the best agriculturists and give them an easy outlet for discussion; and the attention paid to those who did well would wake the competitive instincts of others.so The Ministry of State Domains hoped, too, that peasants would come to the exhibitions and be inspired to innovate. In an attempt to reach peasants, Prince V. F. Odoevskii, a member of the Scientific Committee, penned an article, "On Exhibitions of Agricultural Products," written in a "populist" (narodnyi) manner; eventually six thousand copies of the article were printed for circulation among local peasant populations.Bl Although many exhibitions were held, organizing them was often difficult. Some ideas were centrally mandated, such as the categories of exhibition (examples of grain, vegetables, animals, as well as processed agricultural products, like potash and potato starch) and their respective awards.

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Setting a time and place and gathering participants was left to the provinces. Several of the early exhibitions were held in Kazan' province. In its first letter to the Kazan' governor, written in February 1842, the Ministry of State Domains noted that Kazan' was known for rather undeveloped agriculture and thus would benefit greatly from such an exhibition. The governor and provincial Marshal of the Nobility agreed but noted that this factor actually made it a more problematic location for an exhibition, as it was difficult to find participants.sz Each time Kazan' was expected to host an exhibition, local organizations engaged in a flurry of correspondence with the Ministry of State Domains. They argued about when to hold the exhibitions, and where to hold them within the province.s3 During the second exhibition they expanded the list of categories to be shown to include industrial products, hoping to attract sufficient entries. Still, a local official from the uezd capital Koz'modem'iansk could only report that "from my town no sort of examples will be offered at the exhibition of agriculture, because the inhabitants of it have no particular improvements bringing undoubted benefit to agriculture, nor important inventions."S4 Despite all the troubles involved in bringing the exhibition plans to fruition, there was some success. In all, 24 examples of rye, 14 of wheat, 16 of barley, 31 of oats, 7 of spelt, 2 of millet, 7 of buckwheat, 9 of hemp seed, 10 of flax seed, plus 5 examples each of rye flour, rye malt, and wheat flour, 3 of ground wheat, 2 of barley malt, and 24 examples of vegetables or their seeds appeared at the third Kazan' exhibition.ss The second exhibition in Kostroma province, held in 1854, brought together 7 landlords, 135 state peasants, 27 court peasants, 3 meshchane, and 3 merchants.s6 The exhibitions did bring out peasants, it seems, at least relative to other groups exhibiting. Still, the numbers were small, adding weight to the idea that these sorts of effort did little more than promote a forum for those already interested to share their knowledge. Not only were the exhibitions limited in participants and viewers, they were limited in scope in a way that did harm to the goal of normalizing a belief in agricultural innovation. The exhibitions focused exclusively on fields and farms, with little effort expended to address issues of the internal economy. They were instead exhibitions meant to feature rational agriculture, not country life more generally. There were no celebrations of local customs and craft production, but only of farming progress. As a result, they left out individuals who may have been successful agriculturalists within a traditional framework, and also the domestic side of country life. These Russian exhibitions did not look inside the household, or beyond the masculinized ideal of progressive agriculture. Most exhibits were raw materials; when organizers called for processed agricultural products, they focused on explicitly salable goods, like potato starch. 87 If a few household products did appear, they were neither advertised nor particularly

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sought out, and hardly the focus of the gathering.ss By keeping exhibits focused on one interpretation of agricultural change, the organizers failed to allow for the incorporation of reforming ideals within a Russian reality. MASTER CHEFS IN TRANSLATION

Russia's culinary authors-or translators-faced a similar question of normalization in the first third of the nineteenth century. After the hodgepodge of cooking works published in Russia in the late eighteenth century, translations of foreign works became the most common cookbooks published, but the translators of the early nineteenth century had not solved the problems that plagued the translations of the earlier period. As then, translators often had to deal with foreign techniques and ingredients, with different fasting calendars, and with different social conditions. Their challenge was to fit these differences to a Russian audience. Despite their attempts to align ingredients or techniques, these translators most often faced problems with much more basic elements of the foreign works: their authorship and intended audience. These were works written by a new sort of cooking authority, a master chef, professionally trained, whose creations delighted the palates of gastronomes. But just as the ideal of a professional agricultural overseer ill fit the Russian context, so too did the ideal of the professional master chef prove problematic. As they grappled with foreign differences, Russian translators most often commented on the techniques or ingredients called for in original texts. Their comments ranged from the simple and practical-the translator of B. Albert's Parisian Chef gave conversions between French and Russian weights and measures-to the argumentative. The Russian translator of The Gourmet: Showing the Easiest Methods to Have a Better Table (1809) left many specific references to Paris or to France in the text but used footnotes to give a Russian perspective on those same references. The original author praised Parisian beef; the Russian translator claimed, "it is too bad that these experts have not had the chance to visit Petersburg, [where] they would be surprised, seeing that tasty pieces of beef are nothing special even to our peasantry!"S9 Later, he attempted to clarify the difference between French and Russian cabbage soups. The original author had been kind to cabbage, calling it a "great help to all cuisines." The translator responded with the somewhat cryptic note that "Russian lovers of our grandfathers' filling dishes, having heard of French soups with cabbage and having equated it with our rich, compound, lazy and even normal shchi, may make their own conclusion about the delicacies of the French table."90 In other cases, explanations were made necessary by specific Russian usage, of both words and dishes. By the early nineteenth century, the Russian word "sauce" [sous] had come to mean not a separate condiment, but an entire composed dish. Because of the very different meaning of the

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word in French cuisine, it created confusion for translating cookbooks. In one instance, a careful translator explained the difference: "the grand sauces signify those particular prepared additions, on which are based the entire culinary arts, and from which are put together and made ready almost all dishes."9 1 This was at once the classic French explanation of the bases of its cuisine, and also a necessary clarification for Russian audiences. Elsewhere, the publisher of a Russian edition of the French chef Cardelli's Handbook for Chefs noted that Russians expected "so-called candy making" and preserving in their cookbooks. The original French text on which this translation had been based had, like most French cookbooks, excluded these topics. As a result, the compilers had taken sections on baking, sweets making, and preserving from other works and inserted them into their translation.92 The translation of another Cardelli work, his Newest and Complete Parisian Chef, had been altered even more deeply. Even the title of the translation promised something certainly not part of the original text: "how to prepare the best, most delicate, simple, meat and fast-day Russian foods."93 As in the eighteenth century, fasting practices created another set of problems, but where some earlier authors had ignored Russian Orthodoxy's peculiarities, some of the later authors now sought to explain national differences more clearly. The translator of The Royal Cook, or New Cookery, Baking, and Candy Making for All Conditions conscientiously explained to his readers the differences between the fast-day foods in that cookbook and in Russian practice: "fast-day should be understood as that which we use only in Maslenitsa or cheese week; for Catholics, for whom these fast-day foods were prescribed, are allowed other than meat itself, to use during fasts cheese, eggs, butter and milk."94 Elsewhere, though, such concerns were still ignored. The translators of the Newest and Complete Parisian Chef promised to address the needs of their Russian audience but failed to pay attention to the fasting calendar. Of course, given that noble families often ignored the fasting calendar, such attention might not have been necessary. Social differences also stymied authors. The translator of Albert's Parisian Chef claimed that the cookbook "was adapted for almost any social condition," but its contents were so costly as to make it practical for only the most elite audience.9s A greater problem was with the authors themselves. Most of the works picked for translation were significant cookbooks by professional French chefs. These chefs were relatively new fixtures on the European culinary scene. After the French Revolution many chefs once serving noble households opened restaurants and became professional chefs in a more formal way. These men were, by and large, the authors of the cookbooks translated in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The audience for the cookbooks was a confused one even in the original circumstances; sometimes it was other professional chefs

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employed in restaurants or in homes, sometimes individual gastronomes, sometimes housewives. The Royal Cook, a translation of Le cuisinier imperial by A. Viard, is a good example of one of the new works. This cookbook was first published in 1806 and had gone through seven editions by 1812, well on its way to becoming "the most successful middle-class cookery book of nineteenth-century France."96 That social background ill fit Russian circumstances of 1816, or even later, where the figure of the cook was often a peasant woman. The Royal Cook was particularly well translated, with plentiful clarification of specific possible problems. But the Russian audience was nonetheless still only tangentially related to its French audience. In addition, the cookbooks of the early nineteenth century often focused on the idea of the gastronome, of the man who knew how to live well and sought knowledge of the finer things in life.9 7 At times, this was explicit, as in the 1809 Gourmet: Showing the Easiest Methods to Have a Better Table, translated from a French original. Although the anonymous translator made some attempt to tailor the work to a Russian audience in the discussions strictly touching on food, most notably in a glossary of foreign cooking terms found at the end of the book, he left the reasons for the writing, and the audience, rather more unexplained. According to the introduction, the recent revolution in France had caused many estates and much property to change hands, and the new owners "rushed to delights completely like animals." The author intended his book to show these nouveaux riches the proper way to eat, by teaching them to understand where and when food came from, and the best ways to prepare it.98 In some ways, this rationale was rather like that of Drukovtsov, to teach "new" estate owners how to deal with their lands. But here it was more about town life than about country life; the gourmet was one who ate in part for show. The translations of Cardelli's work also brought up a gastronomic audience but linked it to women, too. Cardelli's Handbook had been addressed to both cuisiniers and cuisinieres, men and women with roles in the kitchen. Its contents were more difficult to define. The author noted that ordering the daily meals was the duty of "the sensible master of the household, or housewife, or better to say the person to whom they have given the task. "99 Both men and women could be responsible for caring about the table, but Cardelli's intended audience was wealthy enough for servants to take on that task. The translator of the Parisian Chef brought up the question of audience more explicitly: having translated his text into the Russian language, he begs with pleasant hope that it will serve the attention of the most honored lady-enthusiasts and gentlemen-enthusiasts of domestic economy. In this text every housewife not only will find rules on what way to prepare a multi-assortment of foods, pastries, syrups, preserves, ... but also to see which foods one ought to serve after one another.1oo

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Again, both men and women were addressed, and both as possible "enthusiasts of domestic economy." This brings together the various ways of being interested in food: as women who were inherently wardens of the kitchen, or as men with an interest in cuisine. Another translation of a French work, Hand Booklet for Young Housewives, focused on the first figure. Although its organization proved it to be a classically French cookbook of the kind usually associated with master chefs, the translation addressed the young housewife, who "must know everything belonging to simple, good cooking. I do not say that she must herself cook, but that knowing partly culinary artistry, she may order the preparation of food." 1D1 But most of the contents of this book, and certainly most of the contents of the other translated texts, were hardly "simple, good cooking." Addressing the real needs of the "young housewife," whoever she was in a Russian context, required more adjustment than the translations currently in vogue. In practice, it required a new figure, the experienced and authoritative housewife, who would soon lead the return of Russian cooking in the written literature in an entirely new way. CONCLUSION Looking back, there is pathos in some of the writings on domestic or estate economy. Many writers seemed to think that their advice would transform Russia's agricultural sector, leading to improvements everywhere. The inclusion of agricultural columns in widely disparate journals, the attention of the state, the growth of agricultural organizations all seemed to indicate that agricultural change was on the rise in Russia. But at the same time as some writers exulted in new techniques and new publicity, others lamented the lack of attention still accruing to agriculture. Thus, in 1825, one review author noted that Russia was seized by a "fashion of managing" (moda khoziaistvovat'), while a report on the Moscow Agricultural Society lamented that "the Science of Agriculture remained still within a narrow circle of a few people who recognize its necessity." 102 On the verge of Emancipation, travelers and Russians continued to believe that in Russia "agriculture, never being encouraged, is in a state of infancy. "103 Despite the reams of paper covered with gallons of ink imploring Russia's nobles and peasants to pay "proper" attention to agriculture, no single authority emerged during the first half of the nineteenth century to compel such attention. The state encouraged agricultural change but rarely did more than that, failing to use the full force of its autocratic power to demand a change. Other individuals and associations similarly tried to become Russia's prime authorities on agricultural matters. But because their major method of encouraging change was the press, with its mixture of successes and failures, with its multiplicity of ideas and techniques, their

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pronouncements lacked a single authority that could actually create major change. Instead, images of failure were forever linked with the ideal of agricultural improvement, although such failures were intended to inspire. Certainly a few individuals remained committed to the cause, but the example of Vladimir Burnashev is far too common: someone who sought great change but failed to make his dream into a reality. Burnashev's fate is all the more poignant because of the role he played in another arena, the culinary arena. Burnashev-like Levshin before him, but unusually for his time-wrote both for agricultural and for culinary audiences. His major cookbook, in fact, played an important role in the development of Russian cookbook publishing as it shifted from explicit translations of foreign works to more or less original works. Just as he published his cookbook, however, another voice appeared and far more successfully claimed authority over the Russian kitchen: the Russian middleclass housewife. Burnashev tried to address this figure, but actual Russian middle-class housewives soon began to publish themselves, and to find far greater success in publishing. Certainly male voices continued to publish, sometimes addressing women, sometimes adamantly focusing on male gastronomes. But the middle-class housewife dominated-and dominated by doing something no agricultural writer of the time could do. She claimed authority over all culinary arts, including the foreign, in large part by labeling herself as truly Russian. She became the proper interpreter of foreign foods, and the one who could incorporate them into "Russian cooking" without losing her Russianness. Agricultural writers might have tried to do just that, to create "rational Russian agriculture" that incorporated foreign knowledge into a Russian context, but they failed. Their authority waned just as the middle-class housewife's began to wax.

CHAPTER

SIX

AUDIENCES AND AUTHORITIES Russian Housewives and European Gastronomes

katerina Alekseevna Avdeeva (nee Polevaia) is perhaps the most unlikely publishing star to appear in midnineteenth-century Russia. Born in Kursk in 1789, Avdeeva soon moved with her merchant family to Irkutsk. As a young woman, she hardly fit the stereotype of a sheltered merchant's daughter and instead "spoke well and led political discussions of the then situation of Europe, of which Irkutsk ladies, with very few exceptions, feared even to think about." 1 After her marriage, she lived in many parts of Russia, from Crimea to Dorpat. Then she began to publish. Her first publications focused on the history and everyday life of the places where she had lived: memories of Siberia in general or Irkutsk in particular. But with the publication of her Handbook of the Russian Experienced Housewife in 1841, she found the recipe for successful Russian cookbook publishing, and she shot to prominence. According to a later critic, her book was "just about the first completely impeccably literate cookbook" published in Russia. It had its faults-few measurements, little accurate advice on cooking times-but all in all, "in the hands of an experienced enough housewife could be useful, and besides, its

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writer, having long lived in Siberia, communicated several very decent local recipes." 2 It also successfully combined a series of approaches to writing cookbooks that had appeared in other works since the late eighteenth century. Most important was Avdeeva's formulation of the idea of the experienced, Russian, middle-class housewife, who herself gave advice and actively sought to educate younger women. This figure helped popularize the notion of cookbooks centered on "housewives," a trend that would continue to develop through the second half of the nineteenth century. According to the editors of the journal The Russian Housewife, first published in 1861, "our economic literature is not only not poor, but is even abundant in books devoted to the subject of housekeeping and that sort of economy which it has for some time been accepted to call women's work."3 Despite the fact that many of these books turned out to be problematic in some way, they noted that the Russian housewife, thanks in no small part to Avdeeva's success, had become a focus of attention was something to celebrate. However, lurking behind this development was a basic question. Who was this "Russian housewife," and why was she worthy of such attention? Her Russianness was marked by many of the same traits that had been developing in the Russian cookbooks and agricultural literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It included elements of the "kvas-patriotism," defined by Faddei Bulgarin as the sort of patriotism held by "the belle monde, the wealthy, landlords [who] considered it an obligation, even if only once a month, to dine Russian style, in a Russian tavern, to eat frozen shchi, with pirogi alongside, ukha of sturgeon, suckling pig under horseradish, bliny with fresh caviar," and who also held a particular belief in Russia's unique strengths. 4 Practically, the khoziaika, translated here as "housewife," was someone who oversaw the running of her household without necessarily taking part in actual cleaning and cooking. In the journal and in a number of earlier cookbooks, the khoziaika was presented as someone akin to the western ideal of the perfect middle-class housewife, but of course the women available to fill that role in Russia would be difficult to classify as part of a western middle class. Instead, some were serf-owners, others merchants-in many ways they were the strong women of Russian novels. This housewife demanded attention in part because, as the editors suggested, she needed perfecting and education, both made possible by the power of texts. She also demanded attention because, as it turned out, she had become the most central figure in Russian cookbook publishing. The created identity of the experienced Russian middle-class housewife triumphed, in essence, by most successfully incorporating many of the contradictions of Russian social and national identities.

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THE RISE OF THE RUSSIAN

Before the Russian housewife emerged as the foremost authority in cookbook publishing, a series of other changes altered the medium. In particular, the mid-1830s saw a renewal of interest in Russian cooking and a new burst of cookbook publishing by Russian authors. To a certain extent, the "Russianness" of some of these cookbooks had mostly to do with their authorship and the wording of their titles. In 1833, Gerasim Stepanov, "an old, but experienced chef" long employed in a Moscow restaurant, published his first cookbook, The Experienced Russian Cook.s Although in content this and Stepanov's other works present a curious mixture of recipes and advice, in title they strove to present a Russian voice first and foremost. This tendency was emphasized in some of his later cookbooks, like The Complete Chef and Baker, or The Russian Gastronome, while others minimized the Russian voice.6 M. Andreev, for example, published a New and Complete Master-Chef's Handbook for All Conditions in 1837. In principle, Andreev had produced a French cookbook for Russians. Andreev made no claim to presenting Russian food of any sort and began his cookbook with three basic recipes: "red," or beef, bouillon, "white" bouillon, and "red" coulis (a thicker bouillon), aping the beginnings of French cookbooks.? And yet, by its very Russian authorship, the cookbook added to the increasing attention to Russian voices in culinary literature. Some of these cookbooks also resurrected the organizational structures used by Drukovtsov and Levshin in the eighteenth century. Stepanov's did not. His cookbooks were often merely oddly arranged lists of recipes with little clarity or internal coherence. Andreev, however, used not only French structures, but also divisions based on Lenten principles. The subtitle, "On the meat-eating table," appears before a series of sections on soups and meat dishes; a later heading introduces fast-day foods. Cold and hot dishes, some with fish, some vegan, are intermixed. Many of these recipes are quite simple, particularly one of Andreev's recipes for Lent: "A head of sour cabbage. It is served whole with oil, vinegar, and pepper.''8 Its simplicity may speak to a perceived need to include Lenten recipes, whatever the author's higher aspirations. Elsewhere, Levshin's course order also reappeared. The five-volume Newest Russian Experienced Practical Cook, Economist, and Candy Maker, first published in 1837, aped Levshin, though at much greater length.9 Its first order of organization was largely based on the Orthodox calendar: volume 1 contains recipes for meat-eating days; volume 2 for fast days; and volume 3 recipes for "the ancient table of the Russian Maslenitsa." The last two volumes turn to a topical organization, covering preserving and candy making. Within the first two volumes larger divisions are devoted to hot foods, cold foods, roasts, and baked goods-Levshin's categories.

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Chapters within each of these divisions are devoted to smaller groups of foods: broad classifications, like soups, or much narrower subjects. Thus both volumes 1 and 2 have chapters on shchi separate from the more general category "soup." The volume on Maslenitsa is a short one; its twentytwo pages cover first a menu (with recipes) for an appropriate breakfast, then a "full dinner." The longest section for the dinner, which includes soups, cold dishes, "sauces," and roasts, is that of baked goods, as it includes numerous recipes for the traditional bliny, from those of buckwheat to some prepared with carrots. The final volumes on preserving and candy making include recipes for both common Russian foods: preserved cucumbers, mushrooms, and cabbage; kislye shchi (the recipe fills one hundred bottles); and clearly foreign treats such as marzipan, meringue, macaroons, and punch (all of which are noted by their Russian cognates). Many of these new cookbooks also began to incorporate more Russian foods in their pages, sometimes in unusual ways. Although the bulk of the Experienced Russian Cook concerned preserves and pantry staples, Stepanov also gave two real recipes, both at the end of the text and both for traditional-more or less-Russian foods. The first was for a Lenten kulebiaka with turnips; the other for a luxuriant ukha with ingredients including a bottle of rum, half a bottle of Madeira, and lemon. 1o In his Complete Chef and Baker, or The Russian Gastronome, Stepanov presented soups labeled variously as Russian, Ukrainian, or French, as well as Russian everyday and holiday baked goods, like paskha and pirogi. Of course, some of these foods were quite culinarily advanced. His recipe for paskha, the Easter sweet of farmers cheese, butter, and raisins, also included advice on making a garnish: a ram made of butter with gilded horns. Similarly, his recipe for "lazy" shchi is hardly that: "Having cut up a head of cabbage into pieces, put beef, mutton, chicken and ham in a pot and put it on to boil; first blanch the cabbage and [then] together with it put in there carrots, turnips and onion, adding kvas and a roux, let it boil; when it is done, then for serving put on chopped parsley and garnish with sour cream."ll Andreev included an entire section titled "Instructions on the preparation of every sort of completely Russian food or Russian cuisine," which not only more or less cleaved to Levshin's description of course order, but also included many more Russian foods: three recipes for shchi, kasha, kisel', and mushrooms in sour cream. Even in sections not touted as "Russian," Andreev discussed a series of different foods than those usually found in French cookbooks, including far more grain-based foods, from pies and pastries to pancakes and kasha. Of course, all these cookbooks also presented foreign foods of many sorts. Stepanov began to stretch Russia's culinary boundaries, often mixing foreign foods into his cookbooks in close proximity with Russian foods. In the haphazardly arranged Newest Addition to the Experienced Cook, he presented recipes for kasha, "ice cream with waffles and jam," and tolokno,

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one after the other. Later in the volume, he described "the Asiatic Table," claiming to be the first to present such foods to a Russian audience. According to Stepanov these foods-kabobs, pilafs, "kifta," "Polish shchi" were "as tasty ... as dishes of any kind of French cooking master." They were obviously also an unusual mix, even in their ingredients. The "Polish shchi," for example, called for normal ingredients like beef and cabbage, but also Dutch cheese. 12 Andreev included foods from Russia's empire as well. He presented a section "On the preparation of Ukrainian borshch" and another "On the preparation of burak from beets." Elsewhere, however, he classified borshch as Russian, adding to the multinational stew of his contents. The Newest Russian Chef perhaps offers the greatest variety of internationally mixed or conflated recipes. An example is an odd chapter of only one recipe for "Italian fish soup." The term used here for fish soup is the traditional Russian ukha, but modified with a foreign adjective. The recipe is itself a strange one, calling for fish cooked in kislye shchi and fish bouillon with apples, cucumbers, capers, olives, truffles, and champagne.13 This seems indicative of a trend in this cookbook. Many of the foods included have names clearly derived from foreign terms (bifshteksy, or peti-pate) or with adjectives denoting foreign methods of preparation ("French" soup or the "Italian" ukha). To these recipes, which recognized foreign cuisines as ones worthy of noting down, were added recipes with names like "Russian cutlets," or "Russian landshpig." These were foreign food terms, taken into the Russian school of cooking by adding the proper adjective. Just as Russian cuisine was asserting itself in organization and vocabulary, it was being steadily incorporated into a larger world of foods from other places. The Russian-authored cookbooks demonstrate changes not only in terms of their contents, but in their presumed audience. The various authors frequently addressed readers with explanatory passages that served to emphasize their own basic conceptions of cuisine and, often, Russian culture. Stepanov first innovated in style; he and his publishers cannily used different aspects of his persona to address different readers in the many editions of his basic works, seeking to bring these works broader readership. Stepanov initially wrote two series of cookbooks: the Experienced Russian Cook and its continuations, and the Complete Chef and Baker, with one continuation. These works proved to be successful. Not only did they receive positive reviews in major journals like the Library for Reading, they were republished numerous times.14 The contents of the various initial volumes, published between 1833 and 1837, were repackaged in a series of longer works over the next several decades. The Complete MasterChef's Handbook appeared in 1835 and was followed by the Final Work of the Blind Old Man Gerasim Stepanov in 1840. This last book was republished in 1851 and then again in two more editions at the end of that decade. These other titles suggest some of the reasons that Stepanov was successful. At base, he was able to appeal to a wide range of readers.

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From his first publications, Stepanov touted his practical experience. He was, as he noted, "old but experienced," which proved the value of his writings, and he addressed "housewife-economists" interested in following his experienced advice.ls The focus on experience and age continued in later editions. In one continuation he more fully described his age: he was a "seventy years of age and blind old man." He might now be disabled, but he was also the holder of lengthy experience-fifty-five years altogether, and thirty at his current establishment.16 In other books, however, Stepanov emphasized his training as a "master-chef" (kukhmister), not simply a "cook" (povar). Although the content of his cookbooks was not significantly changed and indeed was sometimes identical, here Stepanov addressed not simply housewives but Russian gastronomes, those with palates demanding fine European cuisine, not just hearty Russian dishes. Such an identity influenced the reception of Stepanov's work. A later cookbook reviewer addressed this side of Stepanov's image. He referred to Stepanov as "our Russian or, at least, Muscovite Careme." 17 That is, Stepanov ranked alongside the star of French cuisine but nonetheless maintained an age-old Russian identity. By addressing not only housewives but gastronomes, Stepanov was able to appeal to multiple audiences: women and men, the elite and the middle, the professional and the home cook. In so doing, he crossed boundaries that would soon become both fortified and contested, at least in principle. The anonymous author of the Newest Russian Experienced Practical Cook emphasized its connection to a gastronomic audience. On the one hand, his was among the most complicated and yet most Russian of the new cookbooks, including Russian foods and following Russian organizing structures. And, indeed, he felt his cookbook played an important role in the development of Russian culinary literature. On the other hand, however, he looked to an elite, cosmopolitan audience: There are many Russian compositions under the titles "cookbook of chefs, economists and candy makers," but up to now all of these have been based only on the theory of Russian cooking and often in practice turned out to be as unsatisfactory, as not completely true. Gastronomes, lovers of domestic economy and lovers of sweet desserts saw only inexperienced, unversed, and incomplete guides in the cooking arts .... This is the most useful book for inhabitants of towns, the capitals, and the country, which alone can satisfy their taste and desires.J8

Like Stepanov, the author addressed Russia's gastronomes, those men of high taste who sought the finer things. Like agricultural authors, he wanted to combine science and theory with real Russian practice. He almost explicitly did not address women; the lovers of domestic economy and the lovers of sweet desserts were men, primarily.

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Although this approach, turning away from women and toward an elite, gastronomic male audience, later reemerged, it was not long before far more cookbooks addressed women. Andreev, who also wrote as an experienced "master-chef," explicitly addressed Russian women. Indeed, he began his text with a paean to a well-run household, noting that it brought with it "domestic peace and happiness for one's spouse."19 This was certainly the responsibility of the lady of the house, who ought to bring order and cleanliness in all things. Andreev also addressed his cookbook "to all conditions," to those beyond the elite. Although in content his cookbook was more inclined toward foreign foods and techniques, he yet proclaimed it the provenance of women and of the murky overlap of estates that made up Russia's social middle. As Russian-authored cookbooks appeared more and more frequently, they did not completely supplant translated works. However, translated texts were altered in content and form, often in order to adhere more closely to developing standards for Russian cookbooks. Some earlier translations had been adapted for Russian audiences. The publisher of Cardelli's translated works, for example, had explained that the selection of recipes had been chosen with a Russian audience in mind. Still, the main outline of the earlier translations was that of French cookbooks. The newer translated works were rather different, often using organizational schemes closer to the new works written by Russians. The author/translator picked and chose among various foreign writings, often using materials from periodicals as well as books, from different countries, to make a work fitting (more or less) for a new kind of Russian audience.zo Several of these new works were called encyclopedias, much like their late eighteenth-century predecessors, and they often contained information on a wide range of activities both within the household and beyond. One such work was A. P.'s Economic Hand-Encyclopedia, a four-volume collection of information on cooking and other household matters. According to A. P., "this essay belongs both to the wealthy, [those] luxuriating in wealth, and having all the satisfactions of life, as well as to the person of the most straitened circumstances, because ... it is not enough to own, but knowing how to utilize property is the most important science of everyday human life."Zl As in the other books by Russians, the ideal audience was not just the very wealthy, but an imagined group of all sorts, a group that might best profit from increasing the science and rational basis of the domestic arts. Volume 2 of the Hand-Encyclopedia discussed cooking. The epigraph to the volume reiterated the idea that moderation and control are the keys to a good landed estate and a good table: "Two dishes prepared with taste make up as much as five dishes cooked carelessly and without ability and incomparably more than ten dishes poorly prepared."22 This ideal is far removed from earlier descriptions of elite Russian tables, in which the quantity

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of food served as a marker of special occasions; instead a newer ideal is presented in which the quality of the food prepared was key. As in the Russian cookbooks, one of the primary organizational systems of this volume fell along religious lines. Recipes with meat and dairy preceded those with fish and for fast-day foods. Within each of these sections soups, sauces, and cold dishes appeared. A last section gave recipes for thirteen salads acceptable on any day. After these recipes ordered by courses, more sections included recipes for preserves and other foods. Vinegars, mustards, sausages, cheeses, preserves, and alcoholic beverages all appeared in separate sections, as did sections for bread and pastries, including a recipe for "tasty white bread that does not go stale for two weeks."23 Another encyclopedic work tightly entwined translated and original materials and also placed the figure of the housewife more clearly in the forefront of culinary literature. In 1839, V. P. Burnashev, writing under the pseudonym B. V--n, published an Encyclopedia of the Young Russian Housewife Devoted to All Good Little Russian Housewives. He based much of its content on the writings of two French women, Mesdames Hacon-Dufour and Celnart.24 The introduction to the first volume explained the reasons Burnashev felt his work was necessary. He referred to the earlier works of Levshin but noted that while they were to be commended, they had fallen out of date: The greater part of these books translated by him from German are very out of date, and it is not surprising: all these books were published in Germany in the second half of the last century. Since that time all the sciences have notably moved forward; Chemistry especially has matured ... [and] has adapted not only to agriculture, but to the town economy or in general to housekeeping, and all ancient housekeeping books written, for the most part, in barbaric language, laid out with no system, decorated with strange titles and conclusions ... should be surpassed by compositions in which information is based on true and unshakable experience, organized carefully and set forth in clear, even pleasant, language.zs

The mention of Levshin suggests that his works were not simply relics of the past, but instructional manuals still in use. Burnashev, though, brought up a series of important points in his critique of the way things used to be done. Again, he noted the necessity of experience in producing something of value for the reader, as well as the necessity of a clear organizational system. His concern with the style of writing was also new and spoke to a new attitude toward the place of these books. They were no longer mere reference tools but manuals for a whole lifestyle, whose language helped produce the image of a perfect domestic life. He also, of course, echoed reviewers of agricultural works, whose concern for style and grammar highlighted the importance of their subject.

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The style of Burnashev's work, perhaps fitting for an author who also wrote didactic texts for children and peasants, is quite chatty and familiar, with long descriptive passages filling chapters discussing most aspects of keeping a household. In an early chapter on furnishing the dining room, Burnashev described the different meals of the day and the courses appropriate for each. His discussion of courses is quite in keeping with those laid out in most Russian cookbooks: soups, cold dishes, sauces (in the Russian sense), roasts and baked goods or sweets. His discussions obviously draw on foreign sources but also appear largely original. In the discussion of soup, for example, he wrote of the great variety of soups, from "Russian shchi to the most refined French soups" and especially botvin'ia, a cold soup without [which] it is unpleasant to sit at table in summer. This cool popular soup has become, as they say, a necessity of summer; but despite all its simplicity, its unimportant origin, it is not entirely simple to prepare it tastily and pleasantly: French spices ruin it, and its most important ingredient is good kvas or kislye shchi; boiled and minced sorrel, beet-greens and spinach; cucumbers cut into circles, eggs, chopped onion and good chunks of salmon.z6

Although Burnashev was generally a supporter of French influences, as his reliance on several French original texts suggests, he also believed that French influence could only go so far. The basic foods of the Russian table neither needed nor benefitted from improvement through French ingredients or methods. Elsewhere in these beginning sections, Burnashev brought up other fusions of national schools. At the end of his basic discussion of courses Burnashev mentioned plum pudding (strictly transliterated into Cyrillic) as a food beloved in English cooking. The recipe he gave for this English treat, however, is that of the great French chef Careme.27 Burnashev also introduced the question of the Orthodox calendar before entering into cooking proper. In a section on the storage of products needed on fast days-dried mushrooms and vegetable and nut oils-he noted that these are especially important in "those many Russian houses where they still hold to the ancient rites."zs Even if "many" followed these rules, others certainly did not. But this organizing principle viewed Orthodoxy and its rules as a prime marker of Russianness, worthy of preservation in non-religious texts. The last half of volume 1 was devoted to "The Cooking Agenda of a Young Housewife," and it began with a long anecdote about the perfect housewife of the "middle circle." According to Burnashev, One of our young Petersburg ladies of the middle circle occupies herself as much as possible with her household, which for this reason is found in the most flowering condition. These occupations do not at all keep her from raising her two wonderful sons, and for them and [concern] for her husband do

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not keep her from her Virtov piano, nor her harp, nor from singing, nor from drawing .... Being acquainted with her husband, I rather often visit their house, where besides the pleasant picture of family happiness, besides the pleasure of finding real, varied and learned conversation, besides the truly cordial Russian reception, I find not a little encouragement in a good table.z9

The secret of this admirable woman? She herself bothered with what went on in the kitchen, reading cookbooks and collecting the recipes she found the best and most cost-effective. "In this way," noted Burnashev, "she has almost filled her notebook, the sort meant to be filled with the verses of Russian poets, and used in such a prosaic way, although, in my opinion, in a good mayonnaise and a brilliant consomme there is much more poetry and thought than in other poems and poetical fragments."3o Burnashev, who at this point in the book referred to himself as a "Gastronome," claimed that the present book includes the contents of her notebook. The "Cooking Agenda" presented foods neatly arranged in six sections. The first four followed the usual courses of a Russian meal: soups, cold and prepared dishes, roasts with accompanying salads, and pastries and desserts. In this way a certain element of the Russian organizational template was used, though without the attention to the Orthodox calendar. In these sections, foods are a mingled batch. Soups, for example, included "German shchi" and "French borshch." Burnashev's voice frequently took over from that of the good Russian housewife: certainly it is his voice that began the section on soup with the phrase, '"Without a good soup there is no good dinner,' say the French." He, too, added explanatory footnotes.31 The most unusual entries are those for salads to accompany roasts. There are seventyseven such recipes, a number hugely larger than in any other cookbook. The fifth and sixth sections of the "Cooking Agenda" turn to more specifically Russian foods. Section five, "The Russian Table," includes recipes from borshch to bliny. Section six concentrates on many of the same foods in their fast-day variations. Thus the other, religious element of the template was preserved, but only in the discussion of foods Burnashev considered properly Russian. These sections begin with a comment on why they ought to be considered separately: Our national table, it is true, is far from bad and has its own worthiness. The experienced Russian household cook always knows a great multitude of varied, tasty foods, which for the most part are so good, so pleasant to our taste, however spoilt it already is by French cooking. Everywhere in Russian homes the table is a mixture of the French and that ofNizhnii Novgorod, and this is very good. Therefore I cannot not extract information on the preparation of various Russian dishes from the cooking agenda of my dear acquaintance, collected by me here under a common rubric.32

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In other words, Burnashev decided to codify the dishes belonging to the "national table" himself. He recognized the general tendency toward intermingling and he did not disapprove of it. Still, in order to preserve the idea of "Russian cooking," much like Levshin had half a century previously, Burnashev placed these dishes in a separate place. In this manner a real "Russian" shchi kept its originality, rather than being compared and possibly conflated with the "German" shchi mentioned earlier. The Russian foods gain status and significance by their proximity to each other as they might not if considered side by side with all the other recipes. Burnashev's Encyclopedia appeared to muted praise from the press. A reviewer for the Farming Gazette noted that "this book is no worse than others of the same sort; at least it is presented in fairly clear language. There are some useful and reasonably well-grounded instructions, many ungrounded ones, and others little fit for use."33 The book was fairly successful, however. One later account claimed that it sold out its initial print run of 1,500 copies in two and a half years.3 4 And it was also at least successful enough to be reissued in a revised, greatly expanded version in 1842. The new edition-retitled the Encyclopedia of a Russian Experienced Town and Country Housewife, Housekeeper, Lady-Economist, Lady-Chef, Lady-Cook, MilkMaid and Keeper of Poultry, Containing: Instructions and Guidance in All Branches of Town and Country Domestic Economy, Excerpted from the 40-, 50-, and 60-Year Experiences of Russian Housewives by Boris Volzhin-was met with nearly universal disdain and was eventually repudiated by Burnashev himself.3S As a later account put it, "this title, of course, fabricated by crafty printer-booksellers, was a flag meant to attract the readership of this day."36 The specific changes to the title, now emphasizing its female audience almost to a ridiculous degree, now expanding its scope, and especially, now focusing on the question of experience, were all made to attract an audience recently entranced by a small book first published in 1841. This of course was the cookbook by Ekaterina Avdeeva, Handbook of the Russian Experienced Housewife, which became by far the most successful cookbook of the mid-nineteenth century and caused an upheaval in Russian cookbook publishing. THE HOUSEWIFE LEARNS

Ekaterina Avdeeva and her works are noteworthy for several reasons. For one, she was apparently the first woman cookbook writer in Russia, thus paving the way for the later successes of the now more famous Elena Molokhovets, among others. Also, it was the success of Avdeeva's cookbooks that brought her name to the public. Her first cookbook (though not her first book), the Handbook of the Russian Experienced Housewife, appeared in 1841, anonymously (she later published asK. Avdeeva). According

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to its publisher, the first edition sold out within six months. He released two more editions, still anonymous, within the next two years, giving rise to much comment on the runaway popularity of the cookbook but otherwise yielding a lukewarm reaction.37 And yet Avdeeva's writing gained success despite the initial lukewarm reception by critics. An anonymous reviewer in Notes of the Fatherland felt that Avdeeva's book failed to do what truly needed to be done: "We still do not have a composition on home economics, which contains a systematic description of the contents of all ingredients of cooking and such, their actions on human and animal organisms." Not only did Avdeeva's cookbook not meet these goals, according to the reviewer, but its intended audience also would likely find it too expensive: "One ruble fifty kopeks, silver, is a lot for a cookJ"3S On the other hand, areviewer for the Northern Bee felt that Avdeeva successfully met challenges others, like Stepanov, had not. He noted that Stepanov's work, worthy as it was, failed on two counts. First, it lacked "simple, Russian dishes that are convenient for all," and second, it was "without a philosophical gaze at cooking."39 Avdeeva, however, managed to avoid both these traps. Judging by Avdeeva's introductory comments to the cookbook, the first reviewer misinterpreted her intentions, while the second understood them. Avdeeva addressed the question of readership and Russian society in no uncertain terms. In her words, "one of the uncertain relations in which our modern society finds itself is our Russian home economics. Not speaking of the highest ranks, I turn here to the everyday life of people of the middle conditions." Her audience, then, was one in the middle of Russian society, not the very elite. Few earlier works, despite their attention to the "middle," dismissed the elite with such ease. Tied to this particular attention to the middle were comments on the necessary thrift and frugality of the proper Russian mistress of the household. Avdeeva repeated later that her "book is a model not for the household of the belle monde or the rich, but for the household life of my good compatriots, for the use of Russian masters of the household in the middle classes. Where there is a chef or a butler, there my book is unnecessary, but in that sort of life where the mistress of the household herself must think about everything, watch over everything, there I have hope of being useful."40 Not only did Avdeeva formally address a middle-class audience, she also addressed the women of the household most specifically. Her image of how a housewife should act drew on apparently popular notions that women were more likely to want to engage in worldly activities than household ones. Women ought to pay attention to household matters. As Avdeeva noted, "That opinion is false, that wealth frees us from worry over economic matters. No!" While women with servants did not necessarily have to carry out domestic chores themselves, they had a duty to understand how things worked in order to properly supervise their servants. Avdeeva poked fun at the opinions of worldly women who felt do-

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mestic matters beneath them, echoing some of Burnashev's phrases: "But the kitchen, the cellar, the pantry, food stores, flour, potatoes, pies, shchiwhat prose! Well, but what is to be done, if it is also a necessity of life? And besides, everything depends on how we look at things. Not all verse is poetry, and much poetry is found in prose." 41 Furthermore, this domestic work could not only be considered something more elegant than prose, but something approaching an actual science, on par with men's occupations. It was not unproblematically a science, of course, because of reasons that hark back to some of Levshin's long ago comments: "But here we meet a difficulty: science demands rules and experience, but we have so little guidance in [domestic] economy, by which we could learn ... the greater part of our [domestic] economy is a visual matter, a matter of ignorant cooks." 4Z Thus, the women entrusted with the job of overseeing domestic matters were to be educated, not ignorant, and to learn from books, not just from example passed down from mother to daughter or servant to servant. This book was to take the learned experience of one woman and pass it on through a text, rather than through example. Avdeeva also felt a need to make explanatory comments about nationality. Her book was quite explicitly addressed to Russian readers from a Russian writer. She felt her book was necessary because the influx of foreign information had proved confusing to all: "the new-created mixed character, the confusion of the foreign with the natively Russian, the variety of opinions and glances at family life have made it such that, according to the Russian saying, we have set off from one shore but have not yet arrived at the other." 43 While Burnashev had treated such intermingling with good humor, Avdeeva seems to find something more troubling in the lack of a specific identity. Her book was an attempt to make the divisions, or newly created innovations, more clear. A bit later in the introduction Avdeeva went into more detail on her definition of what was Russian, and why Russian foods were so important. My book is intended just for the Russian economy, and I speak of the Russian national [natsional'nyz] table, of Russian foods, of Russian cooking. Reproaching neither German nor French cooking, I think that for us in all ways [it is] healthier and more wholesome [to eat] our Russian, native [cooking], that to which we are used, with which we are accustomed, that has been extracted from the experience of centuries, passed on from father to children and justified by locality, climate, and way of life. It is good to adopt foreign good things, but one should not leave one's own, and [instead] ought to always consider it the basis of everything. So I thought, and so I wrote.4 4

Avdeeva grudgingly accepts the introduction of foreign foods, but only if nothing Russian is lost in the exchange. Any innovations ought to be balanced by a thorough grounding in the Russian basics of cooking. Further

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examination of just what was considered Russian, however, did not appear until the main body of the text and the recipes themselves. Although the Handbook was predominantly a cookbook, Avdeeva had far wider interests, and she hinted at them even in this narrower text. The last several pages of the introduction are devoted to a discussion of many of the physical practicalities of building, furnishing, and maintaining kitchens, cellars, and pantries. In addition, Avdeeva included historical notes on the role of the kitchen in the household, as well as descriptions of Russian stoves in comparison with styles common in western Europe. These structural topics hint at the all-inclusive vision Avdeeva was to put forth in later books. She wrote about the kitchen, because it could fit in with a cookbook, but noted at the end of the introduction that her hopes were to write so much more on all aspects of domestic economy and estate management. If she had had space, she noted, she would have included "the management of farms [fermy], ... of gardens, animal and poultry yards, orchard keeping and other branches of agriculture." 4 S Even though this book was limited to the inner workings of the kitchen, Avdeeva, at least, had interests far beyond it. Within the main body of the cookbook, moderation and rationality continued to be Avdeeva's watchwords as she built on the cookbook organization that had already been developed. She used the Russian template of course order in most sections, and she respected the fasting calendar. The innovative aspect of Avdeeva's work is its larger organizational scheme. The first section presents "Food Natively Russian," the second "The General Table." These two sections are fairly in keeping with the ways Burnashev separated out Russian foods from others commonly in use. The first recipes are for soups, from shchi to burak to solianka. Pel'meni also appear early in this section, with two recipes: "Siberian pel'meni" and "Chinese pel'meni." The first are filled with beef, the second with a combination of pork and mutton or beef. Although she did not explain the inclusion of these "Chinese" dumplings in a section on "foods properly Russian," Avdeeva did comment on this alternate preparation. As she wrote, "the Chinese often feast [Russian] merchants trading in Kiakhta with pel'meni, boiled in the above manner, and the Russians like them. The flour used by the Chinese for pel'meni is excellent, and as it seems to me, must be made of rice." 4 6 Although this example clearly shows that Avdeeva did not hold strictly to her stated purpose of showing Russian foods in this section, in the other recipes she continued to consider foods common in Russia, defined as that space occupied by so-called Great Russians, including Siberia. She also discussed the particularities of cooking in a Russian kitchen, on (or in) a Russian stove, noting adjustments to be made for different cooking media, and those foods better prepared in a traditional stove. In the section on the "General Table" Avdeeva covered the familiar array of foreign-inspired foods. Recipes like one for "soup bourgeois [burzhua]"

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appear, along with descriptions of puddings (a phonetic translation) and cookies (biskvity). A section on "sauces" again refers to prepared dishes rather than separate sauces; a recipe for "Sauce of cutlets" is actually a description of how properly to cook cutlets, with the final note "under cutlets put various sauces, from peas, potatoes, Turkish beans, cauliflower and sour cabbage." 47 For all that the recipes are in some ways familiar terrain, Avdeeva more fully incorporated them into a Russian context. She included notes on ways in which Russians generally served certain items, or on adjusting some recipes to Russian tastes. In that way she was able both to promote the superiority of Russian foods, as she did in the introduction, and to include the foreign foods that had made their way onto so many elite tables. While the first two sections together covered non-fasting foods and thus present a section in keeping with one element of earlier organizational structures, the emphasis placed on nationality represents something quite new. For one, the national division supercedes the course-based divisions popularized years before. But, too, the very placement of these sections reiterates the particular importance of "Russian cooking" in Avdeeva's work. In particular, it seems likely that the "General Table" was initially intended to appear before the "Foods Natively Russian." Some recipes in the earlier (Russian) section refer to a recipe for bouillon "as told above" when there is no "above" to read. This section, however, does indeed begin with instructions for bouillon, making it a more reasonable place to begin. Furthermore, the next sections return to basic aspects of the Russian table, with attention to fast-day foods, both fish-based and purely vegetarian. Why did the change occur? Moving the section devoted to that which was "properly Russian" to the front of the book certainly emphasizes the importance of its contents. Whether the decision was Avdeeva's or her publisher's, the end result was the prominent display of the importance of Russian cooking. The third section, with foods based on fish, and the fourth, on "The Fast-Day Table," present little new, instead following the by now standard organization, but the fifth section again emphasizes the centrality of nationality for Avdeeva. This section was headed "Various foods which have come into use among Russians." While Burnashev had started the trend of separating "Russian" foods from those common across national boundaries, Avdeeva made a further, admittedly somewhat blurred, distinction between traditionally Russian foods and those from Russia's near neighbors. In this section Avdeeva presented foods from Ukraine, Poland, and Siberia. She continued to define Russian food as that "natively" or traditionally prepared by Great Russians, while foods from other parts of the Russian Empire are still considered somewhat secondary. The first recipe is for "Little-Russian borshch" and now common foods like vareniki and golubtsy follow. For the most part there is a certain sense in the division between Russian and

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not quite Russian. Siberia, though, complicates matters. Although Avdeeva considered Siberian pel'meni part of foods "properly Russian," other Siberian foods were lumped in with non-Russian foods common in Russian cooking. In a recipe for "Siberian kisel'," Avdeeva even noted the food might be uncommon in European Russia but ought to become more familiar. A recipe for khvorosty includes an even more complex rationale: "They belong to [the family of] pastries. They are made for Maslenitsa and served with tea, or put with other desserts on the table; they are more used in Siberia, where, probably, they were brought from Novgorod. In ancient times Maslenitsa was not Maslenitsa without khvorosty." 48 Although here she classes Siberian foods with those from outside Russia proper, in her descriptions she often seems to consider Siberia the true home of the ancient Russian way of doing things. She treats it as almost a museum of traditional practices, whose habits had been long forgotten by Russians in the European areas. Although she never says so, it seems rather a conflation of Rus-sian with its very non-European side as the true past, with the present adding European, western ideas somewhat uneasily. The last sections of Avdeeva's cookbook cover a wide variety of other foods and preserves. One section concentrates on baked goods, from buns and pies to breads and pastries. Although some baked goods appeared in the sections on Russian foods and foods from the near abroad, additional regional or national definitions appear in this more general section. A recipe for the pastry called a baba, for example, begins with the note that "in Little Russia and Novorossiskii region, so they call a particular type of tall kulich."49 Elsewhere, Avdeeva covered all sorts of brewing techniques, including kvas, kislie shchi, beer, and mead, or she discussed topics as varied as preserves, syrups, salting vegetables and meats, making flavored vodkas, and preparing potato flour and meal. Another section gives instructions for making milk substitutes out of nuts, which find a place in the fast-day table, and on purifying water. Avdeeva also described "food for servants," noting that "in Russia usually they prepare for the servants shchi and kasha, and pies for holidays."so She presented additional recipes for some of these foods, variants on recipes for the same foods given elsewhere in the cookbook. Scraps and extras went into the servants' shchi, for example, a difference not in how the soup was made but in the quality of its ingredients. The success of Avdeeva's cookbook was impressive and had far-reaching consequences. Not only did it appear in three editions within two years of its initial publication, but eleven editions had appeared by 1877. Avdeeva's particular balance of Russian and foreign, elite and middling, theory and practice, seems to have appealed to the reading public, although reviewers were a bit warier. The first edition received only muted praise, if any, and a bit of distaste was expressed at some of the odd, unappetizing foods included in the text.s 1 By the third edition, however, which now featured Avdeeva by name, reviewers greeted the text with, if not exactly acclaim, certainly respect. Its success with the reading public won

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over even the wary. The journal Ekonom noted with amazement that "in two years three editions-that is the very best recommendation," although the reviewer disagreed with the author's dismissal of fine cuisine. A reviewer for Notes of the Fatherland, in a rare incident of agreement with Ekonom, noted that it was "just about the best book in our cooking literature, with which probably all previous cooking masters would agree, and especially middling housewives, who in the length of one and a half years have managed to buy up two editions of this cooking encyclopedia." This reviewer, too, commented on Avdeeva's particular emphasis on Russianness in her book: "she prescribes her gastronomic work namely to Russian housewives, and therefore, with her book, you can prepare a miraculous table at which you will eat 'lazy' shchi, suckling pig with sour cream, golubtsy ... and so forth." Not only does the reviewer here conflate dishes Avdeeva separates as food Russian and from the near abroad, he also argues a bit with her "patriotism," specifically with her claim that Russian food was healthier for Russian stomachs. "In reality," he notes, "botvin'ia, kulebiaka, sal'nik-this is very pleasant for Sobakeviches, but one must be a thorough fatalist to agree that the Russian stomach is by nature itself and even history meant for the digestion of such frightful dishes."S 2 Not everyone, it seems, was convinced that the foods considered Russian were particularly worth saving, rather thinking them appropriate for Gogol's Russian grotesques. Imitators also plagued Avdeeva and so proved her success and influence. Cookbooks written by a mythical "K. A--a" appeared, from which the real Avdeeva, who published using the initial "K.," took some pains to distance herself. A dual review of the fourth edition of Avdeeva's now attributed Handbook of the Russian Experienced Housewife: Compiled from 40 years of experience and trials by the good Russian housewife, K. Avdeeva and a new work titled the New Handbook of the Russian Practical Housewife: Compiled from many years of experience and trial by K. A--a discussed this problem explicitly, regretting the "prank" of the fake. 53 Other reviewers were less aware. In 1851, Avdeeva herself felt moved to write to the editors of Notes of the Fatherland to protest an erroneous attribution in a review of The Cook, or the Experienced Cook, by K. A--eva. She noted that this was a fake and listed the only books published to which she put her name.s 4 Even these fakes were somewhat successful. Works by K. A--eva came out in multiple editions, although in fewer than did those by Avdeeva herself. The technique of egregious fakery worked. Such out and out fakes were not the only reaction to Avdeeva's success. Other cookbooks began to bring the words "mistress of the household" and "Russian" to the front of their works, plastering them across titles with as many references to experience and patriotism as possible.ss The new title of the second edition of Burnashev's Encyclopedia is a perfect example. While the original encyclopedia originated some of these trends, with its "young Russian housewife" as star, the new title dropped the "young," and added "experience"-indeed, "forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year

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experiences"-instead.s6 Young, modish women were being passed up by older, experienced women, at least as the voice of authority in household matters. Unfortunately, some reviewers greatly disliked the work. Those writing for Notes from the Fatherland noted that "the author [of the Encyclopedia] does not know the most simple basics of domestic economy."S 7 A reviewer for Ekonom, a journal to which Burnashev often contributed, noted that the new Encyclopedia was nothing more than a collection of excerpts from other works, foreign and Russian, and not a very good selection at that. Burnashev eventually denied responsibility for the book, noting that the publisher had taken over his pseudonym and original work, stealing extra information from sources including from Avdeeva herself.ss The new edition did retain much of Burnashev's original work, including most of the section on cooking. The section on Russian foods, however, was expanded from forty-two recipes to ninety-eight, although a section on fast-day foods was barely larger. The new version also imitated Avdeeva with a section on "Various Ukrainian, Polish, Siberian and other foods, having come into the use of Russians." Just like Avdeeva, the new compiler of the encyclopedia began this section with "Little Russian borshch." Other publications also got on the bandwagon of the housewife craze. The late 1840s saw the publication of cookbooks crediting "experienced mistresses of the household" with their authorship. An example was the Cookbook, containing 1,039 instructions, in 15 sections, gathered by the society of experienced housewives.s9 By its third edition, the number of recipes in the title had been bumped up to 1, 102, and by the time a similarly titled book appeared in 1853, reviewers for Notes of the Fatherland commented that "since that time when the Handbook of the Russian Experienced Housewife of Mrs. Avdeeva had success, all domestic economy books in general, and cookbooks in particular, began to be written by housewives, and not masters of the household, and not cooks."60 Even the few translations from French works now aimed at a different audience. The introduction to French Home Cooking, or Instructions of an Experienced Housewife, published in 1853, claimed that it was an attempt to present the French cuisine bourgeoise to the Russian small household, through the writings of a French woman.6 1 Whatever the attempt, it was yet another in the string of cookbooks usually (and sometimes allegedly) written by women, addressed to women, and aimed at people of the middle estates, rather than the elite. Women were not only the spokespersons for Russian cooking, but increasingly for cooking in general. THE GASTRONOME's CHALLENGE

Although these woman-centered books certainly took over during the 1840s and early 1850s, the later decade also saw a resurrection of cookbooks aimed at an audience both more elite and more male. One writer in particular challenged the ideal of the experienced or practical housewife.

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I. M. Radetskii, a French-trained Russian chef, had once served as maitre

d'h6tel in the household of a western nobleman. In the early 1850s, he turned his attention back to Russia, writing the three-volume Gastronome's Almanac.6z Each volume includes a series of thirty complete menus, written in both French and Russian, followed by recipes for every one of the dishes included in those lists. In the context of the many "housewife" cookbooks and, indeed, the past decades of Russian cookbook writing, this was a radically different approach to organization. Despite his claims to foreign training and his inclusion of French text, not simply French recipes, Radetskii also kept a definite national component. He presented, for example, not simply thin "French" soups like consomme, but "Polish borshch," and "white shchi with buckwheat kasha." He presented recipes for savory pastries, for copious numbers of meat- or fish-based dishes, for roasts, for vegetables, and for desserts, all courses in his various menus. The final two sections include extra recipes for salads and appetizers. An "Alphabet" at the back of the first volume provides information on ingredients and basic preparations like bouillon and meringue. Although in the first volume Radetskii concentrated on non-fast menus, in the second he turned toward the specific needs of religious Russian households. Half of the menus include meat, but the rest are divided between meals for Maslenitsa, and meals for both the fish-eating period of fasts and the purely vegetarian period of fasts. Two final menus cover important religious holidays, with menus for Christmas Eve and Easter. Recipes for each of these subsections are presented separately. The final volume returned to the system of the first, though replacing the section on salads with one on punches. Radetskii did not simply present new recipes for gastronomically more complex meals but, instead, prefaced each volume with lengthy and at times argumentative introductions on the art and importance of gastronomy. The first volume begins with the publisher's opinion on why this book was necessary: A multitude of cookery books in Russian exist, compiled by worthy little housewives or published by gentlemen book publishers; but there is not a single book in this vein, written by a Russian maitre d'hOtel or cooking-master, who having thoroughly studied his subject in his youthful years, could present to the public the ultimate results of his experience in cooking artistry. The author of this book is practically the first to write an independent Russian cookbook, based on personal experience. Having served the greater part of his life in elite homes, in fantastic kitchens, the author of this book has become convinced that good cooking not only lessens the expenses of the masters of the household, but even allows the protection of their health .... In this book are collected 330 various foods and preparations, expensive and cheap, Russian and foreign, on the basis that according to the knowledge of the most famous gastronomes the best table is that which is made up of the best national dishes of all peoples.63

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Thus, not only was this book written by a man, it was immediately addressed to men. The author of the introduction appealed to both the pocketbooks and stomachs of his possible male readers, dismissing the "little housewives" who have written books in the past. Unlike many of the previous cookbooks aimed at elite or professional audiences, this was written by a Russian man with formal training in cooking. The most important consistency between this cookbook and others, however, was in the inclusion of Russian and foreign recipes together. The idea of a mixed table, clearly stated in the text, is an important one in the picture of Russian eating habits and receives its clearest statement here. In other parts of the introductions of the various volumes, Radetskii himself presented both practical and theoretical issues. He discussed the best ways to cook in Russia and commented, often favorably, on the availability of products and equipment there compared to other places. He discussed the duties of chefs, always referring to the profession in the first person plural when entering into the discussion. In the first volume he addressed the question of thrift, noting that frugality is indeed part of chefs' duties, although with a different meaning than Avdeeva had. Instead, he noted, thrift meant making sure that no provisions went to waste, and preparing expensive dishes that are tasty enough to warrant their high cost.6 4 By the second volume, Radetskii turned more to theoretical issues. He launched into a lengthy discourse on gastronomy through the ages, ending with his thoughts on the current state of gastronomy in Russia. Gastronomy, he noted, had long existed in Russia as hospitality (khlebosol'stvo). In modern Russia, gastronomy had developed in intriguing and unique ways by mixing the foods of various nations on a single table. According to Radetskii, Russian gastronomes had successfully integrated their traditional tastes with imported innovations. Most important, though, was the thought that "our gastronomes do not prepare food only for the eyes and do not run after empty conceits."6S They ate rationally, if opulently. Radetskii thus used these introductions to laud gastronomy in general, and to claim that it was perfectly suited for a Russian eating public. He seems to have had no thought that anyone might disagree. Before the third volume came out in 1855, however, Radetskii had clearly seen the criticisms leveled against his book. Even if people liked the recipes-and they often did-some found much to argue with in the ideals of gastronomy Radetskii proclaimed. Although Radetskii had noted that these books were less intended for the home cook, and more for future chefs, they nonetheless received a barrage of criticism for their everyday impracticality. They were considered too ornate, too far from the ways most people cooked. One reviewer found Radetskii's writing pretentious, and others felt that it failed even to live up to the task set up in the introductions.66 In the third volume Radetskii was able to respond to the criti-

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cisms of the first. He defended his writings as a necessary part of keeping international standards of cuisine in Russia and dismissed the writings of the "respected housewives" preferred by some critics as so much drivel. He drew on the conflict between Moscow and St. Petersburg, noting that his book was clearly in keeping with the culinary habits of the western capital. Again, he reiterated the goal of addressing gastronomes, and his continued belief that such attention was important. But he also included women in this introduction far more than in any other, noting that he had received laudatory letters from many housewives: "the letters sent from young ladies newly entered into home economics could decorate the feuilleton of the best patriotic newspaper."67 Although he emphasized that women, too, could read and use his cookbook, Radetskii still drew distinctions between men and women. He wrote, "I had as a goal to provide for Messieurs Gastronomes a rich choice of elegant and variable dishes, and equally housewives, preferring the natural to the artificial, will find all to their taste and desire."68 Even as he supported the ideals of gastronomy, Radetskii had to pay at least lip service to the ideals of economy and of the housewife as the force in charge of food in the household. In 1862, Radetskii made one last stab at appealing to a gastronomic audience. In St. Petersburg Cooking, Radetskii claimed to be answering the wishes of the wider public for a "complete Gastronomic Cookery." In response, and according to his introduction to the new cookbook, Radetskii labored long and hard to create this volume "containing around two thousand foods: expensive and cheap, Russian and foreign."69 Practically, the cookbook was a long series of recipes beginning with the basics, moving through soups, savory pastries, meat dishes, and sweets. His promise to include the "Russian and foreign" was certainly met; his cookbook included recipes for many a French concoction, but also such dishes as petits pates a la sibirienne, his translation for pel'menU 0 While he certainly included and even emphasized "Russian" foods," Radetskii also privileged the expensive over the frugal, the complicated over the simple and the plain. Radetskii's recipes were meant to please the eyes as well as the tongue, and although he paid lip service to frugal cooking, Radetskii clearly aimed at an elite audience. A review of St. Petersburg Cooking in the journal Russian Housewife found that to be true. According to the reviewer, Radetskii relied too much on foreign cooking terms and expensive ingredients. At base, however, the reviewer wondered who might find this cookbook useful. As she put it, a "knowledgeable chef" would have no particular use for the book, and an "ignorant or ill-informed cook and in general every housewife" would find the complexity of the dishes absolutely "chaos." Furthermore, the reviewer found some specific recipes simply bad, although she did admit that Radetskii's recipe for ukha was perfectJI

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(right) Sweet and savory dishesincluding souffle of snipe (12), a timbale of macaroni (21), and fillet of duck with asparagus puree (25). Source: I. M. Radetskii, S.-Peterburgskaia kukhnia (St. Petersburg: Shtab Otdel'nogo Korpusa vnutrennei strazhi, 1862), plate III.

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(left) Savory dishes-including ham, leg of lamb, head of wild boar, and fish. Source: I. M. Radetskii, S.-Peterburgskaia kukhnia (St. Petersburg: Shtab Otdel'nogo Korpusa vnutrennei strazhi, 1862), plate V.

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THE CASE OF EKONOM

In 1841, the year Avdeeva first published her Handbook, Faddei Bulgarin began to publish a new journal, The Economist [Ekonom]. From its very first issue, the new journal featured a cooking column, and over the next decade and a half changes in the cooking column reflected some of the same tensions that appear during the same period in cookbook writing: a clear bifurcation between texts written by or for women and those by or for men, with the first concentrating on the frugal, the popular, and the later on the gastronomic, the refined. This attention probably has to be credited to Bulgarin himself, whose voice as editor frequently appears in commentary on the columns and in other opinion pieces. Bulgarin was clearly a man of refined tastes in food, as other writings demonstrate. In an earlier edition of his newspaper The Northern Bee, Bulgarin went so far as to proclaim that the writings of the famous French gastronome BrillatSavarin would "be for our century just the same as the book on the Spirit of the Laws was for the eighteenth." In another issue he wrote place in front of me four dishes: one of the cuisine of an African King or an American Chief, another from the kitchen of the French nobility, a third from the table of a Russian merchant, and a forth from the table of an educated Russian noble and I will guess for you, without error, the character of the owner of each dish, I will tell of his way of life, and will announce the degree of his education.-After that, who will stand to argue that the Art of Cooking is not an important ScienceFZ Clearly, Bulgarin took food seriously, although with the jocular undertone that owed much to Brillat-Savarin, and thus arose the semi-serious approach he took to Ekonom, his most practical journal. In the first issue of the new journal Bulgarin immediately jumped into the theoretical discussion of how people should live their everyday lives and what role food and cooking should play in their lives. According to Bulgarin, Ekonom was meant to promote sensible, not straitened living. Its advice was to do the most with what you had, not really to cut back on things. As for food, the advice came down to the following: "eat good food, for the maintenance of health, and share your hospitality with friends and relatives, because this warms the heart of a good man .... [E]at things that are inexpensive, but fresh and tasty, because a well roasted chicken is better than poorly roasted pheasant, and well preserved mushrooms are better than spoiled truffles." 73 Furthermore, the contents of Ekonom were to concentrate on the mundane rather than the esoteric. As Bulgarin put it, "it is much more useful to teach how to bake good pirogi, than to explain how to get sugar from bananas."74 With this sort of introduction, Bulgarin, while addressing men and noting the importance

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of hospitality and eating well, also seemed to believe in the ideas of frugality shortly to be expressed in Avdeeva's writings. Within the actual cooking columns, however, a more complex picture emerges. Almost more so than any single cookbook, Ekonom's cooking column brought together recipes for foods from around the world. In its pages authors presented recipes from throughout the Russian Empire, from all parts of Europe, and from places yet farther away. In its first issues recipes from Russia's Polish provinces appear, and in one recipe, for a cabbage concoction called mishkuliatsiia, the compiler moved further, noting "even French gastronomes like this food an awful lot when they are in Poland." 75 Other European dishes also appear. The various "gastronomic" dishes with French names are, of course, an example. Italian foods appear with some frequency, such as a Milanese risotto. The compiler gave a bit of a history lesson with this recipe: "today the general cuisine is French cuisine. For the amusement and delight of the educated world the French think up fashions, vaudevilles, novels, and new foods. But the cooking arts (I'art culinaire) was born, like all art in Europe, after the invasion of the barbarians, in Italy, and the French adopted the better part of their cuisine from the Italians."76 The compilers of the cooking column moved out of the bounds of western European cooking, as well. Recipes for Greek and Turkish-style dolma (stuffed grape leaves) appear early in the print run, for exampleJ7 The pages of Ekonom became something of an international culinary reference for those with the proper interest. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the discussions of national cuisines contained in Ekonom are the comments on Russian cuisine itself. While cookbook writers did spend time on Russian foods, the compilers of Ekonom's cooking column were a bit different. Their comments on what Russians liked, and on certain qualities of Russian foods, moved well beyond anything noted by formal cookbook writers. In an early recipe for okroshka of game, the compiler noted that "this food is one of these about which Russian people say 'to a Russian it is healthy, but to a German, death.' People used to dainty food should not in general eat Russian folk dishes."78 Similarly, in another recipe the author noted that although dainty people might "fear" onions, "Russian people in general love raw onion." Russians, again, were given credit for strong stomachs and the ability to eat things others cannotJ9 The opposite relation also appeared, in which foreign food habits were noted as something a bit strange to the tastes of Russians. so Other comments looked at differences in preparation and technique, not simply at differences in tastes. In a recipe for "Russian botvin'e," for example, the author decried the unnecessary innovations perpetrated on Russian foods by French chefs, who used spinach, sorrel, or other greens in place of the traditional (and supposedly tastier) young beet greens of this cold summer soup.B1 The basic idea of much of the writing seems to be summed up in the idea that it was better to prepare Russian food well than French food badly.sz

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The writers for Ekonom also put forward an idea touted by Burnashev and Radetskii in their cookbooks: the peculiar mixture of foods from different places was not an accident; it was instead a purposeful attempt to get to the truth of Russian tables. In a brief comment within the cooking column an important comment appeared on how Russians ate. The writer noted that all countries had their national cuisine and posed the question "which cuisine is best: Russian, French, German, Italian, or English?" The answer? "The best table is a mixed one, that is, consisting of dishes of all peoples, prepared in the French style."B3 Radetskii had commented that the mixed table was best, and anecdotal evidence suggests that this sort of "mixed" table was indeed fairly common among the upper levels of Russian society. Similarly, the authors were perfectly comfortable giving recipes for French foods, adjusted for Russian tastes.s4 The ideal presented really comes down to a balance between foods rich and simple, foreign and native, with whatever adjustments were necessary to suit tastes, ideas of health, and pocketbooks. In addition, the debate between the housewife and the gastronome played out in the pages of Ekonom. For the first few issues of its print run, Ekonom's cooking column was divided into two parts: simple foods and gastronomic foods. In the first issue the section on simple foods included recipes for "economic-style pike" and a cold apple pudding. The recipes in the gastronomic section were more complex. Several had names with French phrases, like "Apples ala Dauphine." Others called for ingredients well beyond the means of most Russians: in a recipe for "partridges a la Catalane" the author notes "if you have fresh truffles [long a signifier of expense and luxury], take three or four of them, cut them up into little pieces and put them in the sauce, too."ss In the next issues, similar foods appear, but almost immediately the line between the gastronomic and the simple began to blur. The gastronomic steadily took over more ground from the simple or frugal. A recipe listed under "simple" foods for pudding of rye bread included a "gastronomic" variation involving chocolate and a sabayon sauce. Another "simple" recipe for kasha with grouse noted that "Gastronomes prefer buckwheat porridge from Smolensk."B6 In another issue Ekonom presented "Russian gastronomic dishes, or, shchi da kasha." Here the column conflated the most traditional of all Russian foods, cabbage soup and porridge, even using a specific phrase from a folk saying, with gastronomic flights of fancy. The recipe for shchi calls for fresh cabbage rather than the more traditional sour cabbage, as "rather many gastronomes prefer this shchi," while that for kasha calls for butter, boiled eggs, brains, and other meats.s7 At the same time that the gastronomic was infiltrating the simple (and, indeed, the official separation disappeared after several issues, leaving readers to judge on their own what was what), women were addressed in often somewhat disrespectful or joking terms. A recipe for "excellent

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soup" included the imagined response of "good little housewives" to such a "common food." They might be indignant that their culinary skills were being slighted by a recipe for such a basic dish, but Ekonom noted that whatever their beliefs, good soup was a rare find.ss Later, the economic housewives really did chime in, according to Ekonom, and their desires were strongly lined up against the gastronomic, but also against the needlessly simple. At the same time, gastronomes complained about plain foods. In the context of a recipe for onion soup, Ekonom tried to find some common ground between these two camps: One of the greatest truths in the world: chacun ii son gout, that is, to each his own taste; and if this truth is accepted in literature and the arts, then in the kitchen-this truth rules over all other truths, even over two times two is four! God help you please everyone with cooking! ... If Ekonom had asked me, I could have taught him how to do that, says one housewife. Please! What is it with Ekonom, who teaches us how to cook such expensive dishes, that they are completely inaccessible? says another housewife. So why is it that Ekonom prints such empty dishes! exclaims the gastronome, and so on. Ekonom answers everyone at once. Dear sirs and madams! In the collection of articles on various subjects everything should have its place, to satisfy the tastes of many. You, respected lady-reader of Ekonom, know many things about which Ekonom has not yet written-wait, he will tell you things that you do not know. It is impossible to tell everything at once! You are dissatisfied that Ekonom teaches how to prepare expensive dishes! Ekonom teaches how to prepare expensive dishes economically, and in that satisfies his duties. If a dish costs 500 rubles-but if Ekonom teaches you how to prepare it well, without spoiling expensive ingredients, then do not be angry about it, and if Ekonom gives instructions on how to prepare the most ordinary food, then he is doing his job, because all strength lies in the art. Not every cook can cook even shchi and kasha well, and let's not even talk about soups, sauces, and roasts! The culinary art is a great art that I call an art-science ... and good cooks and chefs are just as rare as good writers or artists. But the pride of every housewife is so great, that she cannot imagine that anyone knows her business better than she does herself and that anywhere they cook better than she! God be with you, who think that, but we know that a delicious and healthy meal is a great matter in life, and that such meals are rather rare.s9

Whatever the humorous aspect of this excerpt, several things seem clear. The author of the cookery column presented diametrically opposed opinions on what ought to be in the column. "Housewives" wanted frugal foods, but not recipes that were insultingly easy to prepare. Gastronomes wanted more complex dishes and considered money not to be an issue. Although Ekonom claimed to be impartial, preferring to present both sides of the story, in reality, or at least in principle, it clearly sided against the house-

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wives. But in practice, over the next several years recipes with French names gradually disappeared, and the language of the gastronome faded away.9o In the middle of 1844 the idea of gastronomic foods appeared again, more formally, when the cookery column was devoted to "notes from the album of one gastronome." This section, which began with an unaccredited aphorism of Brillat-Savarin, provided a haven for gastronomic foods.91 Over the next few weeks recipes with French names begin to reappear. Again, however, the trend was suddenly recast a month later when, as part of a general change in the form of the journal, the cookery column was subsumed under a general heading of "Women's Work," along with sections of drinks and one on the dairy. This section was separate from one on "Housekeeping," which contained articles on technology for the home or cleaning techniques. Again, French recipes disappeared for a while, although a few recipes for foods with foreign modifiers continue to appear, and eventually, even an occasional "French" dish appeared. However, when recipes did refer to France, they now, as in a recipe for pastries, referred to French housewives rather than French chefs, in a move paralleling the contemporary changes in cookbook writing.92 The beginning of 1845 brought a new writer to the fore, when Ekonom hired the "royal maitre d'h8tel M. Ember" to write the cookery column. His instruction was "to begin at the beginning," and to draw not on the works of Careme, who had become rather old-fashioned, but on his own rich experience.93 This new writer let the journal concentrate on the wishes of gastronomes again, of those who "live in order to eat, and do not eat in order to live."9 4 M. Ember's articles did, in a way, try to present first things first, with a collection of the most important sauces of French cuisine in his second article, and various other important building blocks of cooking in other early articles. Menus also appeared, so that readers could see how best to put meals together. M. Ember continued to write columns rich in French foods and techniques for three-quarters of the year, until the cookery column disappeared for over a month. When it reappeared, it came back with the note that M. Ember was unable to write, as he had gone to Palermo, but a faithful reader had sent in new recipes. This new author was supposedly a woman using the pseudonym Glafira Mikhailovna Shchigrovskaia.9s Glafira Mikhailovna served as an example of the experienced mistress of the household growing so popular in cookbooks during the 1840s. Like Avdeeva and her imitators, Glafira Mikhailovna was concerned with costs and frugality, even, in some instances, reporting on how much a given recipe was likely to cost to prepare. Her recipes, however, also flirted with the gastronomic, or at least the fashionable. In her second column she gave a recipe for waffles, noting that they were currently a highly fashionable food in St. Petersburg. In addition, she reported on the longer history of waffles.96 Glafira Mikhailovna also presented foods she had learned from French chefs, or joke foods whose intricate preparations led to dishes

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more pleasing to the eye than, perhaps, the palate.97 After a short hiatus, cookery columns by Glafira Mikhailovna and M. Ember began to appear alternately, as if Ekonom had finally managed to find a balance between the hypothetical good little housewives and gastronomes of earlier times. Another subject heading also appeared, as some of Glafira Mikhailovna's recipes for preserves were classified as for "the Pantry." By 1847, M. Ember had largely disappeared, and another man, Iu. Trukhmanov, began to write some cooking articles, all of which concentrated on the relation of food to health. He wrote much on the "organic remedies of ordinary, every-day life."98 Still, Glafira Mikhailovna's remained the more common voice, and in 1848 and 1849 she took over the column completely.99 Her name disappeared in 1850, but from then to the end of the print run in 1854 the cookery column retained many of the characteristics of her control: a wide variety of foods, both expensive and basic, gastronomic and everyday, all written by and addressed to women. THE HOUSEWIFE TRIUMPHANT

In the early 1860s, the debate between housewife and gastronome found an uneasy truce. On the one hand, the "housewife" solidified her position as the most dominant figure or ideal in culinary literature. Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets published the first edition of her Gift to Young Housewives in 1861, even as additional editions of Avdeeva's cookbooks continued to appear. The journal Russian Housewife-though concerned with far more than cooking-also held to the idea that women could and should rule over a rational, organized kitchen. Even Radetskii, the champion of gastronomy and of the gastronome, changed his position. In 1868 he published a cookbook titled simply Housewife, or The Most Complete Guidance for Conserving Expenses.1oo In content this was a most practical and scientific work; Radetskii gave specific amounts for most ingredients, as well as the likely price for each dish. He also gave equivalents for different measurements, noting that, for instance, one funt of dry ingredients equaled 2 glasses equaled 16 tablespoons equaled 64 teaspoons. But more important, Radetskii had basically given up on the ideal of the elite table, and although not all of his recipes were suddenly frugal, their packaging had certainly succumbed to the ideal of the housewife. This "triumph," however, was limited in at least two major ways. First, the ideal was, to an extent, hollow. A clear disjuncture between ideal and reality had lurked in even the earliest editions of Avdeeva's Handbook, but by the tenth edition, published in 1865, the disjuncture had become a chasm.l0 1 The slim original volume had grown into a three-volume tract covering additional areas of domestic economy. The first two volumes covered cooking, while the third was addressed to men and covered various agricultural topics. Within the cooking sections, however, an interesting change had occurred. While the new edition preserved the original in-

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