The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine: A Novel

By Alina Bronsky and Tim Mohr

“In this acidly funny novel” of life in Soviet Russia, “a cruel comic romp ends as a surprisingly winning story of hardship and resilience” (The New Yorker).

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

A German Book Award Finalist

A Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal Favorite Read of the Year

When Rosa Achmetowna discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, Sulfia, is pregnant, she tries every bizarre home remedy there is to thwart the pregnancy. But despite her best efforts, the baby girl Aminat is born—and immediately wins Rosa’s heart. The dark-eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through, just like Rosa, and the devious grandmother wastes no time in plotting to steal her away from the woefully inept Sulfia.

When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter, and grandmother begin to fray.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781609459581

Alina Bronsky

Alina Bronksy is the author of Broken Glass Park (Europa, 2010); The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Europa, 2011), named a Best Book of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly; Just Call Me Superhero (Europa, 2014), Baba Dunja’s Last Love (Europa, 2016), and My Grandmother’s Braid (Europa, 2021). Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

Book preview

The knitting needle

As my daughter Sulfia was explaining that she was pregnant but that she didn’t know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap.

Sulfia was sitting on a kitchen stool. Her shoulders were scrunched up and her eyes were red; instead of simply letting her tears flow she insisted on rubbing them into her face with the backs of her hands. This despite the fact that when she was still a child I had taught her how to cry without making herself look ugly, and how to smile without promising too much.

But Sulfia wasn’t very gifted. In fact, to be honest, I’d say she was rather stupid. And yet somehow she was my daughter—worse still, my only daughter. As I looked at her—her nose running, perched there on the stool with her back hunched like a parrot in a cage—I had mixed feelings. I desperately wanted to shout at her, Sit up straight! Stop sniffling! Wipe that pathetic look off your face! Don’t scrunch your eyes like that!

But I also felt sorry for her. After all, she was mine. Some­how! I had no other daughter, no son, and for years my body had been hollow inside—as barren as the sands of a desert. This daughter I did have was deformed and bore no resemblance to her mother. She was short—she only came up to my shoulders. She had no figure whatsoever. She had small eyes and a crooked mouth. And, as I said, she was stupid. She was already seventeen years old, too, so there was little chance she would get any smarter.

I only hoped that her simplemindedness might prove attractive enough to some man that he wouldn’t notice her awful legs until the two of them were already standing in front of a justice of the peace.

Thus far that hope had come to nothing. Sulfia had a few female friends on our block, but the last time she had spoken to a boy was probably ten years before, just after she started primary school. Yet, one day, there I was sautéing a fish in oil (it was 1978, and anthrax spores had just leaked from the huge lab in our city), and Sulfia put her hand over her nose and then threw up four times in the toilet.

Even that witch Klavdia, who lived in another room of our communal apartment, noticed something amiss. Klavdia worked in a birthing center as a midwife. That was her version, at least. I didn’t believe her. She probably wasn’t anything more than a janitor. There were two parties in our apartment. One party—our family—had two bedrooms; the other party—Klavdia—had one. We shared a common bathroom and kitchen. It was a nice old building, and very central.

Sulfia sat on the stool and in answer to my questions told me that her sudden pregnancy could only have come about from dreaming of a man at night, while asleep, and I believed her immediately. The streets were full of pretty girls in short skirts, and a real man would never come anywhere near Sulfia unless he was nearsighted or perverted.

I looked sternly at Sulfia, disappointment in my eyes, but she just stared down at her little feet. I knew such cases existed, cases of virgins having a dream and nine months later bringing a child into the world. And there were even worse cases. I knew of one personally: my cousin Rafaella found her daughter in the blossom of a huge exotic house plant of unknown origin—she’d brought the seed from somewhere down south, she said. I can still remember just how baffled she was.

I looked at my daughter and wondered what I could do now for her future and my reputation. I had some ideas.

I went down to the pharmacy and bought mustard powder. Then I scrubbed the bathtub until it was gleaming and filled it with hot water. We were lucky that we had hot water just then, for it had been shut off time and again over the previous weeks.

I sprinkled the powder into the water and then stirred it in with the broken-off handle of a snow shovel I’d found on the street the previous winter and brought home with me because it looked solid. Sure enough, I’d already found a use for it.

I stirred and Sulfia stood next to me, watched, and shivered.

Get undressed, I said.

She quickly climbed out of her dress and her white panties and looked at me.

Get in, I said.

You always had to connect the dots for her.

She gingerly lifted one of her ugly, dark legs and braced herself on me. She dunked her big toe into the water and started moaning about it being way too hot.

It’s even hotter in hell, I said patiently.

She looked at me, tried to put her foot in, and cringed, jerking it back out.

I was losing my patience. The water has to be hot, not lukewarm, I explained. She looked at me with a wounded look, and then let herself drop into the bathtub. Water splashed onto the floor.

Are you crazy? I shouted and turned the tap back on very hot.

As I mopped up the puddles on the tiled floor, Sulfia whimpered in the tub: it was too hot, she was going to be scalded to death.

Nobody has ever been scalded to death, I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. When her whimpering stopped, I looked up. Sulfia lay in the tub with her eyes closed and her mouth hanging open. I lifted her up and ran cold water over her with the showerhead. Better a pregnant daughter than a dead one, I thought. Sulfia came to. Her skin was red, and she immediately began to complain.

I dragged Sulfia past Klavdia’s curious face and into our room, put her in bed, and gave her cranberry tea to drink. She fell asleep. She slept for twenty-two hours, tossing and turning and groaning the whole time. I kept checking the sheet beneath her. It remained white.

After the mustard bath, Sulfia’s skin began to peel, but otherwise nothing happened. So I went to the market and bought a large bag of bay laurel leaves from one of my countrymen. I boiled up the leaves into a brew and gave it to Sulfia. She drank it obediently, like a good daughter. She didn’t even make it to the toilet before throwing up several times in the washbasin—in plain view of nosy Klavdia. She couldn’t hold any of it down, so it didn’t do anything.

I began to worry. I didn’t want to send my daughter to the doctor, and I didn’t want any idiotic chatter at the school where she’d been studying nursing since the beginning of the year. I hoped to avoid any additional hurdles for Sulfia, who was hardly popular as it was. And I also knew that at hospitals they treated stupid young girls in her condition like pieces of meat. I wanted to spare her that.

I never would have expected God to send help in the person of Klavdia, of all people—that stupid clucking hen. But after observing my increasingly desperate attempts, Klavdia took the initiative. She put a hand on my elbow in our shared kitchen and whispered that she had helped a few other people in her time and knew exactly what to do.

I listened to her and then nodded. I had no choice. The next day we went into Klavdia’s room and pushed a big table into the middle. Klavdia brought in a washable tablecloth covered with a floral pattern of forget-me-nots and bachelor buttons. I went and brought in Sulfia, whose black eyes bounced around the room in panic.

I explained to Sulfia once again that though they could arise on their own, problems never took care of themselves. They had to be solved. She trembled in my arms for a while. Then she obediently climbed onto the table.

Klavdia said she couldn’t work this way. With Sulfia shaking so badly, she wouldn’t be able to find the right spot. I had to hold Sulfia down—if she jerked around in the middle of it, Klavdia might stick the needle into her gut. I threw myself across my daughter’s midsection.

Hold her mouth shut, said Klavdia. As I smothered Sulfia’s suddenly rising scream, Klavdia pulled a bloody knitting needle from between Sulfia’s legs with a quick motion.

Maybe she is more than a janitor after all, I thought, impressed with Klavdia’s steady hand. Then I released my grip on Sulfia’s clenched jaw. Her head lolled to one side. The frail child had passed out again.

I carried Sulfia to our room on my back. I laid a waterproof pad beneath her pale bum and wrapped her in warm blankets.

She came to again. Her eyes, dark and round like raisins, wandered around the room. She made a soft whining sound.

Her face slowly got whiter. My husband, Kalganow, came home from work.

What does Sonja have? he asked.

He didn’t call our daughter by her Tartar name. He called her what the Russians called her because it was beyond their capabilities to remember a Tartar name, much less pronounce one.

My husband was an absolutist. He didn’t believe in God; the only thing he believed was that all people were alike, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was still living in the Middle Ages. My husband didn’t like it when we made distinctions between ourselves and others.

I told him our stupid little Sulfia just had the flu. He went to her bedside and put his hand on her forehead.

But she’s cold, he said. Cold and moist.

Well, I couldn’t get everything right. Sulfia moaned and tossed and turned.

Twins, so what?

That night I suddenly got worried that Sulfia might die on me. It had been years since I worried about her, and I didn’t like the feeling. I lifted Sulfia’s blanket. Things looked good. I cleaned her up, gathered the bloody stuff, stuck it in a plastic bag, and wrapped the bag in a newspaper. I quietly left our apartment and heard Klavdia turn over in bed as I did. I carried the bloody bundle through the dark, empty streets and stuffed it in a dumpster a few blocks away.

In the morning Sulfia had a fever. She was bleeding like a stuck pig. I pulled a jar of caviar out of the depths of my refrigerator—I’d been saving it for New Year. I smeared it thickly on four slices of bread and fed it to Sulfia. Caviar was known to be good for replenishing blood.

Sulfia’s teeth chattered. She had the chills. Tiny translucent orange balls of caviar stuck to her chin. I poured a drink made out of sea buckthorn berries into her twisted mouth. I had a garden out of town, and I’d picked the berries there in the fall. My hands had bled from being stuck by the thorns; it had ruined the skin on my fingertips. Afterward I pureed the berries with sugar, ten liters’ worth in canning jars. That way the sea buckthorns kept through the winter. Now I mixed spoonfuls of the puree into hot water and gave it to Sulfia to drink so she’d get some vitamins.

She sniffled and groaned, but my labors paid off. After a few days Sulfia stopped bleeding and was able to get out of bed and make it to the bathroom on her own. After a few more days she went back to her nursing school. Klavdia gave us an official note saying that Sulfia had been out with the flu. For the next few months I had an easier time putting up with her, until I noticed her belly starting to get round. At some point it became blatantly obvious. But I noticed it rather late. It had just never occurred to me. Eventually even Kalganow, who normally missed everything, noticed.

What’s Sonja got in there? he asked, pointing with his finger. How did that happen?

She’s just a growing girl, I said hastily. I put my hand on Sulfia’s stomach and froze. The kick I felt against my hand spelled trouble.

God was mocking me. God or Klavdia.

Must have been twins, Klavdia said, shrugging her shoulders. So what?

She said we’d paid her to take care of only one baby, and she’d done that. Since she knew nothing about a twin, she couldn’t have gotten rid of a second baby. She just stuck the one closest to the exit.

In fact, said Klavdia, the survival of the second twin was evidence of her skill. Others couldn’t even ensure the survival of the mother.

I locked myself in the bathroom and let the tears flow, silently, so no one could hear me and so my eyes wouldn’t get red. Sulfia sat on a kitchen stool and stroked her belly, smiling, eyes wide, munching on slices of bread stacked with cheese and cold cuts, fresh pickles I’d bought at the market, sour pickles I’d canned the past summer, marinated tomatoes, apples, a piece of apple tart, one bowl full of yoghurt, and another filled with cream of wheat and raisins.

Because I knew my husband would never believe the story about being impregnated in a dream, I told him she’d been raped by the neighbor two floors up from us. The neighbor was related to my husband’s most senior supervisor. After that Kalganow didn’t say anything more, not to me, not to Sulfia, and not to the neighbor, and we began to prepare for the arrival of the baby, never losing the faint hope that some calamity—an illness or a botched medical procedure—might still arrive first.

The child

The child, a little girl, seven pounds, twenty inches long, was born one cold December night in 1978 at Birthing Center Num­ber 134. I had a feeling even then that she would become the type of kid who could survive anything without batting an eye. She was an unusual child and screamed very loudly from day one.

My husband and I picked up the baby in a taxi when she was ten days old. Along with our daughter, of course.

The little child nestled in a folded knit blanket piped with pink. It was standard issue at the time. My husband took a picture of us: me with the baby in my arms, next to me Sulfia holding a bouquet of plastic flowers lent to us by the clinic to use in the photos—obviously there was no place to get fresh flowers in winter. The baby’s face was barely visible, a little flash of red between the folds of the blanket. I had completely forgotten that newborns are so tiny and ugly. This one began to scream in the taxi and only let up a year later.

I held the baby in my arms and studied its face. I realized that the fatherless baby looked more like me than like any adult I knew. She was, despite my initial impression, not really ugly. Up close I could see that she was actually a pretty little girl—particularly when she was quiet.

At home we unwrapped her and laid her on the bed. The baby girl had firm little muscles and strong reddish skin. Her tiny arms and legs writhed around and the bed shook beneath her. And she screamed nonstop.

Klavdia’s curious face peered around the doorframe: Oh, how cute! Already home? Congratulations! Have you fed that baby? The screaming’s unbearable.

Sulfia sat in a comfy chair and smiled deliriously. My husband leaned down and frowned at his first grandchild. I had the feeling there was something he didn’t like about her. Perhaps he was looking for traces of his supervisor in her little face.

What’s his name? asked Klavdia from the doorway.

It’s a girl! I cried so loudly that the baby stopped screaming for one brief moment and looked up at me, surprised. A girl! We have a granddaughter.

Okay, okay. What’s its name? Klavdia asked.

Aminat, I said. Her name is Aminat.

What? said Klavdia, who had always insisted on calling my daughter, whom she’d known since she was a baby, Sonja, and me Rosa, which was at least derived from my actual name, Rosalinda. We had beautiful names that nobody else seemed to be able to deal with.

That is, Anna, Anja, my husband corrected. He always wanted to be like everyone else.

Aminat, I repeated. I didn’t think it was so difficult to remember. My granddaughter would be called Aminat, just like my grandmother, who’d grown up in the mountains. Even if I turned out to be the only one, I would always call her by her real name, and who cared that in daycare, kindergarten, school, university, and then in whatever profession she entered she would soon become just another Anja. For me she would be Aminat, and I immediately began to pray that someday she’d be able to live a life where people didn’t automatically butcher her name.

Her name is Aminat Kalganova, I said, and Klavdia’s disapproving face disappeared from the doorway.

My husband put his hands over his ears and said, That really is unbearable. Is she going to keep that up?

My daughter Sulfia awoke from her trance and said, I’m so hungry, mother.

The baby girl I named Aminat, after my grandmother who had been born in the Caucuses, turned my life upside-down. Everything changed. Sulfia took the birth of her daughter as an opportunity to sleep nonstop. And she ate nonstop, as well. She liked to hold the baby,—she spoiled her that way, in fact—but she was otherwise good for nothing. She even proved useless whenever the new baby was hungry. During the night, Sulfia slept so soundly that she didn’t hear the miserable yelps of loneliness or the irate screams of hunger.

I lay on the other side of the wall and listened to the baby girl cry. I knew exactly what she needed. After the first three days I could distinguish the sounds. Eventually I couldn’t take it any longer and brought the crib into the room I occupied with Kalganow.

I liked the way she balled her tiny fists and rubbed her eyes when she was sleepy.

Mornings I sent Kalganow to the milk dispensary for baby formula—after all, someone had to make sure the baby got enough to eat. She drained every bottle in the shortest time, much more quickly than other children. My husband tried to protest when I asked him to go; the line of unshaven young fathers at the milk dispensary made him uncomfortable. But I determinedly sent him every morning. This was about his own flesh and blood. Kalganow said he wouldn’t treat his own granddaughter any better or worse than he would any other child because all mankind were of equal worth. I called him a fascist.

After a few months, Sulfia returned to her nursing program and I registered little Aminat for daycare. We all had to get on with our lives somehow. Aminat cried bitterly. I had to pry her fingers from my skirt every morning when I left.

My granddaughter Aminat was lucky. She hadn’t inherited any of the sluggishness or ugliness of her mother. She had my dark, almond-shaped eyes, my gently wavy black hair, a slender nose, and a bright look on her face. With some people, you can tell from the moment of birth whether they’re smart or not. I had been able to tell with Sulfia—and had been proved correct. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Sulfia had been conceived in bed, with my husband, rather than by a stranger in a dream.

Aminat was nonetheless a troublesome child. She didn’t want to go to daycare. She would start to scream as soon as we got there and I had to swat away the fingers she clawed into me. But I couldn’t keep showing up late for work.

When I went to pick her up each evening, I could hear her screaming from the street. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t like the fact that my granddaughter was disturbing the whole school. In fact, I felt I had to explain to the caregiver that Tartar children are usually well behaved. For the most part better than Russian children, though of course I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to sound arrogant.

Aminat fought all efforts at child rearing. I even caught myself referring to her as Anja in front of the kindergarten teachers because I was so ashamed of her. She was such a handful that I didn’t want to make things any more difficult for the teachers by also insisting on using an Arabic name. I could be so thoughtful at times.

My daughter Sulfia meanwhile forgot she had given birth to a daughter. She finished her vocational training and began working at a surgical clinic. But she hadn’t passed her exams, so she had to work as a nursing assistant instead of as a nurse. She performed the lowliest duties and nothing of importance. Still, I thought it was for the best for everyone.

I was just happy that despite her limited capabilities, my daughter had become a productive member of society and had even given birth to a daughter of her own, and a surprisingly fabulous one at that. Sulfia was out of the woods, leaving me time to see to raising my granddaughter. It was an important duty for a woman like me, and not such an easy one with a child like Aminat.

Very slowly I stopped paying attention to Sulfia. I no longer noticed when she came home or what she did when she was home. As a result, I was totally unprepared when I came home one day and found a note on the windowsill: Dear Mama, dear Papa, I’m moving out and taking Anna with me. Please just leave me alone. Kisses, your Sulfia.

Next to the note was the key to her room.

My heart beat loudly against my ribs as I threw open the wardrobe she and I shared and found it half empty. Sulfia’s neatly hung dresses and skirts were gone, her underwear was gone, her pantyhose were gone. Some much more important things were gone, too: Aminat’s rompers, socks, and sweaters, as well as her stuffed animals and bottles, her cloth diapers, and her favorite cup, the one with the yellow rabbit on it.

Traitor to motherhood

I didn’t give myself much time to wallow in depression. I took action, as was always my way. I opened the tin can where we kept the petty cash and took out a few banknotes. I hurriedly threw on my coat and ran out to the street. I stood on the curb and put out my thumb. Not nervously fidgeting the way some people did it, but unambiguously, with dignity. That always worked.

A small, dirty car stopped immediately. I always looked younger than I was, and people were happy to be able to help a woman like me.

It was impossible to tell what color the Lada was beneath the filth, but the car got me to Aminat’s kindergarten within eight minutes. The driver wouldn’t take any money, and I didn’t insist. He was understandably proud to have had a woman like me in his car. But I was too late. Sulfia had already picked up Aminat from kindergarten. She had planned everything.

Aminat’s cubby in the entry hall was empty. Her indoor shoes and her smock were gone. The worm she had kneaded out of modeling clay during arts and crafts was gone as well. Aminat wasn’t coming back to this kindergarten anymore, said one of the teachers, with an unusually official look on her face. Aminat’s mother had moved to the other side of town and put her child in a kindergarten that was closer to her new residence.

Where? I shouted.

She was unable to be of further assistance, said the bespectacled hag, clearly taking pleasure in my distress.

I have to say I wasn’t just distraught. I was surprised. For ages I’d thought that Sulfia