James Meek in the Guardian:

On the afternoon of March 31 2000, Boris Pasternak, editor-in-chief of the Moscow publishing house Polifakt, drove to the suburb of Podolsk to look up one of his authors, the food writer and historian Vilyam Pokhlebkin. Pokhlebkin was late delivering the final manuscript of his new book, A Century Of Cooking, and had failed either to turn up for a scheduled meeting or to respond to telegrams. The writer had no phone. He had no fridge or TV, either, although he did have 50,000 books crammed into his apartment.

When Pokhlebkin failed to answer the door, Pasternak (grandson of the writer of Dr Zhivago) called the police, who broke in. They found the body of the 77-year-old writer on the floor, where it had evidently lain for several days. Pokhlebkin, a war veteran, had been stabbed to death with his own military dagger. Relatives said none of the valuable books or documents in the flat had been stolen. Eight years on, the murder remains unsolved.

Pokhlebkin is best known outside Russia for his history of vodka. It was his research, in 1977, that persuaded international arbitrators to strike down an attempt by Poland to claim exclusive ownership of the term "vodka" on the basis that Poles had invented it first. But in his homeland, Pokhlebkin's famous as the author of 21 books about food and drink - mainly about the cuisine of a country that now exists only in the memories of his readers.

By chance, Pokhlebkin was last seen alive on the day Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia. It was fitting. The cuisine Pokhlebkin wrote about with such elan was the cuisine of the Soviet Union, and if the Soviet Union itself shut down in 1991, Putin's election nine years later marked the end of the post-Soviet era. Since then, the borders between the former parts of the Union have hardened; Putin may talk nostalgically about the greatness of the USSR, but his practice towards the former fraternal republics - sometimes pragmatic, sometimes petty - has been relentlessly Russia-first.

What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch? ...

Link. (Thx to PW).

Posted by Laura at March 15, 2008 12:08 AM