Water, Milk, and Cabbage in St Petersburg Russia

 

The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings

Lewis Carroll, 1872 excerpted from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.  The Walrus and the Carpenter hotlink

Excellent water, the best milk, and homemade sour cabbage bring some pleasing moments to our daily lives... in this the gloomiest month of the St Petersburg calendar!

Never drink water from the tap in Russia!

St Petersburg claims our water is contaminant free before it is piped through the system.  The most obvious problem is poor quality corroded and leaking pipes between the treatment center and our taps.  Also city water includes  some chlorine or chloramine which can be possible dangers for skin, body... and lungs during and after a bath or shower.

We used to use a Brita filter to make potable water.  For a  while we did a second step of putting water through a Heboton, which claimed to make silver water.  We stopped bothering when I found out that colloidal silver water is  apparently of no value, and could be dangerous. 

Clean clear water in St Petersburg? hotlink Our post 09 December 2009 tells more about water here.

Now in the last year we have a big improvement in our lives!  A new kiosk near our front door claims it sells artesian water, with no metallic crud or chlorine, for 24 rubles a 6 liter jug (you bring the jug).  We use around three liters a day.

The attendant puts a curved wand out a small window, carefully filling your container close to the top.

You may notice...

Russians like to hid from each other...  don’t like openness... witness the notices stuck strategically on the window so customers can’t see in.  I crouch down and say pa-see-ba, barely seeing the woman inside the darkened space.

Graffiti is endured, not cleaned off right away.  Exterior appearances are usually not considered important here.

 

Fresh milk with cream on the top...

 

Fresh rich milk from a tank on the back of a small truck is sold by competing dairies - both two times a week- one just out the back door of our apartment section, the other by the school.  Around 10 AM they arrive for around twenty minutes.  One liter costs thirty rubles, around a dollar.

Larissa boils it at home, and puts aside some milk for procto-kwasha.  This is a type of sour buttermilk... also known as a clabbered, cultured, or fermented milk.  I enjoy the surface penka from boiled milk after the pan is cooled.

The milk is delicious, as it hasn’t experienced the factory  homogenizing blasting process or had it’s cream mechanically skimmed, and then just a little added back.

Scrumptious fermented cabbage this year!

квашеная капуста!  Larissa hand sliced two large cabbages,  some carrots, worked all in a large basin (no  water added, just a tablespoon or so of salt) and compressed everything in this make shift apparatus of pan, pot, plate and a six liter jug of water in place of a stone weight!

After five or six days the cabbage tasted just right!   The good wife moved the pail to our unheated balcony after putting a jar of this fermented cabbage in the fridge so we could start enjoying the pungent biting flavor right away! 

Fermented Russia hotlink our post from 22 September 2010 gives a lot more background on three ways to practice Russian zymology!

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Old Time Milk in St Petersburg... But Not in Our Country Village

When I was a child I would wake to the sound of horse shoes hitting the pavement as the Becker Farms wagon struggled up the hill to bring milk to our home in New Jersey. I would go to the milk box ("What's that?", today's children would say) and bring in the bottles along with the butter my mom sometimes requested on her note to the milkman.

I would take off the paper wrapper and stopper, pour off cream for coffee, and then drop a dinner knife into the bottle and stir the remaining cream into the milk. I can remember the ring of the knife, the smell of good milk, and the special quality of light in our kitchen of years ago. We are going back 50 years, before Americans shifted their milk purchase to the supermarket. Real milk became low or no fat pastuerized, homogenized, tasteless white water.

Living in St Petersburg has serendipitious effects... one is our ability to get milk straight from the cow ... unpastuerized and unmanipulated. Every Monday and Thursday I wake Larissa at 8:30 and send her out in the cold and wind to have the milk lady top off our two liter jug. On return she fills a few jars and places them with loose tops on the counter. After a few days these bottles will have delicious fermented milk... kefir. The rest of the milk she pours into a sauce pan to heat until the cream congeals on top and the milk rises on the inside edge like a volcano getting ready to explode. This is our pastuerized and heavenly milk!

Like many Russians in St Petersburg, anticipation of summer at the dacha keeps us going during the cold months. We have an old subsistence farmstead previously attached to the колхоэ, the collective farm. Larissa's cousins had around 30 cows, 60 sheep, and one horse until last fall. After one of them had a stroke, they sold off everything but one cow and some sheep.

This will probably be our first summer without fresh milk, and it will mean no kefir, prostaquascha, or yoghurt. The benefit will be that we won't have to mend the fences.

The former collective was the only remaining working farm for many miles. The cousins, agronomists with this kalhos, kept working the land and eventually due to farmer protective legislation it became theirs. The old half collapsed barn was sufficient to house their cattle and sheep.

We bought our few acres with a log house and several outbuilding in 2003, travelling to look at the place in April when heavy ice was on the rough road through the forest. Miles and miles of shrubs and new forest cover the productive fields of 1990.

The collective workers left the farms and eke out a living however they can. As the bushes and trees have taken over the land, so alcohol has taken a yet firmer hold on the men since Soviet days. The countryside is beautiful but the people don't have the purpose and energy that some had before.

So the milk I enjoyed as a child we now have in St Petersburg, while natural milk at the dacha may well be replaced with modern bland equivalents. That's life in the big city... and in our small village!