A Russian doctor takes the connoisseur’s approach to combining vodka and food:
Russian men drink vodka shots. They drink vodka with gusto while making loud breathing noises. They drink vodka as if their manhood depended on how loud those noises are. After these shots, Russians eat. They eat small morsels of food, chewing pensively, their gaze directed inward like that of a woman in late stages of pregnancy. In fact a good prix-fixe Russian dinner is a twenty-course affair, seventeen courses of which are hors d’oeuvres in small portions. During such dinner a Russian may down seventeen shots followed by seventeen different hors d’oeuvres while giving seventeen toasts…
The social purpose of rapid-fire vodka shots is to get as much alcohol in you as quickly as possible to get the party going. The gastronomical purpose of drinking vodka at dinners is to enhance the flavor of the food. Vodka is 40% ethyl alcohol, which is an ideal solvent for the small-molecule chemicals that give food its taste. Most of the taste is sensed not by the tongue but by the nose, and alcohol dissolves the flavor components and vapors and delivers them to their destination, making the food taste stronger.
Personally, I would say this is not the most common approach. More typically, the role of food when consumed alongside vodka is the wholly functional one of alcohol sponge: without it, the evening is shorter and less memorable (I mean this literally). But then this particular Russian doctor lives in California and has probably acquired the American penchant for playing the connoisseur.
I’ve been impressed most recently by the American foodies’ approach to oysters: tasting notes that make Oz Clarke sound like Andy from Little Britain and an approach to provenance that adapts wholesale the French concept of terroir: oysters, it seems, are now talked about with reference to merroir.
My own experience of eating whilst necking vodka shots does take in the odd multi-course banquet of delicacies. But more commonly it’s been along the lines of an evening I enjoyed during one of my first trips to Russia. I was staying with a family that were providing bed and board whilst I learnt the language at a school in Moscow. The young man of the family, Andrei, and I got on pretty well so he started taking me with him when he visited friends.
One weekday evening we travelled across the city to the flat of his friend Misha for what I assumed would be dinner and a few drinks. We settled down in the sitting room whilst Misha busied himself in the kitchen. Presently a bowl of pasta was placed in the centre of the coffee table alongside three or four bottles of vodka (Stolichnayas from the Kristal distillery – back then you could get hold of these through a lucky purchase at the local kiosk rather than paying a premium for their supposed greater purity).
The pasta – naked of butter, oil or any sort of sauce – steamed fairly furiously whilst the first bottle was cracked open. Everyone settled themselves comfortably on the cheap wooden-armed sofas. My glances towards the kitchen, from which direction I imagined sauce, plates and cutlery arriving, found no response. A shot having been deposited in every glass, my Russian pals – there were three of them – gingerly picked out a few pasta shapes by hand before dropping them into mouths which rolled them around a little whilst they cooled. Then bottoms up.
This went on at regular intervals, a second bowl of similarly bland pasta being cooked up later in the evening. Midnight approached and I began to wonder how close we’d cut it to catch the last Metro train. This didn’t seem to be a question that was concerning anyone else though. Anyway, the clock meandered on and as one of the Russians passed out where he was sitting, quietly and without fuss, the general plan became apparent. Eventually, I found I’d lost control of my mouth even as far as executing the fairly straightforward actions involved in smoking a cigarette; I thought better of setting myself on fire and also fell into a stupor. Someone must have turned the light out.
I slept peacefully except for one incident when I felt the need for the bathroom but had forgotten where its door was situated. Or rather I felt absolutely sure the piece of wall I was repeatedly walking into was where the door was situated if only I could walk into it in the right way. Andrei, presumably familiar with this sort of portal ambiguity and demonstrating a remarkable level of alertness, got up and deftly turned me 90 degrees. Like a clockwork toy, I promptly toddled into the loo.
The next morning had a similarly informal character to the evening. As people came round – daylight flooding into the room – they stood up, brushed themselves down and headed off to work or their studies, conveniently finding themselves already fully dressed in the appropriate clothes.
On the way back to our side of the city I checked with Andrei. Yes, just a regular quiet night in.
..just booking my tickets to Moscow..
…So being a Russian is basically like being a student, only more so.
What a terrific post. I find the detail about Andrei getting up to spin you wordlessly in the direction of the loo really quite moving.
On Sunday afternoon, just as it got dark, the family Brit went into one of these nice wood-and-blackboard cafe-bars that are everywhere now, for a coffee. While most customers downed frothaccinos and absurd bowls of tea, in one corner a trio of East Europeans, clad in massive lumberjack-style coats, was downing shots of brandy in a grim, business-like manner. Occasionally one of them would utter a gruff monosyllable. Be lying if I said I didn’t have an urge to join their table.
Fascinating revolving room read Gaw, the comrades, as was, sound like..sound drinkers. I wonder what a party made up of 50% Russians and 50% Koreans would be like, most efficacious I would suspect as the Koreans have the disconcerting habit of drinking until death sets in and not falling over.
Not sure what the hangover would consist of after a night of vodka and pickled whippet.
Living in Europe I was appalled to find that many people, including my wife, seem to think that a wonderful hangover cure is a breakfast of pickled herrings and onions. Confusingly they see it as nutricious rather than purgative.
I believe it is the toasting that does the damage. My first encounter with serious vodka drinking in Mocow found me the next morning fully dressed lying on my hotel bedroom with a model submarine in a glass case on my chest. How it got there; indeed, how I got there remains a mystery.
But the submarine remains on prominent display in my study as a warning against vodka drinking.
Stick to whisky I say. The Scots don’t have a navy.
Brit: Andrei was a strapping young Russian and a lovely, genuine chap. However, this didn’t stop him wanting to vote for Zhirinovsky, the comedy fascist of the day, or disbelieving in the international Jewish conspiracy. I persuaded him out of voting comedy fascist but, looking back, I’m not sure this was really worth much given the sort of people that now run the country.
Malty: I’ve met a couple of Koreans and found them great company. Interesting, sardonic sense of humour. Unfortunately (or otherwise) I’ve never been drinking with them, an ambition yet to be fulfilled.
Worm: That does seem to go against nature. The yin of undigested alcohol should surely be countered by the yang of grease and carbs (i.e. a full English), not the also quite yingish vinegary fish.
Ian: I think that’s called Russian symbolism: quite blamelessly, no doubt, you were drank way below the table.
Great post Gaw. Although I’ve had a few great nights on the Stolly, the illegality of poitin when I lived in Dublin was the real lure – that, and the fact that with an ABV hovering around 80%, you would quickly adopt a state of advanced catatonia and, if you could keep going, all the major body functions would simply shut-down, obviating any need to find the bathroom door, or any other door.
These days, I hear, a poitin-manque is produced commercially by a couple of distillers, at a strength roughly half of what we ‘enjoyed’. Strictly for…er…those chaps in Palm de Brass that Rosie Bell was just telling us about, who were
pleasured by that old slapper M Faithfull.
Vodka’s most famous consumer may have been one Richard Burton, Welshperson extraordinaire. One bottle before breakfast and off we jolly well go, lubrication, that’s the name of the game.
I spent quite a bit of time in the far northern parts of the world in the eighties. All around the sub-Arctic people drink very hard drink purposefully with one objective. Nobody pretends to be embarassed the next morning at having had “one too many”.
Some countries control it with taxes in the stratosphere, others, like the Norwegians, by interspersing their bacchanalia with long periods of abstinence (you probably won’t be offered a drink during a casual visit to a Norwegian home). But most have a real problem. The worst are the Finns, who manage to gross out even the Russians. There used to be bus daytrips from Helsinki to (then) Leningrad for perfectly ordinary middle-class types for the sole purpose of buying and consuming cheap hard drink. A Russian colleague told me than when the bus dropped them off in the morning, they sometimes had notices in cyrillic pinned to their coats that said something like: “Hello, my name is Jaari. I must be back at_______ no later than 17:00 hrs. Could you please help me to get there?”
That certainly puts the connoisseur business at the top of this post in its proper context, Peter.
Brit:
Let’s just say that in that part of the world, a book entitled “101 Vodkas to Try Before You Die” would be aimed at teetotallers.
A great post. The loo-spinning bit reminds me of what someone told me about winter in the Ukraine, that if you meet a drunk you must always give them a good push to keep them moving. If enough people given the drunk a good push, they will eventually stagger home. Otherwise they will fold over and freeze to death in the snow. If you tried the same over here, 50 police gunmen would probably appear toute suite. Richard Burton, if only a one-bottle man, sounds a bit of an amateur compared to these seasoned Russian professionals.
Mahlerman, that poitin is way out of my league. Also I’m suspicious about all bodily functions closing down. I suspect they continue but you’re just not aware of them. Well, apart from the dream about sitting in a leaky boat and feeling a bit anxious…
Malty and Mark: I’ve just finished re-reading Rich, Melvyn Bragg’s highly romantic bio of Burton. But even there, there’s no escaping the squalor of alcoholism, from which Burton couldn’t save himself despite all his money. It’s a sad story. BTW, he really could drink and perform at a staggeringly high level too – a bottle of spirits before performing Hamlet in German for a laugh for instance…
Peter: I have to take my fur-lined hat off to our Finnish friends. Grossing out a Russian where alcoholic excess is concerned is one of the higher achievements.
Helsinki Finnishing school, part one.
Used to do some good business with the Finns, excellent engineering heads, first rate machine tools builders. As a result of this we were frequently descended upon by teams of the blessed plonkies. After visit number three they were, upon arrival, redirected to my managers large, airless office. After about twenty minutes the office became a smoke filled hell, we managed to get them back from lunch reasonably sober, depending upon the definition of reasonably. The nights however were horses of a very different colour. Hell bent, that’s the word, absolutely, utterly determinedly hell bent on running the quayside dry then moving on to the Bigg Market, swilling it down midst a bevy of half naked Geordie burdz, themselves paralytic.
Fun at first, the owner of the Crown Posada tried to bribe me, for the repeat business, then not fun. Lots were drawn, the losers won a dialysis machine.
I have been told that I did visit them on the home turf, the name Helsinki flutters around the remembering head, I do know that I was read the ultimatum, “if you go there again….”
Malty’s comment brings to mind the old Swedish joke that the Finns are so reserved you can’t really get to know them until they’ve had three or four drinks, and by then they’re such obnoxious asses you don’t want to anymore.
This post has reawakened (admittedly hazy) memories of Nordic and Russian excess. I do recall how few of them seemed to have what I call “the little man” inside. He’s the fellow who, even when you are so far gone you can’t see or stand up straight, still manages to whisper audible warnings to you that it might not be such a great idea to molest the hostess or break into uncontrolled giggles after you’ve smashed a vase. I’ve often wondered why nature selected those of us in more temperate climes to give him a loving home.
101 Vodkas to Try and Then You Die.
anyone for the researcher post?
Malty and Peter: A Finn told me once that silence was part of the conversation for Finns. A convivial drink might look quite different to what we’d expect.
One of the most disparaging assessments of the Finns is to be found in a chapter of R Scruton’s memoir. One of the most appreciative is the episode on them in J Mead’s series on The North. Take your pick.
I went to a wedding in Helsinki but it mostly involved ethnically Swedish Finns, a whole different kettle of pickled fish.
Ian: I suspect if you advertised in the right newspapers you could attract a few ferry loads.