Blast From The Past
Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 08:48AM (This one is from May, 2010, when I was living in Moscow, Russia).
Untranslatable: kasha (“porridge”)
During the celebrations of May 1st, when I rallied with the Communist party through central Moscow, an exchange took place with an older woman clutching a small poster of Stalin. My friend Sean wanted to take her picture. She was happy to oblige and encouraged him to continue his support of the Communist party on our side of the Atlantic. Or, as she apparently put it, American Communists need to “stir up the kasha.”
I have not been able to get this expression out of my mind. It’s charming, catchy, but also thought-worthy and useful. Let me explain. Kasha is basically the same thing as “porridge.” It is made simply, out of grains cooked in water or milk, and then enriched with butter, sugar, honey, nuts, jam, or fruit. It can be made of wheat, oats, millet, buckwheat, and is usually served for breakfast [although salty versions exist to accompany meat and cabbage.]
Like “porridge,” or the older American word “mush,” kasha is also used in a number of metaphorical expressions—indicating everything from stupidity and forgetfulness [kasha in my head, like “mush for brains”] to the state of a body that’s been beaten up [turned into kasha, like “beaten to a pulp”]. Indeed, when I visualize a bubbling pot of kasha—beige, gloopy, hot—I can appreciate the power of the metaphor. Kasha is a uniform mass, reduced through pretty un-delicate cooking into a nourishing (but distinctly “vulgar”) mix of ingredients that are no longer distinguishable.
It’s soft and mushy. It has no form. It’s basic, neutral food. It is one of the cheapest, most fundamental and ancient dishes of today’s Russian cuisine—popular among old and young alike, among the rich and the poor. Every stolovaya [“cafeteria”] ladles kasha in the morning for a few coins, and many upscale restaurants decorate it with strawberries and pistachios as part of a “business breakfast” for upwards of 150 rubles.
When I hear stir up the kasha, a number of impressions come to mind. Primarily, I think of the consequences of not stirring the kasha. Left on a flame, kasha would burn on the bottom, stick to the sides of the pot, and would ultimately be inedible. Simple stirring is all that kasha requires to be turned into tasty food. Why wouldn’t you stir?
Perhaps the metaphor translates as follows—society, too is a mix of elements on fire. So it’s kasha whether you like it or not. In order to make it cook into something healthy (and not start a fire or a disgusting mess) all you have to do is “put a spoon in the mix and give it a few stirs,” making sure all the elements are mixed equally, face the heat equally, and rest on the surface equally. Communism promises just this [its effectiveness at delivering is another story]: simple, nourishing unity through diverse and equal labor. All it needs is some passion, intentionality, and a few good stirrers with spoons—in short: smart and dynamic organization.
Let’s imagine that all political systems or social experiments could be talked about with these culinary metaphors. Maybe England could be scones and clotted cream—complex and slow cooking pastries [parliament] decorated with pure fat [royalty]. America could be cupcakes—flavorless and generic pastry [democracy] made with too much white flour [ha, ha], and then decorated (and made to look more exciting and diverse) with saccharine frosting [media]. This list should be extended [with a sense of humor, ideally, not extreme reductivism…] China? Iraq? Soviet Communism should have been a perfect kasha but it went wrong. It wasn’t stirred right, and the proportions were off. Russia today has taken the leftovers of this failed kasha and tried to bake it into a cake [appropriately, Russian desserts often use leftover bread-products as a base]. They’ve baked the kasha mush into cake-layers, smeared them with frosting and whipped sour-cream, and decorated them with bits of imported canned pineapple and some nuts [I’ve just described one of the most popular, common cakes in Moscow]. The only thing that’s nourishing in this cake is the bunch of almonds buried in the sour cream [imported, like all Moscow nuts, from Central Asia]. It’s a poorly- and irresponsibly-made cake. Far better would be to fix the proportions on the kasha recipe and give good old socialism another stir…or perhaps now that we have all these healthful almonds, we could use them?...
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