Red Ticket: Excursions
I am reading a fantastic book by the woman who wrote one of my favorite cookbooks, Please to the Table . It is called Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking , and she's looking at the experience of loving, hating, and leaving Russia through the lens of food. This is a particularly apt approach because so much of Russian history has been marked by famine and want. A few years ago I had sort of the same thought she did, and wrote an essay about the unexpected things I learned when I visited Moscow's Museum of Popular Nutrition during some very lean (though not the leanest) times in Russia. Here it is: Excursions I’d glimpsed it just once, fleetingly, in 1991. The sightseeing bus my schoolmates and I were riding on pulled away from the stoplight before I could note the location, or even really register what I’d seen. Under normal circumstances I’d have told myself I was imagining things, surely, but in Moscow? It was entirely possible that the sign I’d seen as the bus merged i...