Cooking with Max

My flatmate, Max, is one of those people who pretends he can’t do anything but who can actually do pretty much everything. I frequently come home from work to find him sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor reassembling a microwave or a TV, fixing a broken drawer, attaching a pull-up bar to the wall, or negotiating the sale of some household appliance that’s outlived its use. He’s also something of a maths whizz, and, most importantly of all, cooks like an absolute boss.

But because he has college in the mornings and I have work in the afternoons and evenings, we have very little overlap, so we’d hardly got the chance to cook together until very recently. So one evening, when we were miraculously both free, we decided cook shchi together.

Shchi.

No, shchi.

The thing about Russian cabbage soup, is that it’s physically impossible to pronounce its name correctly. The Russians distinguish between the letters ‘sh’ and ‘shch’. Countless people have tried to teach me the difference between the two, but I remain convinced that it’s an elaborate hoax to annoy foreigners, and that there’s really no difference. This very minute, from Karelia to Kamchatka, millions of Russians are laughing at dumb foreigners who GENUINELY believe that there’s any discernible difference between shch and sh. You’ll ask them the difference and they’ll say ‘“shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” is with your lips pushed forwards, but “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” is with the corners of your lips pulled back. I mean, it’s obvious really. Just like this: “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” – see? Now you do it!’

‘Shhhhhhhh…’

‘Haha no that’s neither of them! That’s like, you’ve totally made up a new letter there, nice one!’

Ok… ‘Shhhhhhhhhhhhh…’

‘Brah you sound like a leaky balloon.’

‘Shhhhhh…’

‘Ok stop it now, this is getting insulting. We don’t speak like that, Theo.’

‘Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’

‘Yes! Yes, that’s it!’

“That’s what? ‘Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’ or ‘shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?’”

“I’m not sure what you mean, it’s the one you just said, ‘shhhhhhhhhhhhhh’, as in ‘shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’. The letter ‘shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’.”

Anyway you get the idea. The most outrageous thing is that most Russians will feign not to understand what I’m talking about when I tell them I recently made ‘shchi’. They’ll go ‘she? Like the English word she?’ And I’ll have to say NO THE RUSSIAN CABBAGE SOUP OF COURSE I DIDN’T MAKE A SHE’ and they’ll go ‘ohhhhhhhhh you mean shchi? Yah keep working on your letter ‘shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh there bud.’

Anyway back to making the soup. Max is the very best sort of person, as I hope I’ve conveyed, but he doesn’t do subtlety. The first step in making shchi was preparing the meat. He got a big hunk of frozen beef out the freezer, placed it on a chopping board on the floor, and fell on it energetically with an axe. Splinters of bone and frozen beef flew across the room, but, in the end, it got the job done, and we collected the fragments of frozen beef off the kitchen floor, dusted them down, and left them on a plate to defrost.

Next up was the cabbage. There’s a special knife for shredding cabbage with. Max was dissatisfied with my shredding efforts, though, and grabbed the cabbage and the knife for me to demonstrate how it ought to be done. How it ought to be done is exactly how I was doing it, but with five times more gusto and aggression.

And so it went on. Never has so much violence been put into the making of a soup. But somehow, if you ignored the little splinters of axed beef bone, the end result tasted really good. Maybe we should stop making things ‘with love’ and start making them ‘with loathing’. Might improve British cuisine too, who knows?

Hatred Soup TM

The shchi was soon finished, though, and we needed a new recipe on which to let out the frustration of a week at work and study. We settled for sushi. For this, we called in the experts Kiril and Masha (Max’s sister and Kiril’s fiancé). They brought with them sushi mats and rice vinegar. We provided the other ingredients. You know, the standard stuff: rice, nori, crab legs, red fish fillet, avocado, shrimps, flying fish caviar, tomatoes, and tvorog cream cheese. Ah yeah, did I mention the Russians put tvorog in everything? They also put it in sushi. (Angry face).

In spite of the tvorog, though, the sushi turned out to be pretty good. Masha’s secretly a bit of a sushi sensei. Masha also came up with that week’s #quoteoftheweek (although just gonna say for my dad’s sake that that really should be #quotationoftheweek): ‘Ah that’s a nice photo! You can definitely tell Theo isn’t Russian though, he looks far too happy.’ This is in relation to a long-running debate on whether or not I look like a Russian. A surprising amount of people (including Russians) think yes, but the majority consensus is that, if I had to be labelled as a specific nationality based purely on appearance, it would be Finnish. Go figure.

The most recent instalment of ‘cooking with Max’ was even more baffling than the first. We made ‘sweet sausages’. I’d heard of this Russian delicacy from Cicely, who’d already made them in Novosibirsk, but I was still reluctant to believe they existed. They’re actually much better than they sound, they just have a very unfortunate name. In fact, they’re just a combination of sweet ingredients (milk, cocoa, biscuit, dried fruits, nuts) rolled up in a freezer bag and set in the freezer. They do look a bit like Russian kolbasa (sausages which are actually Polish not Russian, soz Russians), but people should really stop comparing them to actual sausages because it makes them about a thousand times less appealing.

Well that’s all for today. Feel free to leave your opinions on whether or not I look Russian in the comments. I’d be interested to hear…