These are a few of the tastiest things...

Russia is like southern Italy: its cuisine is delicious, and its food is famous, yet no one thinks of it as a culinary paradise. I have no idea why.

When most people think of Italian cuisine, they probably think of regions like Tuscany, no thanks to a spectacularly successful marketing campaign by the Tuscans. (I have no proof of such a campaign, but there must have been one. Read on.) The Olive Garden restaurant chain hasn't helped, what with its ads boasting that its cooks are trained in Tuscany.

I find that curious, since the most famous Italian dish is not one of those fancy fish or lamb dishes that I can't stand but pizza, which comes from southern Italy, in particular, Naples. Why do you think that pizza is so big in the United States? It wasn't the northern Italians whom the House of Savoy reduced to such poverty that they found themselves compelled to migrate to the United States.*

As for Russia, which is the actual point of this essay, Borsch (or however you spell it) is okay, and rice pilaf is much better, especially the way my wife makes it mmmmmmmm. But Russians have a number of tasty foods that I never saw before, and since Russian restaurants are hard to come by (I've never see one in the States) I thought I'd describe a few.

Пирог (pirog): Essentially, a giant pie. Take dough, lay something down on it, and cover it with more dough. Bake it in an oven. Voilà! It is essentially the same thing as the tiella of Gaeta, Italy; it's another one of those southern Italian specialties, which I never saw outside southern Italy until I came to Russia. The essential differences are (a) the Gaetani typically use a thin dough, and bake it crisp, while the Russian dough is rather thick, and is baked soft like bread; (b) the fillings are different. Gaetani use spinach, or egg and ricotta, or a tiny octopus called polipetti, or some vegetable and fish fillings that I can't remember, primarily because I can't stand them. Russians use egg and cabbage, or mashed apricots, or other typical Russian vegetables or meats.

Треогульник (treogulnik, "triangle"): Take a hexagonal layer of dough, put a mix of diced meat and potatoes in the center, then fold the corners in, pinching them together on the edges where they join, to make a triangle. Bake. My wife tells me that this was originally a Tatar dish that has spread throughout Russia. It's superb.

Винегрет (vinigret): The name looks French (think of the "vinaigrettes" of salad dressings that you can find on supermarket shelves) but the ingredients are pure Russian: boiled beets, peas, carrots, and healthy dose of... uhm, I'm not sure. My wife won't tell me all the details of how it's made. She realized quickly that I'd be her slave as long as the secret is hers.

(And you thought I married her only for her beauty. Wrong! I married her for her beauty, her brains, and her vinigret!)

This is a good time to mention that Russians enjoy a lot of delicious salads assembled from ingredients that I have never seen arranged the way Russians do, even if they sit in the average American salad bar. Forget the lettuce and the cheese; for a Russian salad you should just throw together a bunch of the other things at the salad bar. A little mayonnaise helps, too. To this day I'm convinced that my wife's salads cured me of heartburn.

Пельмене (pyelmenye): Visit the supermarket and find tortellini in the section for refrigerated, pre-prepared foods. Pyelmenye is essentially the same thing, only with a tasty spice in the meat, so that it doesn't need tomato sauce the way tortellini do even in Italy. Russians usually spoon some sour cream on it anyway. Personally, I prefer my pyelmenye straight.

This is probably a good time to mention that Russians are obsessed with sour cream. Nearly every time I sit down to eat, someone asks me if I'd like sour cream in the soup, or on the pyelmenye, or in my tea—well, not in my tea, but you get the idea. They do ask if I want milk or jam in my tea. Barbarians!

Russians eat a lot of soup, too. The most famous are probably борщ and щи, borsch and shi. Borsch, a soup made from beets, is great. It's often made by adding beets to shi, a cabbage-based soup whose bland tastelessness is redeemed only by the fact that at least you feel full after you eat it.

Плов (plov, or pilaf): You probably have an idea what this is already, but the Russian version, especially in my wife's incarnation, is different. She adds carrots, meat, and small black things that she swears are dogwood berries, although I've never heard of such a thing before. In any case the taste is beyond heavenly. In the States, my wife would prepare pilaf almost every week. Why? She says it's relatively easy, and she knows I won't complain about it. I don't know what's different from the American verison, but I never much liked the pilaf I had in the States, whereas my wife's... ahhhhhhh.

My wife tells me that I also have to mention Вафельный торт (vafilniy tort, waffle cakes) which are not really cuisine but confections similar to the sugar wafers that we have. Thin, crisp wafers are stacked with chocolate between the layers, and a final layer of chocolate on top. Sometimes the manufacturer tops the cake with nuts. I like these a lot, and my mother-in-law sent them occasionally while we were in the States. When I arrived this year, she showed me a bag full of Джек a new brand of individually-wrapped servings. Oddly enough, Джек is how one writes my nickname (Jack) in Cyrillic.

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*Certain northern Italians assert that southern Italy is a crime-infested cultural backwater, another country really, and that Italian culture comes from the north. It's much the same attitude that many Yankees have toward southerners, and is no less unfounded. Such northern Italians must not have heard of pizza, or Neapolitan song (think of Santa Lucia, 'O Sole Mio, Funiculì Funiculà), a number of famous Italian comedians (most famously Totò—just look at his face and you will start laughing, although the insanity of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia also springs to mind), and Luigi Pirandello, author of The Late Mattia Pascal, one of the best novels I ever read. Ironically, this book was recommended to me by a northern Italian. :-)

Note that Northern Italy has given the world Umberto Bossi, Bettino Craxi, and Silvio Berlusconi, Benito Mussolini, and Federico Fellini. You make the call.

Similarly, a lot of Westerners look down on Russia as a crime-infested cultural backwater, a completely different culture really. Never mind that the Russians gave us Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Lobachevsky, Mendeleyev, Tarkovsky, Solzhenitsyn (my wife isn't reading at the moment so I can write this), Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and the Moscow Ballet!

Note that the West gave us... oh bother, who cares?