Kholodets (ru: Холодец), a new year’s dish, is a labour of love. It’s ingredients are simple and include the patience of a devoted individual. Its preparation is often accompanied by a cacophony of chopping, pouring, and clattering noises, a shifting display of ingredients, utensils, and dishes, and a constant stream of national music crackling from the old radio on the windowsill in the appropriate post-soviet language. Before the cooking even begins, the cook chops an assortment of onions, carrots, and garlic en masse. She adds them to the largest stock-pot available along with peppercorns, bay leaves, and other spices. The meat, which by this point has already been carefully selected on the merits of its cut and fat consistency, follows the vegetables. She adds just enough water to cover the ingredients and puts the lid on the pot.
The tedious process of preparing a traditional kholodets requires at least five and up to eight hours on the stove before she begins the last, and arguably trickiest phase of the process. During this metamorphosis, she attentively watches over the pot, and carefully skims off any fat or foam that rises to the top.
Hours later, she removes the individual pieces of meat and filters the remaining broth. She then allots a small portion of meat to each one of an assortment bowls, and covers them with a generous amount of broth. She leaves the brimming bowls of kholodets to set overnight and finally retires from the kitchen.
During the hours of anticipation, the smell of meat cooking in a bath of onions, garlic, bay leaves, and peppercorns wafts into every corner of the apartment. The smell whisks away remaining memories of cheeks stung and feet numb from the sheets of ice, driving wind, and brown slush of a meteorologically inconsistent December.
Kholodets is a labour of love that demands endless trips across our small soviet-style apartment to retrieve meat and produce stored in the fridge on the balcony. It requires chopping those vegetables on a white-painted table, which is a couple of inches too low to be convenient and which, though up against the far wall of the kitchen, is still only two feet from the counter. It necessitates stacking bowls waiting to be filled everywhere including on the reliable but ancient microwave in the corner whose buttons are labeled in Russian and Chinese.
Kholodets is a labour of love, and the only dish in the post-Soviet kukhnya that I have to make a concerted effort to keep down.
It is a wobbly, fatty, meat-based, jello-like concoction that floats at the top of your stomach like oil floats on water. It is served cold and mixes poorly with the American pairing of chilled water and dinner.
The result of all of this chopping, shredding, stirring, seasoning, pouring, and filtering is a dish that could have come out of an article in a 1950s women’s magazine on how to host a superior dinner party. But please remember what 50s cuisine entailed.
Unlike the synthetic gelatin of the bright-red strawberry banana jello that colored my Midwestern American childhood, the wobbly motion does not come from a small fun box in the bakery aisle. The bouncy, jiggly movement of kholodets rather is caused by the breakdown and later reformation of collagen in the cartilage and tendons of the carefully selected cuts of meat mentioned above.
The week before winter exams, it was this infamous classic that Bekbolot, my host father carried into the dining room and sat down at my place at the table. I looked up, recognizing it immediately.
–Kholodets.
-Ah. Good. You know it.
-Of course. How could I not.
-Cholpon is eager for you to try it. She started yesterday. She made this from scratch.
And indeed, she had. I had heard the cacophony, seen the shifting display on the table, and breathed in the savory aroma rolling out of the kitchen. I steeled my nerves and cut into my dinner. The gel gave little resistance, and I picked up the first nearly perfect cube and placed it in my mouth. I swallowed. I took a bite of black bread, and quickly followed it with another bite of kholodets before I lost courage.
-Does your mother make it often at home?
–Kholodets? No, we don’t really eat that much Russian food at home.
I finished my dinner shortly afterward, and rushed to my room to nurse my now churning stomach. But it did not end there. We had kholodets the next day, and for breakfast the day after that. I was dying. Never had I missed plov so much. Or pelmeni. Or oromo. Or borshch. Or manti. There simply were not enough pryaniki in the world to ever let me forget the taste of my allotted portion of kholodets.
My Midwestern American rearing had taught me to always be gracious, to finish the food on my plate, and to always give my compliments to the cook. So I did. And the other exchange students rolled their eyes and sighed as I came in day after day with tales of my gastronomic woes. Eventually the madness ended, and my intestinal trauma faded into the background. Now, months later and miles away from the nearest serving of kholodets, the memory of that chilled jiggly bowl of despair brings only warmth.
Kholodets is a labour of love. Sometimes for both parties.