According to tradition, the blood must come from a colt no older than six months (the rule for most Yakuts horse recipes). Tabarkhov, for reasons never made clear, declined to step out from the kitchen, but the waiter was eager to show off the chef’s signature disk, a plate of half-frozen, congealed horse blood shaved into thin slices called haan, which, logically enough, means blood in the Yakuts language. Tygyn Darkhan was just around the corner, but since Basil had just eaten his enormous salad we decided to limit ourselves to a snack. When he got to Yakutsk he was served local ingredients elegantly prepared continental-style by trained cooks flown in from the Baltics. Yakuts food, according to local lore, was first lashed to Western technique in June, 1944 when Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice president, traveled through Siberia with generals from the NKVD-Stalin’s secret police-where he toured gulags and declared the brutalizing slave labor camps to be full of contented volunteers. Russians loved it, but before him it was only for native people. No appetizers, no entrées – but he regimented the whole thing like European cuisine. “Before him there wasn’t any Yakuts food designed in any sort of acceptable form, it was just food poured together. “He’s the guy who actually started the whole thing,” Basil explained as we walked. Tarbarkhov, everyone in Yakutsk apparently agreed, had launched new wave Yakuts cuisine. We decided to take an immediate field trip to Tygyn Darkhan, the hotel restaurant whose chef, a Mr. “But it’s very difficult because the Yakuts people, to be very blunt, they don’t want to have any sort of new fusion inventions. “There are some young chefs are who trying to push things forward,” said Basil. Men have to be flown in from elsewhere in Russia and Central Asia to work the mines.Īmid the heavy industry, Yakutsk supposedly has taken on some culinary glitz. New construction booms, the city is a historic center for state universities, and the region produces a large share of the world’s diamonds. Yukutsk exists on the edge of what is humanly survivable, but the economy hums. You are, of course, aware, when Japanese people see blood they get incredibly upset.” Basil forked a vegetable. A Yakuts guy walked in with no nose and no earlobes, which had just been cut out in some kind of street brawl. They were shocked as Japanese people always are to see any dead thing. The first thing the Japanese saw was a huge, enormous head of an elk. Then I took them to this restaurant, it was really a canteen they had incredibly bad material for cutlery, and the toilet wouldn’t work. “I brought some Japanese people here in 1991, you see, to the government hotel. Basil was eager to talk, to tell me how much his eastern Siberian city-a backgammon configuration of shoddily built new midrise developments and grim Soviet apartment blocks, along with a few teetering Tsar-era wooden buildings-had changed since Soviet times. I am aware this is unheard of for a Yakuts man.” The English accent was so upper crust I thought it may have been last heard in the bunks of Eton around when Harold Macmillan was prime minister.īasil, who was educated in the 1980s at Moscow State University and now worked for a politically connected Russian foundation, must have noticed my gaze on the prodigious mound of green salad heaped in a bowl in front of him because he arched an eyebrow and said, “I quite like vegetables, you see. I swiveled to find a nattily dressed, very round, very short man cradling an electronic book reader and a tall cup of tea. Slamming the door behind the icy air ricocheting along Lenin Prospect, the main drag in Yakutsk, I scanned the restaurant for the man I was scheduled to meet. Yakutsk is not an easy society to penetrate, and so I went looking for a guide. People depend on protein – reindeer, horse, moose and above all, fish from the massive Lena River that courses through the city and from which Lenin, then in Siberian exile, derived his name. There aren’t a lot of fresh vegetables, fruit, or anything else harvested from the ground. Which makes summer feel like a Siberian joke: temperatures skyrocket to 100 ☏ and mosquitoes swarm so thick that I’m told they feel like a second skin. It is, give or take, the coldest city on earth, settling in on -40 ☏ during the long winter. The epicenter of Yakuts culinary innovation is the city of Yakutsk, population 250,000, and a 400-year-old monument to perseverance. Maybe it was all the new money or envy at the gleaming Uzbek and Georgian brasseries popping up in Moscow or just ethnic aspiration, but supposedly the indigenous Yakuts of Eastern Siberia have decided it’s high time their traditional frozen horse blood and fishy concoctions and reindeer organ stir-fry received the full-on haute cuisine treatment. I heard rumors that Yakuts food was changing.
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