Katrina Kollegaeva is a food anthropologist, journalist, and co-founder of Russian Revels, a London-based catering company that has staged a series of spectacular pop-up events around the capital. She spoke to me a couple of weeks ago about growing up as a Russian-speaker in Estonia, challenging British perceptions of Eastern European food, and some of the best options for having an authentic Russian culinary experience in the UK. She also mentioned a pea-based chocolate substitute that's way more appetising than it sounds...
Alistair Pitts: Hi Katrina! You’re a food anthropologist; could you explain what that is?
Katrina Kollegaeva: Essentially, I got a master’s in social anthropology from SOAS [the School of Oriental and Asian Studies] and they have a pretty unique course that has a particular focus on food. The idea is to look at, explore, and understand the world through the lens of food.
AP: You’re the first person I’ve interviewed for this project so far who is actually Russian, although ‘Russian’ might be a bit of a problematic word as you’ve described yourself elsewhere as, ‘Russian, well, not quite’. You grew up in Estonia, but your parents were ethnic Russians, is that correct?
KK: Yes, and as I’m sure you’ll know about the history, there are loads of Russian speakers in that part of the world, especially in Latvia and Estonia. So, I’m one of those. My mum was from Ukraine and my dad grew up in Crimea and they both moved to Tallinn in the late ‘60s because then of course it was all one country. My brother and I were born there and then obviously in the ‘90s Estonia became an independent country. To all intents and purposes, I’m Russian, that’s how I define myself, although it is true that I always have to qualify my answer with, ‘but…’; I’ve never lived in Russia, and I don’t really have any relatives in Russia proper.
AP: Identifying as a certain nationality but not having strong ties to the country that nationality corresponds with might be an odd concept to some people.
KK: Well, yes and no. It is a bit peculiar and obviously very recent when it comes to the Soviet Union but on the other hand if you even think about the UK, you may have someone who is, say, Welsh, with a family that is very strongly affiliated with Wales who move to London when the child is small. And so the child grows up knowing that they’re definitely not English, so there are some similarities, and of course there are all sorts of other parallels around the world.
AP: Going back to Tallinn, it’s probably a place that quite a few people reading this may have visited on a city break or something similar, but what was it like to grow up there?
KK: Wow, I don’t think anyone has actually asked me that question before!
AP: Seriously?
KK: No! Not quite! What was it like? What I recall and what I miss most these days is the scale, the smallness of it all, you know? Obviously, Tallinn
is tiny, the population is just over four hundred thousand.
AP: By capital city standards, yes.
KK: When I was growing up we lived next to this gorgeous old town which is obviously so well-known these days.
AP: Yes, many a stag-do.
KK: Exactly, exactly. And it’s quite strange to think that the area where I grew up, which these days is basically the equivalent to Shoreditch I guess, and very hipster-y, back then was thought of as being quite rough. It’s still perceived that way by some people, including my brother who still lives there. But we did live by a huge park in a block of flats with only about 10 families and we lived literally above a bakery and opposite a butchers.
AP: Do you think that was significant for your future career direction on some subliminal level?
KK: Not really! But the fact that we were so close to somewhere selling food was quite unusual for the Soviet Union. My abiding memory is of my grandparents sending me to fetch some bread, it was this standard list, one white loaf, one black. And I’d just go down in my slippers because it was literally in the basement of our building. My memories of it are quite nostalgic and romantic in many ways. But of course the other side which fascinates me more these days is the fact that I was a Russian speaker growing up in very much a Russian environment.
AP: The impression I got from your article was that the “real Estonians” and the ethnic Russians, were, I don’t know if you used this term exactly, quite self-segregating?
KK: Yes, it was quite unusual in the extent that society was segregated and still is to some extent. I wouldn’t call it a ‘ghetto’ as that has a connotation of being ‘worse off’, and Russians generally speaking… Of course we were the ones, as it were, ‘in power’.
AP: The colonial power?
KK: Exactly. At the time, frankly, sometimes it could be quite unpleasant and occasionally really quite awful. I recall when I was a teenager in the early ‘90s when Estonia was already independent. We Russians had a very strong feeling of not being wanted there and of course the laws changed very quickly about the official languages and where you could and couldn’t study, where you could work and where you couldn’t work. So nearly everybody around me spoke Russian but very few of the Russians spoke Estonian.
AP: There hadn’t really been the incentive, I’m guessing?
KK: That’s right. And so it created this really strange world. I don’t remember ever having an Estonian friend as a teenager, for example. And even though the language, which I obviously had to study at school, was quite visible in the streets in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I didn’t really speak it. So there is this peculiarity, this segregation of the place where I grew up.
AP: Is that getting better these days?
KK: No, not necessarily. And that for me was a very surprising thing. Basically, I arrived in the UK in 1998, and I didn’t go back for about nine or ten years at all. And when I did go back in around 2008, I was really surprised; I thought that by that stage most Russian speakers would have been bilingual but that wasn’t actually the case. For example my nephew, who’s in his teens, and is obviously from the generation born after 1991, he doesn’t speak Estonian fluently as a second language. He’s learning it in school but as a completely separate foreign language.
AP: But not using it on a regular enough basis?
KK: Not at all. It is true that the ratio has changed; for example most of my classmates, I’m in my thirties, those who went to work for businesses, they do all speak both languages, they had to, basically.
AP: It’s a survival necessity, almost?
KK: Exactly. But it depends on your demographic, I guess, and which class you come from. For example, if you didn’t go to university and didn’t get a job of that ‘calibre’, if that’s the right way of describing it, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to speak Estonian at that level.
AP: And, again, it’s less incentivised as you go along?
KK: Yeah.
AP: I’m a bit wary of going much further down this route as it tends to get a bit political but I suppose that goes with the territory, if you’ll excuse the pun. So I wanted to jump back a little bit; you’ve said elsewhere that your parents were ‘Soviet hippies’. If I hadn’t lived in Russia for a while, I would have been totally unaware that that was something it was possible to be in the Soviet Union. Could you tell me more about what it was like to grow up with that kind of background?
KK: Yes, ‘the sixties’ in that sense really did happen in the USSR, albeit in quite a different way. This is an area that I’m really interested in and would love to do more research into and just read more about as it has been written about quite extensively. There’s this term you’re probably aware of, ‘shestidisyatniki’ [loosely translated: ‘sixties people’ - AP], I’d definitely call my dad one of them. I think I’m right in saying that it refers to a generation of people who were young in the ‘60s, and it was after Khrushchev, so the political and social situation was quite a bit looser.
AP: Yes, it’s my understanding that in the early and mid-‘60s there was a loosening of culture and a greater degree of freedom of expression than obviously there had been under Stalin, but that it did tighten back up as Brezhnev took over and established himself more firmly.
KK: That’s pretty much what I’ve heard as well, so that would be quite a good summary I guess. So definitely in the ‘60s there was this flourishing of the arts and culture more generally. There was a lot of music, so you had bardi, these sort of poets, the likes of Bulat Okudzhava, who sang and put together this quite lyrical music. Some of it was quite political, but perhaps not in direct, political language.
AP: They were probably smarter than that!
KK: Sure! But what’s associated with that time is a huge surge of interest in culture and the theatre. My dad, for instance, used to play in a jazz band as a hobby. So maybe I’m totally defining ‘hippy’ wrong, and that’s not a proper ‘hippy’, but for me, my parents were very much part of what was going on at that time. This was way before I was born because parents had me quite late, but before I came along every summer my dad used to resign from his engineering job and they would go to Crimea, which back then was all about resorts and sunshine, just to chill and do a little bit of work as my dad was also a mountain guide. So they would go for six months and do that and then they would come back. And, because it was the Soviet Union, he could go back to his existing job, again. I wish I knew exactly how it was done but because there was officially no unemployment in the USSR, there were always positions available. My parents were very relaxed, they travelled a huge amount, and for them reading books, music, and nature were really the most important things in the world. They had a complete disregard for money. They fit really well with this intelligentsia image; that was definitely my parents. But they’re almost in the sphere of myth for me as they both died quite a long time ago and there aren’t really many people around that I can ask about them.
AP: So you moved to London when you were nineteen, did you have any particular expectations about what the UK, and London specifically, would be like before you got here?
KK: Not really. It all happened on a bit of a whim. But in a way I was escaping, although maybe that’s too strong a word, quite harsh realities. I wanted to study properly and the situation in the late ‘90s pretty much everywhere in the post-Soviet space wasn’t great.
AP: From what I understand, ‘not great’ is kind of an understatement!
KK: Yeah, well, I’m British now, so I’ve really learnt how to do understatement! It was pretty awful, and in the Baltic States, and other former Soviet republics, there was this extra national tension. I don’t think anybody died in Estonia, but that did obviously happen elsewhere. All that was the main trigger for why I left, and though it’s a much more complicated story, it all happened very quickly. There wasn’t really a very strong reason why I came to London; it just happened that I knew someone who could potentially help me out here and I could speak a little bit of English so that was helpful too. But in terms of expectations, no, although all the usual stereotypes of London and of Britain were there and I really loved joking about them, with Sherlock Holmes and Baker Street being the first things I wanted to see because in Soviet times there were these very well-made film adaptations of Conan-Doyle.
AP: Partly shot in the Baltic States, if I recall?
KK: Yes, I think so. They’re really fantastically well-directed films with great acting, and lots of humour and warmth. I think they do a great job of conveying the Englishness, actually, and the culture of late-19th century London. And they’re portrayed by iconic Russian actors.
AP: There’s actually a statue of Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin in costume as Holmes and Watson outside the British embassy in Moscow, which I’m pretty sure I saw at some point.
KK: I did not know that! But what I do know is that there’s a Sherlock Holmes museum here in London on Baker Street and one of the first things you see as you go in is a photo of Livanov, it’s literally by the door. So seeing that was definitely one of my first priorities when I got here once I’d got settled. I’m trying to remember whether I had expectations about people being particularly reserved, I don’t know, I can’t really remember that. Of course, coming from behind the Iron Curtain, as it were, you’re always surprised by how many different nationalities there are here. Obviously these days when people travel more it isn’t so much, but it was a bit of a surprise, I hadn’t expect that.
AP: You mentioned that you didn’t go back to Tallinn for a long time, is that still the case, or do you go back a bit more regularly now?
KK: Yes, for the last ten years or so, I’ve gone back about once a year.
AP: What are your friends and relatives’ perceptions of British food, or is it not something that comes up in conversation ?
KK: Well, because I write about it, British food does tend to come up a fair bit, and wherever I travel within the former Soviet Union, as I spend quite a lot of time in Ukraine and Crimea as well, people roll their eyes and ask about British food! I almost feel like a kind of ambassador in that way. Being an anthropologist, I find these very black and white definitions quite difficult and I struggle when people say that it’s awful, and I try to get them to look for the shading if you like. Generally speaking, I really defend British food culture, and London specifically, which is really pretty easy to do these days! But beyond that, I’m always curious about engaging people in a conversation about what food culture means. In a common language sense, most people often talk about ‘food culture’ as being something which is very refined and defined. Russians tend to think of French cuisine for example as being that.
AP: As do we here, of course.
KK: Exactly, there is this similarity in the admiration of French cuisine between the Russians and the British, and the Americans too actually. I always like asking people these questions and engaging them in this debate as food culture is everything. In France there are very specific reasons why it has become so professionally refined in terms of recipes over centuries. I’m interested in talking to people about both British and Russian cuisines. I think there are some similarities because of the climate. Of course, if you’re talking about northern Russia, it’s much harsher, but generally as we’re both northern European countries so there are a lot of ingredients in common.
AP: And the stereotypes people have of British and Russian food overlap in some ways, i.e. that it’s not very good, that it’s very starchy and stodgy and heavy. Good in the wintertime when you’re cold but that’s really the only time you’d want it.
KK: Yeah, that’s it. It can be quite difficult to have a light conversation about what British cuisine is. I’m not sure I can give a very clearly defined answer myself as there really isn’t one unifying thing. If you were just to give a list of five or ten dishes, it would be a very boring and limited way of talking about it. Especially with all the changes and movement of people for many decades but even in the last fifteen or twenty years as well. What we think about being British has changed a lot and is changing and that’s what’s really fascinating for me.
AP: I also wanted to talk to you about your Russian Revels project with Karina Baldry. How did you two meet and how did the idea for the project develop?
KK: We met at the launch of Karina’s book, she self-published a book called Russia on a Plate about six years ago. I was invited to the event quite randomly via a PR company; it was quite serendipitous, as I didn’t know anything about Karina beforehand. But we hit it off straight away because we had a lot of similarities in terms of our interest in food and in developing the idea of what food from the former Soviet Union might be. Both of us really love to create this really interactive, fun setting in which people can talk about food as well as eating it. Originally, I did the first couple of events myself in my home but then I combined forces with Karina and since then we’ve done pop-up events in various different places. We’ve collaborated with different people and run our own events as well.
AP: The events had all sorts of different themes, didn’t they? For example, you had an Anna Karenina-inspired 19th century feast, a 1920s secret Soviet bourgeois dinner, and an early ‘60s cosmonaut party. Which were your personal favourites and why?
KK: I knew you’d ask this question! I actually have several, and for different reasons as the events were all very, very different. Some of them were very gregarious and large-scale and others were much more intimate with very particular stories. One of the first projects we did was a Futurist dinner at Pushkin House. We had a few different collaborators and we had lots of actors, basically this whole stage show as well as live music and the dinner itself was just totally crazy. We have some pictures on our website I think.
AP: Yes, I saw those! The chicken with scissors, what was that all about?
KK: Although it was a Russian-themed event, we took our inspiration from Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook. His whole idea was to question the merits of classical food, in his case Italian food. So we made links with that in relation to Russian food. The whole idea of Futurism, in simple terms was about technology, mechanisation and standardisation and so various tools and contraptions were a very big part of the dinner because we wanted people to experience eating in a very different way from the usual knife and fork. In that particular case we had this absolutely delicious chicken roasted with garlic and herbs on Soviet champagne bottles. It was actually a very popular New Year’s Eve dish that I grew up with. It’s sort of the equivalent of chicken on beer cans, which I think perhaps is the American equivalent. Because you have liquid in the bottles, the chicken roasts really nicely. What we then did was to have all these weird scissors of various shapes and sizes and got people to eat with their hands as well. I really enjoyed it, it was very playful. Karina and I also wrote this very short manifesto the future of Russian food. It was also very visually striking; we had this mannequin figure of a woman made of pork fat which Svetlana, a friend of ours who is an artist, made for us for the event.
We also had this other more storytelling-focused event based on a Soviet cookbook by Pavel Syutkin and Olga Syutkina, who are quite a famous couple in Moscow now. They’re food historians and they’re doing incredible work and I don’t think I know of anyone in Russia who is doing anything like it to quite the same extent, where they really unpack the idea of what Russian food is and isn’t, and what it could be. I really love and admire what they do. Together with this British publisher, they’ve written this really fun book with all the iconic imagery of Soviet dishes. The event, which we hosted at the Calvert Gallery a couple of years ago, was a combination of the recipes from the book, together we some other dishes that we created that were beautiful and whimsical and based on our memories. So it was this beautiful collaboration. It was smaller in scale and very much about the food itself with a few stories backing it up.
AP: That seems like a really novel way of exploring your own past and history more generally. Quite a few of your events have had an element of interactivity; what sort of things have you got people to do?
KK: Yes, well, we stumbled across the idea of ‘immersive theatre’ a few years ago. One of the events you already mentioned, the 1920s-inspired Soviet bourgeois secret dinner. We actually worked with a group of actors and we created this whole atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We used this very beautiful old building in Clarkenwell the front of it was made to look like a boring Soviet shop and the whole idea was that people could only get into this alternative world of luxury which obviously always existed in Soviet times but you needed to know the code. There’s this very unique Russian word 'blat' that denotes access, and this network of people and knowledge, and specifically how to get hold of food and other goods during the Soviet times because if you had blat, you could get access to certain products. So we tried to explore this idea in an entertaining way. So people had to do certain things; the guests were interacting with other people but they didn’t know that they were actually actors. And they had to say certain things as they had been given passbooks with certain identities and based on these identities they had ask certain questions to get access to this literally underground restaurant in the basement where we served them this feast and there was music and cabaret dancers and all sorts of other things.
AP: Maybe this isn’t the greatest analogy but it almost sounds like a Soviet version of a US prohibition-era speakeasy, particularly as the time period roughly coincides.
KK: Yes, although the reason for it was very different. This was the time of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, the ‘nep’, as it was called.
AP: Which was a time of relative prosperity as people had the incentive to produce more, whereas before and after that, the state would basically requisition the lot.
KK: And there was lots of trading on the black market and various kinds of shady dealings. I’m not sure about the technical details but I gather that some things were legal, but there were a lot of things that were not quite legal, or only maybe legal but it wasn’t really clear. There’s a famous novel called The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov that was written around this time with a character called Ostap Bender who was an example of someone who made a lot of money that way. Recently I heard someone describing that time within the Soviet period as being similar to the modern-day oligarchs. That time created these very rich people very, very fast in a semi-legal way, so they were this kind of nouveau-riche but in a very particular environment.
AP: That sounds like an absolutely fascinating event, and what an accessible way of presenting history! Going back to the food specifically, we’ve talked a little bit already about the kinds of things you served but I’d like to explore that in a bit more detail; as we’ve said, Eastern European food doesn’t always have the best reputation in the UK, so what dishes really surprised people who came to the events? And what were the big crowd-pleasers?
KK: Not necessarily the things that would be recognised!
AP: Yes, you have this menu called, ‘New Slavic Chic’, is that right?
KK: Yes, we do! It often includes ingredients which are recognisably Russian but put together in a way that is not quite expected.
AP: The one that really captured my imagination was the borscht pie.
KK: That was actually the one I was going to mention as it was many people’s favourite. It’s Karina’s invention and she has it in her book. She has actually been married to an English guy for about 25 years now and so when they were newlyweds she was discovering her husband’s culinary tastes and those of Brits more generally and she realised that they really like their pies!
AP: Oh my goodness do we!
KK: And obviously borscht is this really popular Russian/Ukrainian dish and so one day she had the idea of putting them together. So for the filling you take all the typical root vegetables that would go into the borscht, the beetroots, carrots, and then a bit of garlic and spices and you encase it in this flaky pastry.
AP: Almost like ‘borscht concentrate’?
KK: Yeah, exactly! And because Russians are always really surprised and they really liked it and the same with Brits too. Even people who normally really hate beetroot enjoy it. The other day Karina made it again and took it to this dinner and there was this four-year-old kid who normally doesn’t eat any of the ingredients and he loved it! So this is definitely a hit and we make it a lot.
Another example that we’ve served a lot is this sweet truffle dessert that I borrowed from a very well-known Estonian food blogger called Pille Petersoo. It’s a very unusual truffle because it’s made with Italian mascarpone cheese and this very unique Estonian mix of ground peas and grain. When I describe it to people, it sounds horrible but actually it tastes like powdered hazelnuts. It’s called kama and you roll it with the cheese and with a little bit of sugar, dried fruit or chocolate.
AP: Yes, I read that it was often used as a sort of chocolate substitute?
KK: That’s right! These were the sweets that I used to really love buying when I would run down to the bakery as a kid in Estonia because it reminded us of chocolate but they were actually available. It has this very light cocoa flavour. So we often serve these truffles when we’re making canapé-style food and they’re always very, very popular.
AP: Do you ever have problems sourcing ingredients here?
KK: Yes and no. No, in the sense that in London there are loads of eastern European shops so you can find most things. But then there are ingredients and there are ingredients, right? What matters is how fresh and how simple they are. For example, I love and I really miss tvorog. You can buy it here of course as practically every eastern European shop sells it, but the quality, the freshness and also the variety that you can get back at home is nothing like what’s available here. That’s often the difference. I can remember Karina and I being ecstatically happy four or five years ago when a company called Bio-tiful Dairy started making kefir here in England from organic milk. Kefir of course is very popular across the whole of Eastern Europe but it’s very trendy these days in London. Russians always talk about its helpful properties the importance of dairy but particularly what they call kislomolochnie produkti, fermented dairy drinks.
AP: Which, when you translate it literally into English comes out as ‘acidic dairy’, which sounds very unappealing!
KK: True! But fermentation is really popular in London so people should discover what it means! Kefir is another example because you can buy it everywhere but the really fresh and amazing stuff that Natasha Bowes who owns Bio-tiful is making is really rare. I wish there were more products being made here using local British ingredients. Actually, one of the original reasons I started doing these dinners is my ultimate interest in combining my memories and eastern European culinary traditions but with local ingredients.
AP: So, Russian Revels is on hiatus at the moment. What does the future hold for the project?
KK: Yes, we’re having a sort of sabbatical. But we’re talking a lot about lots of different options. Having done so many different things over the last five years, and having learned so much about what works and what doesn’t and what we like and what we don’t like so much, we’re now at a stage where we want to focus a little bit. So over the next six months or so we’ll be continuing to figure out where and how we want to focus.
AP: Yes, from what I’ve seen and heard it seems like the events are very labour- and thought- and therefore time-intensive.
KK: Absolutely. And Karina and I are interested in so many different things, but we also have to make a living! We’re trying to figure out what’s the best, most interesting and most effective way of combining those interests and priorities, so watch this space!
AP: You are still doing the occasional bit of catering for the meantime though?
KK: Yes, if people come to us and ask us to do an event, we may still say yes, which is what happened with the recent Royal Academy of Arts event.
AP: Could you tell me a little about that?
KK: Essentially it was one of those immersive, one-off extravaganzas and was based around the Revolution exhibition that was happening there. So we curated and created a kind of communal dining experience. It was a huge event, something like nine hundred people all-in-all.
AP: How did that compare to the scale of previous events?
KK: Well, normally we’d be catering for between thirty to fifty people. Having said that, we have done some larger events a couple of times in the past. But this one was quite story-led and we wanted people to experience that as well as just feeding them so it was really quite a task.
We will probably be doing something at the Tate towards the end of the year as well along the same lines, it all depends on timings, etc. but they’re also having an exhibition based on Soviet art as well so we’ll be doing a pop up event for them.
AP: One last thing I wanted to ask, besides Russian Revels obviously, where would you recommend for proper, good Russian food in the UK, and what particular dishes should people try?
KK: Even as recently as three years ago I don’t think I’d have been able to say much but there has been a lot of development recently in terms of Russian-ish food. In London there are a couple of restaurants that are definitely great if you want to experience a sense of Russianness and some of the flavours. There’s Mari Vanna, they do very classic Soviet Russian food but the atmosphere is also very good, and they’ve won awards for their design; it’s an amazing environment. There’s one that opened more recently called Zima, which focuses more on street food. It’s in Soho, and if you were to go there, I’d recommend that you go to the basement bar and hone in on the vodkas because they do lots of home-flavoured vodkas with zakuski [snacks]. This is the thing that’s really lovely about Russian culture and it’s a really amazing way of experiencing strong, bold flavours that eastern European food, at least to my mind anyway, is all about. As Brits, you guys will certainly appreciate the beauty of drinking with food and the particular reason why vodka needs to be had with food! So those are what I’d recommend in terms of restaurants but there’s also people doing pop-ups, there’s Mince & Dough, which is this lovely girl who does various things with pelmeni, [dumplings]. She makes everything by hand, so they’re very high-quality. Also, there’s Kino Vino run by Alissa Timoshkina which is all sorts of different events linking food up with film, not necessarily Russian, but every now and again, as she herself is a chef, she makes things connected with Russian food.
I’ve also come across Cossack Cuisine in Sheffield. I think they’re a husband and wife who sell food at the market and also do events now and again. It’s a rare opportunity to try something that’s outside of London. And my final suggestion would be to buy one of Olia Hercules’ books. She’s probably the most well-known author writing about food from ‘over there’. She herself is Ukrainian. Then you can cook for yourself at home if you don’t have access to the food in a restaurant environment.
Obviously, Karina and I will definitely be back, throwing together some parties with food and with storytelling very soon, probably in the autumn because I’m actually working on a series of events around bread right now. So, fingers crossed!
AP: Thank you so much for your time, it’s been fascinating and I look forward to hearing about more about those events in the future.
(Photos by Natasha Nestman; more examples can be viewed at Russian Revels' website)
