To Russia With Love
Texas author Sharon Hudgins talks about living—and cooking a Tex-Mex meal—in Russia.
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texasmonthly.com: How did you become interested in food?
SH: Ironically, my interest in Russia is what got me interested in food. When I was growing up in Texas, I didn't care about learning to cook—I was planning to be a career woman, not a housewife. I did learn a bit about baking from my mother, because I always loved desserts. But I really didn't learn how to cook until my senior year at the University of Texas, when I first lived in an apartment of my own. Since I was so interested in Russia, I began trying to cook Russian dishes in Austin.
Two years later, when I first traveled to Europe, I encountered a whole new world of foods. I was hooked! I began cooking all kinds of foreign dishes at home, collecting cookbooks from around the world, and taking copious notes about foods wherever I traveled. After a decade or so of doing that, I decided that I knew enough to become a food writer myself. I sold my first food column to the Stars and Stripes in 1983, and have been working as a professional food writer ever since.
texasmonthly.com: How did you become so interested in travel?
SH: Traveling is in my blood. When I was growing up in Texas, my father was a fireman on the M-K-T [Katy] Railroad in Denison, which meant that the whole family got free passes for traveling on the train, wherever and whenever we wanted to go. I took my first train trip, to Iowa, when I was six weeks old. By the time I entered the first grade, I had visited 44 of the (then) 48 states—traveling with my parents, by train and car. Fortunately, I married a man whose parents had taken him all over the U.S. when he was a child too, so we share the same wanderlust, instilled at an early age.
texasmonthly.com: In addition to absolutely mouth-watering descriptions of food and festivals, you really look in-depth at heritage, politics, economics, and daily life in a changing society. Have you ever undertaken such an extensive project before?
SH: I've undertaken similar projects, but none that took me as long to research and write as The Other Side of Russia.
My first book was Spanien: Küche, Land und Menschen (Spain: The Cuisine, the Land, the People), which was published in Germany in 1991. Although it was a cookbook about the regional cuisines of Spain, it was full of the same kind of historical, geographical, and cultural material that I've included in my Russia book. In 1992, it won a national literary award from the German Academy of Gastronomy—equivalent to a James Beard or IACP cookbook award in the United States—in recognition of its in-depth study of Spanish regional cuisines.
My second book, Never an Ivory Tower, was a history of the University of Maryland's global education programs. That project also required a lot of research—primary sources, secondary sources, interviews, and travel. So when I set out to write The Other Side of Russia, I knew what a large project I was undertaking. I just didn't know how long it would take me to write it.
texasmonthly.com: You discuss the difficulties of shopping for groceries, and yet there were not many restaurants for those too busy or disinclined to spend hours in various markets. Do you just learn to cook with whatever you can find?
SH: Yes, shopping for food was a daily, time-consuming chore. But we both approached it like we approached life in general in Russia: as an adventure, a challenge, even a kind of treasure hunt. Tom was a great food shopper, much to the surprise of our Russian friends who were accustomed to women doing most of the food buying. He hadn't studied the Russian language before we moved there, but he quickly picked up "market Russian"—food and money terms—that made shopping much easier.
texasmonthly.com: As a foreigner, you were required to take an AIDS test. Your computer disks were destroyed. Your notes were read and e-mails intercepted. What was it like to recognize the realities of government control and the remnants of Big Brother mentality?
SH: I didn't worry about it in Russia. Maybe I'd just read too many Cold War spy novels before I went, so I wasn't too surprised about that low-level surveillance. More important, I didn't take it personally. I just accepted it as a part of daily life. Other Americans, who felt personally targeted by Big Brother in Russia, had a much harder time adjusting to life there.
texasmonthly.com: You mention Americans' frustration with the roll-over-and-accept-it attitudes of Russians regarding the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of things like public utilities, public transportation, and government services. Do you think these attitudes will change, or have changed, as Russia moves further into the free market and people have increasing access to outside ideas and influences?
SH: Yes, I think some of those attitudes will certainly change as the older generation passes away and younger people, who never experienced the Soviet system and Soviet ways of thinking, become the adults leading the country, the economy, and the education system.
I could already see that potential developing among the students in our university programs there. They were well educated, spoke English, and interested in the modern world. Their focus was the future, not the old Soviet past. Some of them were also well traveled—perhaps more so than many college students of the same age in the U.S. These are the people who will be leading Russia in the first half of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, Russians will never turn into an Eastern Hemisphere version of Americans (nor should they!). I think there will always be significant cultural differences between Russia and the Western world, no matter how modern and westernized the country becomes.
texasmonthly.com: Have you been back to Asian Russia? Do you plan to?
SH: No, I haven't been back, much to my regret. I would love to travel there again. I do keep in touch with other friends who've gone there for work or travel, so I have an idea about how things have changed (or remained the same) since I lived there.
texasmonthly.com: Are you working on any new projects?
SH: My next book will be a memoir cookbook titled T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking With Two Texans in Siberia. After I finished writing The Other Side of Russia, I realized that I had many more food stories that I was unable to include in that book, because of space, plus all the recipes to go along with those stories. So I'm writing a cookbook that will be a companion book to The Other Side of Russia.
Half of each chapter of T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks will be my personal narrative—about food shopping, cooking, dinner parties, festivals, restaurants, and culinary outings in Russia—followed by the recipes for all the dishes mentioned in the text. I'm also including a lot of additional information about food history, agriculture, food products, and the cultural dimensions of food as they pertain to the parts of Asian Russia that I lived in. Since Tom cooked as much as I did in Russia, and many of the recipes are ones that he himself developed, this is a collaborative cookbook, with both of our names on the cover.
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