Wax Steaks and Fake Fish: Moscow Learns to Cook

Larisa Tatarskaya is standing in front of a class of Russian teen-agers, mostly boys, explaining how to cook something few in this country have seen: steak.

She is holding what looks like a nice cut of meat, except that at this angle a real piece of sirloin would have slipped off the platter and onto a student’s desk.

The steak here in one of Moscow’s largest cooking schools is actually a slab of wax, one of a huge assortment of fake-food platters around the classroom. Neat mounds of olive-green peas, translucent fish, a pile of roasted potatoes, crisp-looking brown onions--they are all synthetic dishes used as teaching tools at Professional Technical School No. 41.

In a nation where food is scarce and there is grim talk of food shortages this winter, how do you learn to cook? The answer: mostly by the book. How do you learn what a good meal looks like? The answer: Make it look like this wax model.

“What is the role of the fat in the frying pan?” Tatarskaya is asking her class of students, all dressed in fashionable jeans and Western jackets.

A full-bodied young man stands to answer. “It evens out the temperature between the meat and the pan,” he says, seeming to recite a memorized answer.

Tatarskaya nods, pointing to a plate with a wax steak in the middle, explaining the chemical reactions in the meat and talking about how this steak does not have to be fried bloodless, because “the English” like their meat with a little pink part on the inside.

At PTS No. 41, the 600 students are learning how to be professional cooks in a society where for the last 70 years food has been viewed more as fuel for human workers than as something to be tasted, savored and enjoyed. In many ways their course is a grim lesson in how to cook what isn’t there.

To be sure, food from a factory kitchen nearby is occasionally available for practical work, and there are knives and stoves and potato-peeling machines at the ready in the basement kitchen when there is food. There are also apprenticeships at restaurants where students begin to learn what chefs expect in the dining places in Moscow. But by Western cooking school standards, most of the study of how to prepare a dinner is theoretical.

As a result, some of the new chefs in Moscow tend to avoid those trained in the old Soviet way. As Bernard Derroisne, the French chef at TrenMos, a successful U.S.-Soviet joint venture restaurant, puts it: “I might just as well hire people off the street as from these (Russian cooking) schools. They have to learn everything all over again, and I have to be the teacher for them. The most important thing is that they have a desire to learn.”

Derroisne says the key talent for a professional chef in Moscow is “learning to substitute” at the last minute. There are days when he has to make cheesecake without cream cheese, he says. Baking powder is sometimes available, sometimes not.

At PTS No. 41, however, the idea of teaching how to make do with what you have is not acceptable. Instead, they learn to cook for the future--when supplies will be plentiful.

The guiding spirit behind this philosophy is the school’s principal, a jovial, red-haired woman named Liubov Fedorovna Klokune. Klokune, a mathematics teacher who loves to cook as a hobby, spends her time trying to rise above the scarcity that now dominates Russian cuisine.

Her method, she says, is to teach cooking with the presumption that someday her students will be able to walk into the gastronom (grocery store) and buy potatoes, leeks, meat, flour and ginger root to the specifications of a favorite recipe.

As it is now, most cooks go to the stores first, buy what’s there and then decide what can be made for dinner.

“We teach students what it should be,” Klokune says. “If we started with what is in our stores, we would have to throw the textbooks away.”

Klokune, who recently began an exchange program with a cooking school in Paris, has also begun trying to give her students a larger and tastier repertoire--using what is available.

An apple torte made in France can be made here, she said. There are apples in the private markets. Flour and sugar, although scarce, are sometimes available. Lemons, bright yellow and expensive, are plentiful these days. Butter and milk can be found if one is patient.

During one of the occasional cooking sessions, the students tried to make the torte. “They thought it was delicious,” she said.