From Gulag To Goulash

While working in her recent doorstop history, a chronicle of the Eastern Bloc that was a finalist for the National Book Awards, Anne Applebaum also found time to publish a pretty cookbook on the pleasures of Polish cuisine.

By Sarah Lyall

The historian Anne Applebaum — Pulitzer Prize winner; speaker of English, French, Russian and Polish; glamorous globe-trotting intellectual — stood at her stove in northwest Poland, explaining the virtues of her adopted country’s cuisine, and in particular how to prepare an excellent venison stew.

The process involves a marinade in Madeira wine, a quick sauté and a long, low simmer in the oven. The stew, fragrant with cloves and allspice berries, is among hundreds of Slavic soul food recipes collected in “From a Polish Country House Kitchen” (Chronicle Books), written with Applebaum’s old friend Danielle Crittenden.

This homespun cookery book came out last fall at roughly the same moment as Applebaum’s latest history, “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956,” a rigorous, vivid and often desperately sad 566-page anatomization of the miseries inflicted on Hungary, East Germany and Poland after World War II. (Forty-nine of those pages are footnotes.)

“It was very nice to do both,” Applebaum said of the books. “The part of your brain that’s doing research in the Hungarian secret police archives and the part of your brain that’s figuring out how to roast wild boar are not the same part of your brain.”

”Iron Curtain”: Courtesy Of Doubleday. ”From A Polish Country House Kitchen”: Bogdan & Dorota Bialy.

I recently visited Applebaum at Dwor Chobielin, the 19th-century manor house three and a half hours from Warsaw that she rescued from a state of Communist-era dilapidation. Hours before lunchtime, Applebaum was already busy preparing her venison stew, along with mashed beets, pumpkin with cinnamon and nutmeg, braised red cabbage and a salad with tomatoes from her garden. In recent years, Poles have been rediscovering their culinary heritage, which was snuffed out under Communism. Applebaum’s cookbook argues that true Polish food is sophisticated and inventive, “not heavy and stodgy and fatty.”

There are many reasons why Applebaum, who grew up in Washington, D.C., writes and cooks from a country house in rural Poland. The main one is that she’s married to Radek Sikorski, the country’s foreign minister, who grew up in nearby Bydgoszcz. He went to school under the hated Communist regime — a sign in their driveway now proclaims, in Polish, that the property is a “Communist-free zone” — and became head of his school’s Solidarity committee. When martial law was declared in Poland, in 1981, he was in London studying English. After obtaining political asylum, he earned degrees at Oxford University. Meanwhile Applebaum, after studying at Yale University, went on to Oxford for graduate school and, fascinated by Poland, eventually moved to Warsaw to work as a journalist.

The two met a few times, but it wasn’t until they drove together to Berlin in 1989 — and sat talking all night atop the Berlin Wall as it was being dismantled around them — that they became romantically involved.

Today they lead peripatetic lives. Applebaum splits her time between London and Warsaw, where Sikorski is based; the family, which includes two teenage sons, usually ends up here on weekends and vacations. She writes in a handsome study filled with every conceivable history book. Between paragraphs, she slinks into the kitchen.

“That’s what the cookbook was about — a kind of diversion because my other book was so hard to write,” she said. “You take a little break and put pepper in your chicken stock. A lot of Polish food is made over many hours. You’re roasting something or making soup, and naturally it fits well with writing.”

The cookbook idea came several years ago, when Crittenden, the international blog editor for the Huffington Post, and her husband, the conservative writer David Frum, were visiting Dwor Chobielin for a weekend filled with lots of people and lots of food. “I made them several meals,” Applebaum recalled. “And Danielle stood here in the kitchen and said, ‘No one’s done it. No one’s done anything since the Polish food revolution arrived!’ ”

“I completely bullied her into it,” Crittenden said, speaking by phone from Washington, D.C. The two got a contract and started working on the recipes — testing and tweaking, sending notes back and forth, feeding the results to their children — and then Crittenden was hit by a pang of conscience. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, is this interfering with her very important work on the history of Eastern Europe?’ ”

But Applebaum has always managed to balance serious scholarship with a lighter side. “She’s got a close group of friends in Washington, and when she comes we hang out and drink and yak and gossip,” Crittenden said. “When ‘Gulag’ came out” — Applebaum’s previous book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004 — “I remember turning to one of my friends and saying, ‘Solzhenitsyn is our girlfriend!’ She has this amazing brain, but can be deeply girlish and fun.”

Back in her kitchen, Applebaum was finishing lunch. She served the meal at a wooden table next to a big window looking out over the back of the property, where there are plum and apple trees. Applebaum was in her element — talking about vegetables one moment, the Soviet bloc the next. She peered into her bowl. “This is not a very good pumpkin,” she said. (It was.) “But it looks very pretty.”

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Bogdan & Dorota Bialy

Cherry Vodka
Makes one 1-liter bottle of vodka.

1 ⅛ pounds fresh sour cherries (or black currants)
25 ounces clear vodka
1 to 2 tablespoons sugar (optional).

Pit and halve the cherries. As in all vodka recipes, it is important that the flesh of the fruit be somehow exposed. Fill a jar with the cherries, but do not pack it. Pour the vodka on top and seal tightly. Leave in a dark place for at least two weeks. At the end of that time, open the jar and strain. If you have a very-fine-mesh strainer, that will do. If not, use an ordinary strainer lined with a cheesecloth or even a coffee filter. Set the strainer over a large bowl, ideally one from which you’ll be able to easily pour afterward. Pour the vodka mixture through the strainer and allow the fruit to sit, seeping liquid, for a good hour or so, stirring a bit and pressing if need be to make the liquid go through. Now taste the vodka. Add sugar if you want an after-dinner liqueur, or leave it out if you want something sharper. Pour into a decorative bottle.

De T Magazine, The New York Times, 17/02/2013

Foto: Anne Applebaum