A gift to young empires
Elena Molokhovets in the political kitchen
Author: Andrey Filimonov
During the turbulent days of March 1881, when the country was reeling from the tsar's assassination, Elena Ivanovna Molokhovets, a well-known St. Petersburg food writer (nowadays she would be called a food blogger), tried to schedule an appointment with Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod. Pobedonostsev was known for his stern conservatism and his intention to "chill Russia" to stem the revolutionary ferment. Molokhovets shared his position and wanted to share with him her original recipes for the political preservation of society. But the Chief Prosecutor was misogynistic and uninterested in the opinions of a cookbook author.
More than thirty years later, Molokhovets, also unsuccessfully, sought an audience with Patriarch Tikhon to discuss the issue of church unification. She knew exactly how to prepare Russia, but no one wanted to listen to her.
Menu of the Russian world
The beauty of a cookbook is that it promises a guaranteed result. If you take the right ingredients, mix them in the right order, and let them sit for the right amount of time, the result will be edible and even beautiful. Political recipes are the opposite: the more promises, the greater the likelihood of a burning smell everywhere. Because history is not an oven with a thermometer, and people are not yeast rising on a schedule.
Elena Molokhovets wrote two major books during her long life. One is well-known—"A Gift to Young Housewives"—a practical catalog of family happiness, measured in pounds, zolotniks, the number of guests, and the cleanliness of the tablecloth.
In a secret cupboard in the Molokhovets kitchen, you can find another book—not about cutlets and biscuits, but about East and West, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, freedom of conscience, and the hidden history of Russia.
The Lord, foreseeing everything that could happen to the Greek Church, created the Russian state in 862, destining it to be, in time, His chosen instrument for the complete restoration of Christianity... From that year 862, the entire history of the Russian people, as if the life of one man, or, better said, one woman, can be divided into the following main eras:
862 is the year of her birth, or the beginning of Russia’s infancy;
988 is the year of her baptism and confirmation, or the beginning of her childhood;
1700 is the beginning of her serious education, or the beginning of her youth;
1848 is the beginning of the mistakes of her youth, due to the temptation and temptation of the West, and, finally,
188X is the year of her coming of age, the great and holy year of her self-awareness, the year of her entry into the great service of the world...
Elena Molokhovets. "The Fates of the West and the East." St. Petersburg. 1880.
In her book, "The Fates of the West and the East," she gives recommendations to the young empire, which should feed the entire world with its unique pies made with Orthodox yeast, a special-purpose leaven.
It sounds comical, like Lenin: a cook wants to run the state. True, Lenin never said that, but popular culture is powerful because it's full of pseudo-quotes that appeal to the people. Propaganda actively exploits this. Molokhovets's fantasies have become relevant in 21st-century Russia. Now they're served up as the official menu for a patriotic banquet: a special mission, spiritual bonds, the salvation of humanity from the influence of the rotten West—all of this is spoken of with a serious face by Solovyov and other singers of the Russian General Staff.
In this context, Elena Molokhovets unexpectedly appears as a supplier of imperial rhetoric for the political kitchen.
A caution regarding cucumbers
The secret to the success of "A Gift to Young Housewives" isn't in the recipes. You can copy the recipes from a friend—that's how it's always been done. The main thing is that Molokhovets' book is rooted in the idea of raising a new type of housewife—rational, calculating, armed with tables, keeping a firm grip on the house, and calmly following advice like, "Pour vinegar into the chicken's crop and lock it in the barn to keep it moving. Slaughter it in the evening, and you'll be amazed at how tender its meat is." Molokhovets's home is a model of a state—complete with a budget, a warehouse, supply logistics, and personnel matters. And also with the obligatory room for communal prayer. This book truly can be called a "culinary bible"—it has everything. Even a warning about cucumbers:
"Sometimes store-bought cucumbers are very beautiful, i.e., green, due to the fact that they are cooked in untinned copper cookware, which is extremely unhealthy. To find out if cucumbers are truly green due to this cooking, stick a clean steel needle into them; in this case, the needle will quickly turn copper-colored."
Russia in the 1860s truly needed detailed instructions. Alexander's great reforms had restructured society and disrupted everyday life. The old order had lost its grip, and the new one had yet to take hold, so helpful advice was especially in demand. The question of "what to do?" shifted from philosophical to practical: how to treat frayed nerves, what to teach children, how to run a household. In this realm, the cookbook became a universal code of civilization.
From veal to Tarkovsky
"A Gift to Young Housewives," which made its author famous, suffered the fate that only true bestsellers have—it was counterfeited. Cookbooks by "E. Morozovets," "E. M-ts," and similar pseudonyms, brazenly exploiting the success of others, were published across the country. The book soon became a source of quotations, most of which the real Molokhovets never wrote. For example, this: "If unexpected guests arrive, send the servants down to the cellar for cold veal." Various versions featured ham, leg of lamb, and hazel grouse—the gist is the same: a true housewife is always prepared for any surprise.
Researchers leafed through thirty lifetime editions of "The Gift"—to no avail. Molokhovets does indeed offer recommendations for evening tea for overstaying guests: thin slices of veal, ham, tongue, hazel grouse, Swiss cheese. But "sending the cook to the cellar"—no such suggestion. The joke originated in Soviet times, when the book became a symbol of irretrievably lost abundance: the phrase about veal from the cellar sounded more fantastical than any magic. Crystal flycatchers and a platinum truffle pot exceeded the wildest fantasies of the Soviet people, who, for the most part, had never tasted anything sweeter than a collective farm carrot.
In the story of the emigrant Arkady Averchenko, “The New Elena Molokhovets, or the Soviet Cookbook,” refugees from Russia, out of hunger, read the Molokhovets cookbook at night and find comfort in it.
In 1957, Soviet poet Arseny Tarkovsky wrote the poem "Elena Molokhovets"—a vicious invective with the epigraph: "...after which the pressed grain can be given to the kitchen people. E. Molokhovets. A Gift to Young Housewives. 1911." The epigraph contains the very same pseudo-quote about servants that Molokhovets doesn't include.
Where are you, half-salted writer, Molokhovets, half-hearted toady, Bliss of the ten-pood carcasses of the rulers of ten thousand souls?
One of his acquaintances later said: "He slandered her there; he was a mean man back then, Arseny." The poet created the fictional Molokhovets—and hit the nail on the head: Soviet culture had developed the image of a gluttonous monster—an exploitative lady. The image proved more important than the real person and survived all refutations.
From Smolny to Spiritualism
The real Molokhovets never owned ten thousand, let alone ten souls. Despite the wildly popular books, her life is extremely modest and represents the story of a person who strove for order while suffering from the chaos around her. Due to the paucity of known biographical facts, some even believe that Elena Ivanovna never existed.
But this is unlikely. Most likely, she was indeed born in Arkhangelsk in 1831, lost her parents in early childhood, and was placed by relatives at the Smolny Institute, from which she graduated with a gold bracelet and a Bible—as the top graduate.
The Smolny Institute was then a bride factory with a quality seal. It's no surprise that Elena soon married Franz Molokhovets, a retired guards officer who had mastered the profession of architect.
The young family settled in Kursk, where in 1860 the provincial censorship committee granted permission to publish the book, which became a bestseller in the Russian Empire and a legend of Soviet life. "A Gift to Young Housewives" went through twenty-nine editions during the author's lifetime and, over time, expanded from 1500 to 4500 recipes.
In 1866, the family moved to St. Petersburg, where Elena experienced the joys of spiritual life. The capital was then abuzz with spiritualism. The chemist Butlerov and the zoologist Wagner were demonstrating the scientific validity of spirit communication. In defiance, Dmitri Mendeleev created a commission to expose "spiritualists," which, as Dostoevsky noted, merely served to publicize them. In this atmosphere, Molokhovets joined the circle of medium Evgenia Tyminskaya, where she carefully recorded the revelations of the "priestess" and her own prophetic dreams.
Elena's everyday rationality easily combined with a belief in the supernatural: the former determines order in the home, the latter, the world order. In a large family where children get sick and die, faith in heavenly powers is a great consolation. Of the Molokhovets' ten children, only two survived. Such losses might have broken a woman of lesser character. But Elena Ivanovna was a rock—she came to the rational conclusion that the world was malfunctioning, apparently because the chef had lost the recipe, and someone urgently needed to fix the situation.
How to destroy food products with rot?
According to Molokhovets, the "West" is to blame for everything. Western ideas are a putrefactive bacteria, the presence of which no young Russian housewife should tolerate in her home. Liberalism and freedom of conscience are especially harmful to Russian cuisine.
"Freedom of conscience" (Gewissensfreiheit)—a Western invention—best defined and delineated the West and the East, those two worldly realms destined at all times to represent darkness and spiritual light. Clearly, by "freedom of conscience" honest, pious people meant "freedom of spirit" to act according to one's conscience; while those morally and spiritually undeveloped understood it as a supposedly legitimate liberation from conscience, from that voice of Christ's love for His creation. And since the latter are more numerous than the former, such lawlessness, anarchy, and lawlessness have arisen everywhere.
Like mold, Western freedoms are infecting the healthy foods of the Greeks, Slavs, and other good Orthodox peoples. Orthodoxy is the leaven without which the dough of the new world will not rise. All countries and peoples must eventually dissolve in the rich broth of autocracy. For enemies, this will be a terrible soup; for our own, a fraternal hodgepodge. But everyone must enter this pot to ensure the perfect dish emerges.
To illustrate his ideas, Molokhovets takes the Old Testament, retelling it in culinary terms: just as Joseph saved Egypt from famine, so Orthodoxy will save not only its own people but also those who convert to it from "spiritual starvation." Orthodoxy, Elena explains, is a granary where all nations can come for rations. They need only renounce their "errors," and peace will immediately reign on earth. The Russian world.
What do Armenians have to do with this?
The long narrative, filled with abstract matters and vague phrases, unexpectedly ends with a panegyric to Armenian culture and one specific representative of it in the Russian service.
"The Armenians owe their intellectual, scientific, and initial spiritual enlightenment to Greece and Western Europe," writes Molokhovets, "and their highest spiritual enlightenment will be indebted to Russia; Russia will owe its internal peace and final preparation for its entry into the Kingdom of Glory to the Armenians, in the person of His Excellency, Count Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov..."
In February 1880, as the book was being prepared for publication, an Armenian, Count Mikhail Tarielovich Loris-Melikov, became the most important person in the empire (after the emperor). Alexander II appointed him head of the Supreme Administrative Commission, with near-dictatorial powers: a few months earlier, Stepan Khalturin, a member of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), had detonated a bomb right in the Winter Palace, killing an innocent servant in the kitchen. The Russian state clearly needed a man capable of keeping the revolutionaries in check and preventing the people from taking to the barricades. In August, Loris-Melikov became Minister of the Interior, concentrating considerable power in his hands. Journalists dubbed his policy a "dictatorship of the heart": harsh measures against terror were combined with attempts to restore society's sense of the future—he relaxed censorship, entered into negotiations with the zemstvos, and drafted a constitutional reform.
Molokhovets immediately adds Mikhail Tarielovich to his recipe—the "Armenian seasoning" imparts a unique flavor to his almost-perfect dish. As they would say today, the taste of victory. But something went wrong. Instead of simmering slowly, there was an explosion.
On March 1, 1881, Alexander II was assassinated on the embankment of the Catherine Canal. The new Emperor, Alexander III, immediately rejected the constitutional draft, and Loris-Melikov resigned. The Count retreated to the Côte d'Azur, where he died in Nice, having failed to prepare Russia for the Kingdom of Heaven. The recipe had failed.
A real colonel?
For 150 years, rumors have circulated that it was her military husband (sometimes a "certain colonel" is mentioned) who wrote Molokhovets. Supposedly, a woman's name was used as a cover. There is no evidence to support this theory, but there is a certain logic: the author, a colonel, "explains" the national-patriotic tone, the imperial intensity of the texts, the love of discipline and strict order, thought out to the smallest detail. "To prevent mice from gnawing vegetables, you need to sprinkle tobacco on top of the first layer of sand with which you sprinkle the vegetables." Elena's husband, Franz Molokhovets, was indeed a guards officer who rose to the rank of colonel, which, however, does not make this theory any more convincing. You don't have to be a colonel to think in imperial categories. The main thing is to believe in the power of recipes and not harbor doubts, like Elena Molokhovets.
The last years: the Petrograd finale
She outlived her Franz by almost thirty years and managed to bury eight children. Three of her sons followed in their father's footsteps and pursued military careers: one joined the gendarmerie corps, another died at Port Arthur, and the third left Elena with a grandson of whom she was proud. The grandson served on Nicholas II's yacht and was mentioned in the emperor's diary: "We had a good time with Lieutenant Molokhovets."
For half a century, Elena Ivanovna lived in Petrograd on Suvorovsky Prospekt. She, in the words of the Dutch researcher E. Hartman, "devoted herself to her mission as a pilot of lost Russia." Right up until the 1917 Revolution, Molokhovets wrote books and pamphlets with titles such as "In Defense of the Orthodox Russian Family," "A Brief History of the Economy of the Universe (with an Appendix, in Colors)," "Monarchism, Nationalism, and Orthodoxy," "The Mystery of the Grief and Troubles of Our Time and the Anchor of Salvation for Those Encroaching on Unbelief, Murder, and Suicide."yours and extreme immorality (from the realm of spiritualism)."
In August 1917, at eighty-six but still in good spirits, she wrote letters to Empress Maria Feodorovna expressing gratitude for her attention to her work and to Patriarch Tikhon, asking to meet with her for a discussion on the important topic of church unification. A year later, on December 11, 1918, she died of heart failure. The city was in the grip of famine, and the author of the most famous cookbook in the Russian Empire passed away in freezing Petrograd, where people ate dogs and cats and drank alcohol stolen from the anatomical theater. Georgy Ivanov wrote in "The Decay of the Atom": "Pale miscarriages in greenish alcohol. In 1920, this alcohol was sold in St. Petersburg for drinking—it was called 'mladentsovka.'"
In such a Russia, the young housewife from Molokhovets's book had no place. Elena was buried on December 15th. Not a single newspaper in war-torn Russia, neither "Red" nor "White," issued an obituary for her passing.
