What's Cooking in the Kremlin by Witold Szablowski

Author:Witold Szablowski [Szablowski, Witold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

4.

I came home from the army, and at the Praga restaurant they received me with open arms. But it was clear to everyone that I wouldn’t be there for long, and that I’d be going to work at the Kremlin.

To everyone except me, that is, because I didn’t think much of myself as a chef.

Even so, it really did happen. It turned out that Alexander Fedorovich, the uncle of one of my teachers, was made the Kremlin’s food manager—I couldn’t possibly have expected that one day I would replace him in that post. He asked her if she had any capable graduates, and she named me—it was rare for anyone to graduate with nothing but top grades, but I’d managed to do it. So Alexander Fedorovich invited me in for a conversation.

“Do you have a wife, young man?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “But I have a girlfriend.”

“After two years here you’ll get a nice apartment. It’ll be perfect if you want to get married.”

In those days you waited far longer than that for an apartment, so it was a serious reason to accept. I didn’t think about it for long.

But before I started the job, I had to wait two months until the secret services had vetted me properly. I filled out a questionnaire, and then they checked to see if I was telling the truth. I had a problem, which was what to write about my father, who had been in jail, but someone suggested I put that I didn’t know him and wasn’t in touch with him. Apart from that, I had to say if anyone in my family had been repressed in the Stalinist era, if anyone had been a German POW during the Great Patriotic War, or if anyone lived abroad.

Luckily in my case there was no issue with any of it.

I took the opportunity to ask Mom and Grandpa a few things, and it turned out that my forebears on their side of the family had been very rich; they had traded in food on a grand scale, and even had their own barges. My great-great-grandfather’s house stands in the city of Skopin to this day, and it’s now the local history museum. All this greatly interested me—as I’ve already told you, I adored and still adore history.

But the real elite were the family of my father, whom I didn’t know. They turned out to be direct descendants of Alexander Danilovich Menshikov, who was Peter the Great’s right-hand man.

Luckily at the Kremlin, either they didn’t check quite so far back or they weren’t bothered. I got the job.

When I arrived I was still a child. And the Kremlin kitchen has always been a place with unusual personalities. There were people still working there who had cooked during the Great Patriotic War, people who remembered Stalin and Khrushchev, people who had seen and experienced a great deal in that kitchen.

But no life story can compare with that of Timofeyevich. I only ever saw him once, but I’ll never forget his face or his slightly stooping figure.

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