Kazan — summer 2014

I'm mentally gearing up to try making a real plov (pilaf) this weekend. A former student of mine, Ryan, learned about good tasting plov when he served in Afghanistan, and there the locals he knew always made it with red palm oil, which was the only thing they had handy, but it imparted a taste to it that Ryan raves about. Sounds like an interesting place to start. I've been looking up and down to find that stuff here. No luck. I even went to ask the Tadzhiks at the dried fruit market where to find it. They told me you couldn't, and they offered me two variations. The best version, quoth they, is a homemade oil made from walnuts and some other thing that they didn't know how to say in Russian. It's a dark brown oil and costs 300 rubles for a half liter. I'm tempted, but that's about nine bucks for half a liter of oil. Y'know, if I were trying to cook something with a recipe I had paid multihundreds of dollars for to a New York restaurant for a dish that had once blown my mind, then maybe I would use exact ingredients. But to pay nine samolians for an oil of questionable provenance that has been bottled in used plastic bottles from the Raifa monastery... no, I don't think so. They said the second best option was cottonseed oil. Seriously? They said it's great. Later I wikipedia the info: turns out cottonseed oil was the most common cooking oil in the US in the first half of the 20th century, and that Crisco was originally made from it. Huh. Whodathunkit? So that's an option.

Finally, I gave up and went to the place I should have gone first, Бәхетле, the Tatar equivalent of Whole Foods. First I found linseed oil. I had known it was used as a base for paint, but I didn't know there was an edible version. Then I found mustard oil, the cooking oil, not the essential oil that is used as a spice. Turns out you can't import or sell mustard cooking oil in the US. I should probably try that while I'm here; it's supposed to have a fairly sharp brassica taste. And then, yes indeedy, I found red palm oil. 700 rubles for a half liter (= $21). Am I going to pay that much dinero for an experimental oil? Maybe if I were Andrew Zimmern, but for a minor experiment in Russia? Nosirree, bob.