"Rich people can have anything but bird’s milk"

by Erik Borda (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Russia

On a cold snowy evening, I was sitting with my then girlfriend's parents at a small hotel room in the outskirts of Yaroslavl’, Russia. It was my first time in the country, and in this occasion I had been staying there for roughly one week. As we got around the low nightstand we improvised to be a dinner table, they were aware that my hunger never limited itself to food, and after presenting me to many sorts of Russian meals and sips of a strong homemade spirit, “samogon”, they finally brought in a white cardboard box. They told me it was a cake, and that it was called “ptich’e moloko”, which means “bird’s milk”. My ex mother-in-law rushed to tell me the story of this particular dessert, all while carefully slicing a brownish cubic piece and putting it on my plate. She told me that back in the Soviet Union, such cakes were the dream of many children and families, a dream that neither the price of 6 rubles – the average monthly salary was around 125 rubles in the 1980s – nor the long wait in a queue in Moscow could prevent it from being fulfilled. The cake gets its name from a Slavic saying: "Rich people can have anything but "bird’s milk'”. Standing up to the challenge, in the 1930s a Polish confectionery tried to fill this gap, and created the first version of what would later become the recipe I was being presented, made out of chocolate and milk soufflé. Suddenly, it seemed that what was lacking in order to make someone truly rich was within reach. A brief silence followed the explanation. I tasted my first bite. We could hear the howling wind outside, until my ex's father briefly posed: “you see, nowadays we can buy it in any supermarket… But it does not taste the same, the real one was better.” I have never tasted the Soviet “bird’s milk”, and as far as I can tell, for obvious reasons, I will never be able to. I can never truly grasp what life was really like in the Soviet Union, and why this cake and its taste could have such meaning to these people. That night though, trying this cake for the first time meant to me having a small bite of a whole lost way of life expectedly unknown to me, but alive to these people through such flavors and smells. Yes, the piece I tried was, indeed, tasty, but it seems that it was so because I could reach something else through it. We all know that trying new dishes is part of travelling. However, the cake made me realize how meaningful we can make such experiences, when one allows oneself to taste a place’s culture and history along with the food. With it, we can see through not just what people think about something that is unknown to us, but mainly how they feel about it. In my last days of this travel, I visited an antiquary. Its walls were crowded by Soviet memorabilia: Lenins of all shapes and sizes inhabited the shelves, and helmets and caps were there to remind us of the nation’s strong relation to its military past and present. I remembered the cake, and all this contemporary Russian connection with the Soviet Union made itself somewhat clearer. The “bird’s milk” turned out to be one of those few foods that makes you richer when you buy it, regardless how different they might taste