T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia and the Russian Far East (Volume 5) (Great American Cooking Series)

Finalist for the 2019 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, Silk Road Category

You can eat very well in Siberia. That's right. Forget the stereotypes of seal blubber and reindeer balls in Russia's icy north. People living in Siberian cities today have a wide range of food products available—and know how to turn them into delectable dishes, from colorful soups and salads to sophisticated desserts.
 
T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks is the first cookbook in America to focus on the foods of the Asian side of Russia, a vast area covering eight time zones and encompassing both Siberia and Russia's Far East. It's also a land of contrasts—from modern cities to log-cabin villages, from dense forests to treeless tundra, arid steppes to snow-capped mountains, steamy swamps to fuming volcanoes, rugged seacoasts to legendary Lake Baikal.
 
This unique cookbook is filled with fascinating food history, cultural insights, and personal stories about the culinary adventures of two intrepid Texans who lived, worked, traveled in—and ate their way around—the Asian side of Russia. The author vividly describes the memorable meals that she and her husband enjoyed at the apartments of Russian friends in Soviet-era high-rises, at new restaurants and ancient festivals, on boats and on picnics, at remote little dachas in the lush green forests near the Russian-Chinese border, with the Buryat-Mongolians living in southern Siberia, and along thousands of miles of the Trans-Siberian Railroad tracks.
 
Featuring 140 traditional and modern recipes, T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks includes dozens of regional recipes from cooks in Asian Russia, along with recipes for the European and Tex-Mex dishes that the author and her husband cooked on the "Stoves-from-Hell" in their three Russian apartments, for intimate candlelight dinners during the dark Siberian winter and for lavish parties throughout the year.
 
You'll find recipes for classic Russian New Year's fare, spring festival foods, traditional Russian Easter desserts, and the East Asian dishes adopted by Russians living in that part of the world. You'll learn how to make fresh seafood dishes from Russia's Far East, venison-blueberry dumplings from Siberia, "The Captain's Meat" from Vladivostok, pine nut meringues and frozen cranberry cream from Irkutsk, enticing appetizers from the dining car of a Trans-Siberian luxury train, and flaming "Baked Siberia" (the Russian twist on Baked Alaska) from "the land of fire and ice." And here's the bonus: All of these recipes can be made with ingredients from your local supermarket or your nearest delicatessen.
 
So join these two Texans on a culinary adventure through the Asian side of Russia—and discover how well you can eat in Siberia and the Russian Far East.

SHARON HUDGINS is the author of five books, including an award-winning cookbook about the regional cuisines of Spain and a travel memoir, The Other Side of Russia. A former professor with the University of Maryland’s program in Russia, she has also been a National Geographic Expert on Trans-Siberian Railroad tours. TOM HUDGINS is an economics professor and accomplished cook. They live in north Texas.