Just next to the Odessa Train station there is a huge, sprawling marketplace offering fresh produce, plastic shoes, Uzbek dried apricots, pink hair ornaments, just about anything that a happy Odessan could want. Including fish.
Especially fish. Above are pickled mussels sold by a Korean pickle seller. Well over a half million Koreans live in the former Soviet Union, where they are known as
Koryo-saram, and they have been there since the mid-19th century, mainly working as rice farmers. Through their influence, Russians are well acquainted with all kinds of radical
kimchee and korean
pickles - sea weed kimchee was available in every shop that sold fish, for example.
Koreans from Russia were the first to introduce communism into Korean politics, and one of Russia's most beloved rock stars,
Viktor Tsoi, was a Koryo-saram.
Kim Jong-Il, the
madman leader of North Korea, was born in the village of Vyatskoye near Khabarovsk, where his father, Kim Il-sung, commanded a battalion of the Soviet Red army, made up of Chinese and Korean exiles.
Sturgeon for sale. Russians and Ukrainians eat a lot of smoked sturgeon, and caviar is offered at every market, but this was the first time I saw whole sturgeon for sale. Sturgeon poaching for the illicit caviar trade is endangering populations in many areas, so I wasn't surprised that the sturgeon sellers weren't too happy about having their photograph taken. On the other hand, a jumping sturgeon almost
killed a woman in florida in April, so let's not get to sentimental about them. They can be
bad fish. 
Smoked fish. In American Jewish food tradition we retain a fondness for smoked fish in many forms - lox for our bagels, for instance, or "
smoked sable" which is essentially Alaskan black cod smoked in an almost perfect imitation of smoked sturgeon.
Smoked whitefish, which is a staple of New York's
Jewish "appetizing" shops, obviously has its Yiddish roots in the Odessa fish market. In the Ukraine, however, most of the fish are either mackeral, herring or various unsavory looking fresh water species. We bought one of these smoked babies (foreground) to take home and try out. It was incredibly salty and just about inedible. Of course I ate it all. But when it comes to inedible... there is always one more border to cross...
Dried fish, or
vobla is a common Russian snack.
Vobla is generally eaten with a glass of
beer, which balances the salty taste of the fish. Vobla could be considered as raw fish, but it is, in fact, salt-cured. It is soaked in brine for two weeks and then is thoroughly air-dried for another two, which in the end acts as a form of chemical cooking. As my buddy Igor explains it "
Vobla takes the role of chips when you drink beer." You strip bits of salty dried fish meat off the bones and chase it with a swig of beer. I bought a packet of pre-stripped
vobla and gave it a try... and gagged. It was...
incredibly... horrible. I met my match. I surrender.
Vobla wins. I still have two packages sitting in the kitchen waiting for some homesick Russian to show up at my door...
How about this: take the lowly pike, which confounds fish lovers by having delicious flesh but is riddled with lots of tiny Y-shaped bones... and give it the
vobla treatment. Mmmm... dried salty Y-shaped bones...
Basic pork butcher's offerings include blood sausage, bacon, pig's ears, and
salo, a raw pig fat delicacy that Ukrainian love. Living in Hungary I'm pretty well versed in the art of pig sushi, so I wasn't at all surprised. I'll write more later on the Ukrainian
cult of salo.
Free range chicken? And next to that, some very large hares.
Trucks offer live carp swimming in their tanks. The owner dips in a net, pulls one out, whacks it on the head with a club, and places it in a plastic bag. Often the carp are only stunned and jump to life while taking them home on the tram. Happened to me once in Budapest. I do not like carp much. At all. It is the number one fish consumed in eastern Europe, if not the world, but carp doesn't do it for me. Soft fatty flesh, tastes like mud, lots of floating Y-shaped bones. Basically, carp is a pig with fins. My opinion of carp can be summed up in one small linguistic pecadillo: the Romanian word for carp. Says it all...
Due to popular demand (well, popular in my view) I present the latest member of the growing Cohen Dynasty of Blogs: Dnieper Shlepper. I have created this as a separate blog page to host blogpost reports from my trip down the Dnieper River in the Ukraine in May 2007. All of these posts were originally published on my regular blog Dumneazu: Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere. 
The trip was also documented by a film crew from the National Film Board of Canada, who also maintain a blog about the event. The film crew included Canadian Film/Food Mastermind Barry Lazar, who really inspired me to document the unique flavors of the local chow... on film, at least. Concieved of and primarily organized by the prodigious Dolgin Family - especially DJ Socalled Josh Dolgin - a dozen or so of the world's best Klezmer musicians, and a delightful cast of travellers on the Klezmer Heritage Cruise from Kiev to Odessa in the Ukraine. I will soon add a few fresh postings to this blog on topics I left uncovered during my Ukrainian blog blitz of the spring. Enjoy...
Here is a $5 dinner: borscht, baked ribs, stewed cabbage, cabbage salad. I was worried about eating low carb meals in the Ukraine. Silly me.
Blintzes, which Fumie eats as an afternoon snack. Cheese filled with sour cream and berry preserves. These were called "blintzy" which will forever cause my appreciation of blintzes as a Jewish heritage food to be filled with mirth and frivololity. Blintzy! Blintzy! Blintzy!
Given that Ukrainians make about EU 130 a month on average, I can only wonder who it is that chows dowm on all the caviar sold in the market. Most of the jars contain salmon caviar from farm raised fish, but for $10 you can chow down on fish eggs for breakfast in an amount that would set you back about $200 in a japanese restaurant.
Horilka is the Ukrainian for vodka. And my, how people love their vodka. A bottle of pure grain based spirit was about $3, and as long as you didn't mix it with anything like beer or wine, one could wake up in the morning with virtually no hangover at all.
Duringt he Soviet era, the Jewish population of Odessa assimilated into Russian speakers - according to Prof. Dovid Katz, who did a survey of Yiddish dialects including Odessa, today there are very few old people who still speak Yiddish. Still, the Jewish presence is evident in even the street names: Jew Street.. a major downtown thoroughfare...
Just off of Jew Street was the main Synagogue. On a weekday, still used for Talmud Tora by what appears to be a Chabad Lubavitch dominated congregation. 
The old Jewish quarter, the Moldovanka, the focus of so much Yiddish song (In Ades, in Ades, af di Moldovanka/ Ikh hob gelibt a meydele, a greyser charlatanke!) is no longer what it once was. Most folk under the age of seventy could not even tell you where the neighborhood was. 
Eric, Drorit, yours truly, and Fumie in front of the old Synagogue.
Jewish identity need not be a matter of solemn reflection and good taste. In the Odessa Jewish musuem we found what appeared to be a dancing Santa Claus doll dressed as a hasid, mechanically davening at the entrance to the Museum. Yes, this is the museum run by the Odessa Jewish community. You often find odd takes on Jewishness among assimilated Jewish communities in East Europe... one man's offensiveness is just another man's kitsch.
Lunch was to be had at a small working class cafeteria... including pelmeni, which are small meat filled dumplings. Usually, in the Ukraine, these are larger and called vareniky, but such is the stubborn Russophilic identity of Odessa...
Strolling around town, one gets a truly mediteranean feeling. The architecture is glorious...
But the dancing hasid dummy... you have to see this in action. I actually did a shakey pan shot around the museum just to prove that this thing actually is an exhibit in the Odessa Jewish Museum. This clip actually was a Youtube hit when I first posted it...
On the other hand, throughout its history Odessa has been a strong player in the Russification of the former Tatar lands of Novorossiya, and the result is that today there are very few speakers of Yiddish in Odessa. The Jews of Odessa mostly spoke Russian after the 1920s. And they made songs in Russian. Especially Jewish gangster songs. Such as the well known Odessa tune “Lemonchiki”
Being on a low-carb eating regimen means that I don't get hungry easily, but it had been a while since I had really filled my belly and this was obviously the way to do that. I ordered a double portion of lamb 
Fumie needs her Asian noodle soups, and this is as far west as we can get and still call this an Asian noodle soup. Thick noodles in a stewed lamb broth with eggplant and vegatables. Not content to remain seated in meat heaven, I nosed around the back and found an outdoor oven baking the unique Uzbek version of burek called samosa. Nothing at all like an Indian samosa, these were triangular bureks filled with ground lamb or cheese.
Shashlik stand, Odessa. A tin shack in the back of the junk market behind the vegetable market. Turkish karaoke blaring at full volume.
Aha! Now I know where they come from! 
Bakhchisaray was the capitol of the Tatar Khanate, and is the location of the Great Palace of the Tatar Khans, the Hansaray. Preserved in no small part because of a fountain that inspired a poem by Pushkin, the building was a beautiful example of Ottoman architecture.
We started to get a bit impatient with our guided tour - in Russia, you don't just wander around museums. No. There is a defined set way to experience a museum, and your tour guide will explain this to you. You will spend twenty minutes in this room. You will regard the ornaments on the wall, you will not wander off, you will not sit down. So we escaped, and found that the entire municipality of Bachiksaray was celebrating Soviet Victory day in the courtyard of the palace.
And what is Soviet Victory Day without the March of the Much Decorated Veterans! 
When you ask to take one's photograph, they will pose with grace and pride - and usually offer to tell you then and there what they did to earn these decorations, even if you speak no Russian at all... 
And among them, the Afghantsi, the hardened veterans of the USSR's own war in Afghanistan. 
But all around - smiles and flowers for the foriegn visitors lucky enough to visit on such a proud holiday. We were treated like rock stars by the schoolchildren eager to practice their English on us. 
Being with a guided tour, we couldn't spend as much time as we would have liked in Bachiksaray... but if I had to choose a place to return to, this would be it. 