Читать книгу Nine Rabbits - Virginia Zaharieva - Страница 11

Baked Rabbit

I liked my Uncle Klemo much better than my Aunt Maruna, who really annoyed me. Klemo took after Grandpa, he’d inherited his blue eyes and he and my mom were a team. When he and Maruna came back on weekends from the boarding school in Burgas, we’d go to the movies, not that there was any great selection. They always showed Mr. Pitkin, Parts 1 and 2. It was a comedy, and the only part I remember is the scene where Mr. Pitkin dresses up as a nurse and tries to walk in high heels. Dressed up in my mother’s nursing coat and her size 41 clodhoppers, my uncle would imitate that scene so brilliantly. We’d roll on the ground, stomping our feet and peeing ourselves with laughter. Grandma, too. It was funnier than in the film.

At that time, Klemo and Maruna had just taken up smoking. When they came back home, they would sneak cigarettes amongst the cornflowers at the far end of the yard near my turtles. I kept their secret, but blackmailed them into buying me candied fruit. Once, Rufi and I found a kitten and secretly kept it up in the attic because Grandma didn’t want us coddling any animals inside the house—she’d had enough with my grandpa’s stupid wolfhounds. I showed the cat to my uncle, and he grew silent and angry. He told me to forget about the kitten and took it away to Burgas. There was no one I could complain to, but he made me so mad that I tattled on him to Grandma for smoking.

God, all hell broke loose the next time he came home. The whole house shook with their stomping and shouts. Grandma chased him with a dustpan; you could hear the dull ring of metal hitting bone. Klemo howled, while Nikula’s voice pierced the din.

“You worthless brat, yesterday’s turd. So you’re smoking on me, are you? Just like that rapscallion, your father! I raised you from a mere slab of flesh,” she screamed, laying into him. “Now you’re gonna poison yourself. Once you’re earning your own money, go ahead and buy shit for all I care, but don’t you dare buy tobacco with my money!”

I listened to the uproar with satisfaction, since for once somebody besides me was getting a thrashing, but I soon felt sorry for my uncle and began to get scared. It was dangerous to unleash Nikula’s fury. I had just breathed a sigh of relief that the attack seemed to be tapering off when the dustpan came down hard on my back.

“Whyyyyyy,” I screamed as I writhed at her feet.

“So you learn not to tattle, you worthless brat!”

Thus my grandmother concluded our lesson for that evening and disappeared behind the curtain by the kitchen sink, where she rattled the dishes around for quite some time. After such campaigns, she would let off steam with cleaning.

After a week, I made up with my uncle. I apologized for ratting him out and he told me the following story. Once, in Czechoslovakia, after many unsuccessful attempts, he finally managed to sweet-talk Nikula into letting him adopt two small kittens. They named them Topsy and Mopsy, and they soon grew into magnificent cats, everybody’s darlings, especially Nikula’s. They adored her and would wallow in her lap for hours in the evening. For Christmas, the family slaughtered a pig, made sausages, and put them in the cellar to ripen. Somebody left the cellar door open, and Topsy and Mopsy snuck in, gobbled up whatever they could, chewed on the rest and then escaped.

Nikula discovered the damage but didn’t say anything, which wasn’t a good sign. Instead, she threw away the remains of the sausage and rattled around the kitchen, sunk in a deep silence. Topsy and Mopsy were nowhere to be seen. The next day, the whole family gathered for dinner. The delicious aromas of baked rabbit and apricot dumplings wafted from the kitchen.

This fragrant dinner lightened up the gloomy atmosphere of the preceding days. They ate and drank, and at one point Boris asked: “Well now, woman, where are Topsy and Mopsy?”

“How should I know? They ran away, like the devil’s spawn they are. How could they dare come back now,” my grandma replied angrily.

Boris pushed the food around on his plate and set down his fork. The children followed him closely with their eyes. All at once, the whole gang realized what had happened and rushed outside en masse to throw up in the yard. They went to bed hungry; the next day they had dumplings for breakfast and slunk away silently.

Grandma tossed out the pan of “rabbits,” but a month later she appeared in a leather vest, lined with fur on the inside since, of course, cat-fur vests work wonders for a sore lower back.

“You know her favorite cat-fur vest? The one she never parts with,” Klemo asked, finishing off his story.

How could I not know it? I had worn it myself.

“So now do you see why I let the kitten go?”

And Hollywood tries to give me their Addams Family. What a joke!

Potato Dumplings with Fruit

Boil the potatoes in the evening, and on the next day peel them and grate them using a fine grater. Add two eggs, flour, and a bit of semolina to make dough that won’t stick to your hands. Form it into small balls wrapped around the pitted fruit. Bring salted water to a boil, then stretch cheesecloth across the pot and secure it with an elastic band. Place four to five dumplings on top of the cheesecloth and cover with a lid. Steam the dumplings for 20-25 minutes. Dissolve cinnamon and sugar in butter and pour the sauce over the finished dumplings, or add poppy seeds and sugar to the butter as desired.

Dumplings with Yeast

Take one packet of dry yeast, one cup of flour, one cup of semolina, one cup of milk, one egg, and one tablespoon sugar.

Mix the yeast, sugar, several spoonfuls of warm milk, and one to two spoonfuls of flour and set aside to allow the mixture to rise. Once it has risen, add the remaining flour and semolina. Stir the egg and a pinch of salt into the remaining milk and add it to the mixture. Knead the stiff dough and let it rise for an hour. Then, knead it again and shape it into a long loaf. Cut it into three or four pieces like small rolls. Wrap them in a clean towel and let them rise for twenty minutes. Drop them into boiling salted water and let them cook for five minutes covered with a lid. Then remove the lid, flip the dumplings over, and finish boiling them in an open pot for five more minutes. After removing them from the pot, pierce the boiled dumplings in several places and cut them into slices with a strong thread. Serve them with roasted meat, gravy, and oven-baked cabbage. As with the potato dumplings, you can wrap fruit in the dough and drizzle it with butter, sugar and cinnamon, or poppy seeds.