Zemlenika Diet - 2005

"The Zemlenika Diet" was written on July 16, 2005. Once again, I write about food.


I'm trying the Russian "zemlenika diet." For two weeks you're supposed to eat nothing but zemlenika berries -- but you can eat as many as you want. Zemlenika translates as "earth berry." They look like wild strawberries to me, however I'm assured that they are not. You can put 18 of them on a teaspoon -- I counted once.

Zemlenikas are not sold in stores. They're only available from little old ladies who sell them by the cupful on the street. It must be exhausting labor to find these wild berries, and carefully place them in a cup. If you stare at them hard, they begin to spoil right away.

The season for zemlenika is very short -- about two weeks actually. So you have to be ready for the zemlenika diet as soon as they appear.

Slava tried to sell me on his enthusiasm for the zemlenika diet, which guarantees good digestive health for a whole year. This guarantee comes by way of hearsay; I doubt that anyone actually knows anyone who actually went on the strict zemlenika diet. I found a practical problem in that we can't really get many zemlenikas at a time, and I didn't like the idea of going hungry for two weeks. Slava and I compromised. We eat a bowl of zemlenikas twice a day, once before breakfast, and once before bed. That way we're having zemlenikas on an empty stomach, which ought to do some good, don't you think?

Speaking of food, I had a small disaster in the kitchen today. It had been my intent to make "varennia," which is something like fruit preserves. There were quarts and quarts of black currents in the freezer that had come from our dacha. Slava doesn't like eating them plain, so I was making varennia.

Instead of granulated sugar, I decided to use up a small supply of confectioner's sugar that I had brought from the U.S. some time ago. Sugar is sugar, and I didn't anticipate having any problem. But when I added a cup of confectioner's sugar to the three cups of cooked currents, instantly I got a pound of purple cement. It turns out that the "confectioner's sugar" was actually cornstarch.

I told this tale of woe to my friend Irina. She recognized that cornstarch is a thickening agent much like the potato flour that Russians use as a thickening agent. Potato flour and berries and sugar and water make "kisel," a pudding-like dessert. So tomorrow I'm going to find out how much water a person has to add to re-liquify soupy cement. Then I'll find out if it passes the taste test with Slava. It probably won't seem quite like the Russian dessert to him. I found out long ago that in similar circumstances he assumes my culinary mistake is an unfamiliar American dish. One way or another, he's in for a surprise.