Current Moscow Time: 06:24:0120 May 2013
The world’s biggest country, in a magazine. Since 1956.
Train Fare
Author: Darra Goldstein
Russian Life: Jul/Aug 2005
Department: Cuisine
Page: 61 ( 2) pages
Summary: A short look at the history of fare aboard the Trans-Siberian railway, with a recipe for pelmeny you can prepare between stops...
In 1901 the intrepid American traveler Burton Holmes crossed Russia on the Trans Siberian Railway, then still under construction. His travel notes reveal that although the dining car was "a stuffy little affair" and the meals "badly served," they were "surprisingly well-cooked and appetizing; good bread, excellent veal, and hearty soups, sometimes frappés, with a clinking cake of ice floating on their chill depths, sometimes seething hot, with a hunk of steaming beef rising from them like a volcanic island."
Hyperbole aside, it's clear that Holmes was able to eat well as he traversed the steppe. But things were different in 1983 when my husband and I traveled on the Trans Siberian from Moscow to Beijing....