Soup to Nettles.(The Talk of the Town)('A Gift to Young Housewives, or the Means of Lowering Household Expenses')

In 1861, the year Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs, Elena Molokhovets published her domestic bible, "A Gift to Young Housewives, or the Means of Lowering Household Expenses." She explained how to feed the servants, how to pick the freshest meat, how to measure precisely in a culture that still cooked by instinct, how to plan six hundred meals of varying attendance, cost, and life-cycle significance. (A breakfast for one's name day, for example, should include a turkey galantine, a cold French pate, a well-sauced duck or goose, beef tongue, fried foul, rice, radishes, two salads, pastries, coffee, rum, and, of course, more pate.) A half century later, by the time the Bolsheviks had overthrown Alexander's heirs, the book had been printed in thirty-odd editions, most of them overseen by Molokhovets herself, all while rearing ten children, writing religious tracts, and running her own hearth with utmost efficiency.

The once ubiquitous and bourgeois "Gift to Young Housewives" all but disappeared in Soviet times, but it resurfaced this summer in Red Hook. Valerie Stivers-Isakova, a young, American, and very pregnant housewife, received it as a gift from the mother of her Russian-born husband, Ivan. Inspired, Stivers-Isakova, a writer, decided to have a Molokhovets-themed dinner party.

First, the menu. For a June dinner "of the first order," Molokhovets recommends starting with a soup of pureed game or wild mushrooms, accompanied by "strong Spanish wines," lobster-stuffed pastries, and pirozhki with brains, "served in their shells." The dinner should then proceed through eight more courses: filet of beef with a knockwurst butter paired with a nice Saint-Julien or a warmed Lafite; sturgeon and potatoes served with a Sauternes or a Chablis; young carrots, turnips, potatoes, and cabbage in a cream sauce, "divided on the platter with strips of pastry"; lobster souffle; a wild-strawberry Imperial punch; braised capon stuffed with liver and truffles; strawberry ice cream; and, finally, berries with black coffee, tea, and cognac.

After hours of translation, Stivers-Isakova decided to ditch the vegetable dish with what she termed "fancy dough receptacles." She also figured that she was inviting too many vegetarians to serve so much meat. In the end, she said, "I decided to go for the spirit of the thing."

She started with the poultry. "We tried to make the veal-stuffed duck, and it was a total disaster! We deboned it, we even sewed it closed, and it just came out looking ridiculous," Stivers-Isakova recalled, posing, elbows out, in ...