Dining on Rails
Eating on a long train journey can be a source of great excitement. There are three options as far as obtaining food is concerned. You can bring provisions with you, you can buy food on the platform during the longer stops (some are up to 40 minutes) or you can eat in the restaurant car.
The Russian restaurant cars we visited had a lengthy menu containing such delicacies as ‘whole baked trout’. On quizzing the waiter it appeared that only one or two of the dishes were actually available and the prices were too high for our meagre budget anyway. Every time I passed through the restaurant car to pick up some beer, it is occupied only by staff so it would appear that we were not the only ones to come to this conclusion.
Our favoured provisions for the train in Russia were flavoured instant mashed potato pots fortified with chunks of cheese and salami and instant noodles made edible with the addition of a generous helping of chilli sauce.
As for platform food is concerned, it is possible to pick up the usual provisions, noodles, biscuits, crisps, beer and soft drinks but the best stuff is to be had from the Babushkas
who plant their baskets at the carriage door when the train stops. They sell a number of home made snacks including savoury doughnuts filled with either potato or shredded cabbage, meat patties (often mixed with rice) and fish prepared in a number of ways. The fish vary from enormous carp to small dried silver fish and squid which are good with beer.
A jar of gherkins is a useful thing to have on standby (goes well with vodka) and so is a bar of chocolate (Russian chocolate is very good). The straight faced man we shared a compartment with between Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk lit up when we offered him some ‘Red October’ chocolate. He’d earlier declined our offers of biscuits and gherkins. He did, however, open our jar of gherkins for us. After seeing us struggle with it for ten minutes he took the jar off us and disappeared. When he returned he put the opened jar on the table and whispered a triumphant pazhalsta!