Seventy Percent

There is a certain stereotype which most Americans hold in regard to Russia. They think that Russia tends to build things that are cold and gray, with a blockish and industrial look. They think that Russian products, business, foreign policy, and even culture are not known for their use of a graceful, gentle touch, but rather for a certain heavy handed forcefulness.

I don't plan to dispel that stereotype with this blog post. I may even take pleasure in spreading it a bit.

Yesterday we made a cake for one of the church members, who was having a birthday. Gerethle and I needed to go to the market to get some things (many things) which the recipe called for, including vanilla (which I had never seen here) and buttermilk (which I had never seen here).
Surprisingly, we succeeded in getting the vanilla. I bought a bottle of expired Mexican vanillin with traces of vanilla extract for an arm and a leg ($5). The other things were, unfortunately, simply not to be had.
We did get the other things we needed though. In addition to Mongolian eggs and butter we got Russian condensed milk, Indonesian shredded coconut, American flour, Indian sugar, German chocolate and whipped cream from some eastern-european country who's language I can't identify. It is easy to tell where things are from here, because the packages are usually labeled in the language of their country of origin. Mongolians are experts at going through life without understanding half the stuff they read (like, for instance, all the popup messages and warnings on computers, but that's another topic).

We got home and assembled the spoils of our conquest on the kitchen table. I looked over the recipe, and wondered why on earth I had chosen it. It was for a terribly complicated German chocolate cake involving things that needed to be melted, things that needed to be stirred, things that needed to be separated in unnatural ways... and whipped egg whites.
Gerethle said we should double the recipe, so we did. I began giving instructions to her and the other church members gathered there, spending half my time with a pen and paper as I went from English to Metric and then doubled everything. They were unfamiliar with the basic style of American recipes, and I had to explain that a "cup" meant neither a "heaping cup" nor "a cup with however much you want to put in", but rather a "cup" neatly leveled with a finger or knife edge.
As they watched various bowls of things being mixed, some of them looked at me in slight consternation. "Have you ever made a cake before?" they asked.
"Yes, of course, several" I said. I deliberately left out the fact that by "several" I meant "three", and that all of them had been about ten years before.
Halfway through the recipe, when the kitchen was in full disarray with every horizontal surface covered in bowls, we came to "two cups buttermilk". Since the recipe used baking soda instead of baking powder I assumed the buttermilk was needed to change the pH of the cake (when science majors bake this is how we think). I looked up "buttermilk substitute" on the internet and found that it is quite easy to make. Simply add a tablespoon of vinegar to a cup of milk, and you have buttermilk substitute.
I went to the school kitchen and got some Russian vinegar. The Mongolians looked at me wide eyed with disbelief as I carefully measured a full tablespoon of vinegar and put it into the milk. "Have you ever made a cake before?" they asked again. "Yes, I have" I said. Again.
The milk instantly curdled, smelling strongly of vinegar. I dumped the milk into the correct bowl (the one with the chocolate, egg yolks, vanilla and butter) then did it again.
I began to get a feeling that this may have been a mistake. The kitchen filled with the smell of vinegar, which was odd. A drop of vinegar had dropped on Gerethle's skin, and she immediately ran to the sink, holding her hand under the water as if she had burned it. This too was odd. I picked up the bottle, scanning the Russian words for anything I could understand. Then I saw it.

70% acetic acid.

Wow. Wow wow wow wow wow. 70% acetic acid will burn your skin (or, if you prefer, dissolve rocks). Almost all American vinegar is five percent or less. I tasted the bowl of cake batter that I had poured the two tablespoons of vinegar into. It tasted like salt and vinegar chips, only with chocolate and egg yolks.
The Mongolians insisted that we continue, saying it would be interesting (and not wanting to waste the $10 worth of stuff in that bowl). Sighing, I told them to toss it out. It was hopeless.

After a few more mistakes involving mental English to Metric conversions we finally succeeded in making a very nice cake. Only six people showed up for the "birthday party" (meaning six people showed up to sit around and eat cake), but it was fun.

Still, I fail to understand the Russian mindset on food products. SEVENTY PERCENT?! Are we talking about something for salad dressing, or are we talking about something used to dissolve the corpses of people killed by the mafia? Maybe they just want to make sure that anyone can dissolve corpses if they really need to.