The traditional Russian meal (obed) revolves around a first hot liquid course — soup (pervoe), the nourishing foundation of every table, from palace to worker's home — followed by a second course of cereal porridge or pasta (vtoroe), accompanied by ever-present black bread. Everything ends and warms up around the samovar, where tea flows endlessly from morning to night. Among revolutionaries in exile like Kollontai, this structure was reduced to the essentials: a soup, a kasha, bread, and tea that united comrades for discussions until dawn.

Two pillars of the Russian table that wealth could not gentrify: the roasted buckwheat grain, robust and earthy, and the cabbage soured by lacto-fermentation, which brought acidity and vitamin C to long winters. These two democratic foods, from peasantry to revolutionary committees, were those of a woman who despised bourgeois luxury.