Toasted buckwheat groats, plumped in water until tender and fluffy, bound with butter and lifted by mushrooms and golden onions. A brown, earthy, comforting dish that sticks to the ribs.

Why this dish? Buckwheat, gretchka, is the staple food of everyday Soviet life: cheap, nourishing, always there when the shelves were bare. It's the dish of the queues and communal kitchens that Schnittke knew as a student and later as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

In Moscow, you didn't choose your dinner: you took what there was, and there was always gretchka. My mother, who spoke German before Russian, would dry-toast it in the pan to wake up its nutty smell before adding water—a small gesture that changes everything. You add the mushrooms, the onion fried golden in butter, and this poor man's dish suddenly becomes rich, almost grave. I've always thought that simple material, well treated, carries further than rare material badly written.

How it was made : In communal kitchens (kommunalka) and canteens, buckwheat was often cooked in water alone, butter and mushrooms being occasional luxuries. The grains were toasted to extract maximum flavor with minimum ingredients—a typical economy of means of the era.

The contemporary twist : Serve as a 'kasha bowl' with a soft-boiled egg and fresh herbs: the scarcity dish becomes a bistro plate.

Alfred Schnittke · Charactorium