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Vanessa Anderson is the Grocery Goblin, on a mission to discover neighborhood grocery shops all through Southern California.
If the Valley had been an ocean, and it usually feels as huge as one, then its sunken treasure is unquestionably discovered within the bulk sections of its Russian grocery shops.
There, instead of dried cherries and slivered almonds, lie 1000’s of individually packaged goodies. In shades of violet and vermilion they glitter like jewels below beams of sunshine, every with an intricately designed wrapper and a narrative to inform.
My Russian fluency begins and ends with “cheers,” however fortunate for me, iconography isn’t any stranger within the Russian grocery retailer. Take Odessa Grocery in Valley Village, for instance. Right here one might forged a kids’s image ebook by merely pacing the aisles. Butter, biscuits, condensed milk, every part appears to have a mascot.
The majority part isn’t any exception. The folktales on the chocolate wrappers are attention-grabbing sufficient, however the lore they’ve created for many who grew up with them may be a folktale of its personal.
“Little Red Riding Hood, that’s the candy we had as children.” says Tatiana Rosinskaya from her submit behind the chilly case, her face framed by piles of piroshki and bricks of salt-cured pork. She’s referring to a chocolate-covered wafer with an illustration of the people heroine featured prominently on the entrance.
Golden Cockerel goodies at Odessa Grocery in Valley Village, Calif.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Instances)
Take into account the Golden Cockerel, an orange praline with a darkish chocolate glaze, impressed by Alexander Pushkin’s poem of the identical title.
“This is not a fairy tale, this is a painting,” says shopper Sveta (who most well-liked offering solely her first title) as she plucks a blue confection from the pile and holds it between her elegant fingernails. On it, a tiny portray of 4 bears within the forest. “Shishkin painted this,” she says, referring to the well-known portray “Morning in a Pine Forest” by Ivan Shishkin and Konstantin Savitsky. One can see the similarities, however within the reproduced sweet model the bears are fuller, fluffier and extra playful.
The majority chocolate bins at Odessa Grocery in Valley Village showcase a trove of candies whose wrappers are impressed by fairy tales and people artwork. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Instances)
Rosinskaya is from Saratov, Russia, and has reminiscences of a close-by sweet manufacturing unit in Samara. However so far as sweet producers go, her clearest reminiscence is of Красный Октябрь or “Red October,” headquartered in Moscow, with Wonka ranges of renown.
Purple October is accountable for a slew of treats, none extra well-known than Alenka.
Initially created when the corporate received a Soviet authorities contract within the Sixties to create an reasonably priced milk chocolate simply reproducible for the plenty, Alenka is acknowledged extra for its packaging than its taste. Its signature blue-eyed child wrapped in a scarf was later revealed to be Elena Gerinas whose father Aleksandr took the photograph again in 1962. Gerinas misplaced a authorized battle searching for compensation for rights to the picture, which to this present day stays an icon of the aisles.
Alenka candies’ signature blue-eyed child wrapped in a scarf is an iconic Russian sweet, courting to the Sixties. The face on the wrapper was later revealed to be Elena Gerinas, whose father took her photograph.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Instances)
Not all grocery shops within the Valley’s Russian enclave are solely Russian, and the identical may be mentioned for his or her patrons. Households from all around the former Soviet Union — Uzbekistani, Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian people — store at Odessa, which itself is known as after a metropolis in Ukraine.
The candies comply with swimsuit, none extra fittingly than hazelnut praline Kara-Kum named for the desert that covers 70% of Turkmenistan. On the wrapper, 5 camels trip into beige oblivion below a golden solar.
Hazelnut praline Kara-Kum is known as for the huge desert of Turkmenistan. Its wrapper is adorned with camels.
(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Instances)
“We left when they kicked us out,” Sveta says, when requested about coming to America from Uzbekistan.
“It also started like that in Ukraine, they said Russians go to Russia, Jews go to Israel, Armenians go to Armenia. We lived in a very international city, lots of different types of people.”
These candies maintain nostalgia for the primary technology too, Bella Sosis tells me. She was born in Chicago to Ukrainian dad and mom, and Batonchik, a chocolate roll stuffed with powdered milk and crushed wafers, was a favourite in her home. She picks one off the shelf and smiles at it like an previous pal.
“Honestly, they aren’t my favorite sweets. The chocolate flavor in a lot of these candies isn’t intense. Because chocolate is expensive, it’s cut with milk powder, sugar, stuff like that,” she tells me. “But I do like to eat them because they help me understand my dad’s childhood experience a little bit.”
“I think a lot of these illustrations are meant to serve as escapism of sorts,” her sister Ari chimes in.
“Yeah,” Bella responds. “You get lost in the story and it elevates the chocolate, which itself isn’t rich or luxurious.”
Holding up a Golden Cockerel, she provides: “When we were growing up my parents would eat the candy inside then re-wrap them so they looked just like this.”
(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Instances)
