Aspic: Traditional Recipe for Tears

A WRITER'S WIT
American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation.
Herbert Croly
Born January 23, 1869

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Bianca Bagnarelli

January 25, 2016, Tatyana Tolstaya, “Aspic”: The narrator, a contemporary denizen of St. Petersburg, Russia, prepares the ancient, ritualistic, and gelatinous recipe for aspic. ¶ In the second-person account in which she addresses herself, she muses over the ancient tradition requiring hooves or even muzzles of particular animals. It is a tradition she traces back to pre-czar leaders like “Truvor, who, as it turns out, never even existed” (59)—making the reader ponder the origin of any tradition. The author employs a certain personification of the animal parts involved to sensitize the reader to this pointlessness of tradition: “The chopped-up legs . . . [t]hey’ll twitch, break free, and run away, clacking across the ceramic tile: clippity-clop . . . .” (59). Then our narrator takes us step-by-step through the six-hour ordeal/joy of preparing aspic, at the end of which you take “the bowls and plates out to the balcony, cover the coffins with lids, stretch some plastic wrap over them, and wait” (59). She remains outside, crying, for this is a New Year’s tradition, a time for all the ugly aspects of the old year to fall away, like the tears from her face. Tolstaya's novel, The Slynx, came out in 2007.
Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli.

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