Kamchatka ahoy

I have been lucky in many ways. You can't choose which family you are born into. My parents were far from wealthy. My mother, however, was involved with estates. In the 1930s, she was the estate secretary on a thousand-hectare estate in Silesia. The table there was always richly laid. Good, fresh cuisine was celebrated there, from which all the employees benefited. There she not only learned to drive a carriage and, as a young unmarried woman, to defend herself against rebellious servants. She also refined her taste in the kitchen and cellar. And found great pleasure in brooding and baking bread.

I benefited from this passion, coupled with an openness to foreign cuisines, from an early age. My father, meanwhile, trained as a baker before the Second World War, then went to maritime school and spent the last 20 years of his life sailing around the world as a captain. So I was born with a passion for traveling and quality cuisine. In addition, my father had access to duty-free cigarettes and spirits on the ship and brought them home with him. So even as a teenager, I was able to treat friends to real Budweiser beer and Pommery for 10 German marks a bottle. We puffed away like world champions. I'm talking about the 70s here. Money was tight, but my mother was already flavoring her potato salad with canned Kamchatka crab ten years earlier. Also from dirt-cheap duty-free stocks. The delicate taste of the king crab legs, the colorful label on the can and, last but not least, the promising name Kamchatka had become so ingrained in my childhood brain that the peninsula in faraway Russia became a dream destination after I started working as a travel journalist and restaurant critic. In 2016, the time had finally come.

During a luxury cruise through the Sea of Okhotsk on the MS "Silver Discoverer", I found myself at the fish market in the capital Petropavlosk Kamchatski. There, the monster-like crabs were plentiful, but at a price per kilo that hardly differed from the local price. And where to boil them? Our ship's cook was forbidden to bring food from unlicensed outfitters into his realm. But thank goodness, he turned a blind eye. We pooled money with our Russian colleagues and a monster about a meter in diameter from one leg tip to the other ended up in the giant cooking pot. One of our colleagues dug deep into his pocket again and bought two kilos of pure crab meat. The evening feast was worthy of a tsar. The kitchen conjured up an opulent selection of typical Russian side dishes. The finest vodka flooded our throats every 5 minutes. In between, a glass or two of Roederer Cristal.

Just like a tsar.

Or to put it another way, an expression of Russian hospitality taken to imperial extremes. What remained? A head weighing tons the next morning, broken fingers from crab legs cracking and the bliss of having fulfilled a long-cherished dream in the finest possible way. That's as good as it gets
.