“What queer beefsteak!” said one of our Russian friends.  “Is there no other meat?”

“No, madam.”

We all looked at it for several minutes.  We said it was natural, when invalids drank from three to five bottles of the nourishing kumys a day, that they should not require much extra food, and that the management provided what variety was healthy and advisable, no doubt; only we would have liked a choice; and—­what queer steak!

The first sniff, the first glance at that steak, of peculiar grain and dark red hue, had revealed the truth to us.  But we saw that our Russian friends were not initiated, and we knew that their stomachs were delicate.  We exchanged signals, took a mouthful, declared it excellent, and ate bravely through our portions.  The Russians followed our example.  Well—­it was much tenderer and better than the last horseflesh to which we had been treated surreptitiously; but I do not crave horseflesh as a regular diet.  It really was not surprising at a kumys establishment, where the horse is worshiped, alive or dead, apparently, in Tatar fashion.

That afternoon we made it convenient to take our dinner in town, on the veranda of a restaurant which overlooked the busy Volga, with its mobile moods of sunset and thunderstorm, where we compensated ourselves for our unsatisfactory breakfast by a characteristically Russian dinner, of which I will omit details, except as regards the soup.  This soup was botvinya.  A Russian once obligingly furnished me with a description of a foreigner’s probable views on this national delicacy:  “a slimy pool with a rock in the middle, and creatures floating round about.”  The rock is a lump of ice (botvinya being a cold soup) in the tureen of strained kvas or sour cabbage. Kvas is the sour, fermented liquor made from black bread.  In this liquid portion of the soup, which is colored with strained spinach, floated small cubes of fresh cucumber and bits of the green tops from young onions.  The solid part of the soup, served on a platter, so that each person might mix the ingredients according to his taste, consisted of cold boiled sterlet, raw ham, more cubes of cucumber, more bits of green onion tops, lettuce, crayfish, grated horseradish, and granulated sugar.  The first time I encountered this really delectable dish, it was served with salmon, the pale, insipid northern salmon.  I supposed that the lazy waiter had brought the soup and fish courses together, to save himself trouble, and I ate them separately, while I meditated a rebuke to the waiter and a strong description of the weak soup.  The tables were turned on me, however, when Mikhei appeared and grinned, as broadly as his not overstrict sense of propriety permitted, at my unparalleled ignorance, while he gave me a lesson in the composition of botvinya.  That botvinya was not good, but this edition of it on the banks of the Volga, with sterlet, was delicious.