The bulk bins overflow with thousands of chocolates — and memories — at this Russian market
If the Valley were an ocean, and it often feels as vast as one, then its sunken treasure is surely found in the bulk sections of its Russian grocery stores.
There, in place of dried cherries and slivered almonds, lie thousands of individually packaged chocolates. In shades of violet and vermilion they glitter like jewels under beams of light, each with an intricately designed wrapper and a story to tell.
My Russian fluency starts and ends with 'cheers,' but lucky for me, iconography is no stranger in the Russian grocery store. Take Odessa Grocery in Valley Village, for example. Here one could cast a children's picture book by simply pacing the aisles. Butter, biscuits, condensed milk, everything seems to have a mascot.
The bulk section is no exception. The folktales on the chocolate wrappers are interesting enough, but the lore they've created for those who grew up with them may just be a folktale of its own.
'Little Red Riding Hood, that's the candy we had as children.' says Tatiana Rosinskaya from her post behind the cold 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 folk heroine featured prominently on the front.
Consider the Golden Cockerel, an orange praline with a dark chocolate glaze, inspired by Alexander Pushkin's poem of the same name.
'This is not a fairy tale, this is a painting,' says shopper Sveta (who preferred providing only her first name) as she plucks a blue confection from the pile and holds it between her elegant fingernails. On it, a tiny painting of four bears in the forest. 'Shishkin painted this,' she says, referring to the famous painting 'Morning in a Pine Forest' by Ivan Shishkin and Konstantin Savitsky. One can see the similarities, but in the reproduced candy version the bears are fuller, fluffier and more playful.
Rosinskaya is from Saratov, Russia, and has memories of a nearby candy factory in Samara. But as far as candy manufacturers go, her clearest memory is of Красный Октябрь or 'Red October,' headquartered in Moscow, with Wonka levels of renown.
Red October is responsible for a slew of treats, none more famous than Alenka.
Initially created when the company won a Soviet government contract in the 1960s to create an affordable milk chocolate easily reproducible for the masses, Alenka is recognized more for its packaging than its flavor. Its signature blue-eyed baby wrapped in a headscarf was later revealed to be Elena Gerinas whose father Aleksandr took the photo back in 1962. Gerinas lost a legal battle seeking compensation for rights to the image, which to this day remains an icon of the aisles.
Not all grocery stores in the Valley's Russian enclave are exclusively Russian, and the same can be said for their patrons. Families from all over the former Soviet Union — Uzbekistani, Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian folks — shop at Odessa, which itself is named after a city in Ukraine.
The candies follow suit, none more fittingly than hazelnut praline Kara-Kum named for the desert that covers 70% of Turkmenistan. On the wrapper, five camels ride into beige oblivion under a golden sun.
'We left when they kicked us out,' Sveta says, when asked 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 hold nostalgia for the first generation too, Bella Sosis tells me. She was born in Chicago to Ukrainian parents, and Batonchik, a chocolate roll filled with powdered milk and crushed wafers, was a favorite in her house. She picks one off the shelf and smiles at it like an old friend.
'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 adds: 'When we were growing up my parents would eat the candy inside then re-wrap them so they looked just like this.'
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