Issue 15: Rhubarb & cream cheese buns + The Tiger
Danish-like buns using seasonal rhubarb and a non-fiction book about a tiger attack in Siberia
Welcome to Good Book/Good Bread! Every two weeks, I recommend a book I love, and bake a delicious bread that fits with an aspect of the story.
Part 1: Good Book
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant (2011)
Setting the tone
Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio, here.
In a nutshell
In December of 1997, a tiger kills and eats a man in Russia’s far east. The man, Markov, was a hunter living in a derelict cabin in the forest, outside of a remote and economically depressed town. The killing terrifies the locals, and a team of hunters led by tracker Yuri Trush is engaged to forensically retrace the tiger’s movements and interactions with Markov in the days leading up to the killing. Through their tireless work in the taiga (a forest of the cold, subarctic region), it becomes clear the killing was not random, but an act of revenge by the tiger. As they track the tiger, injured after the fatal encounter with Markov, the animal continues to threaten the safety of other people in the taiga.
John Vaillant’s fantastic work of non-fiction reads like heavily researched true crime, providing an education on both tigers and the lives of deeply isolated people located thousands of kilometres from their country’s capital. The Tiger also reflects on the complicated relationships between humans and tigers, and how our growing proximity to them has severely affected their numbers.
Why I was drawn to this book
Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce (2006) is one of my all-time favourite books. It is about a massive spruce tree on Haida Gwaii, a remote archipelago off the British Columbia coast, with a rare genetic abnormality that made it golden yellow. The book follows the fall-out and unfolding controversy when the tree is mysteriously cut down in the night. I was so taken with the book and Vaillant’s writing that I was inspired to travel to Haida Gwaii, a 7-hour ferry ride from mainland British Columbia, with two girlfriends. When my mom came to visit recently, she gave me a copy of The Tiger for my birthday, and remembering how much I loved the meticulous research and suspenseful arc of The Golden Spruce, I began reading it immediately.
Three things I liked about The Tiger
1. Incorporates many different views on the tiger attack
I appreciated how Vaillant helps the reader understand the Siberian (aka Amur) tiger and what one attacking a human means through multiple perspectives in the community. He speaks to indigenous people about their relationship to tigers as they move through the taiga, and how several of them handle periodic encounters based on their history and culture. He spends time with hunters, poachers, and trackers as they recount their run-ins with tigers. Valliant also shares insight from local biologists who have spent decades studying the species, rounding out the community perspectives with a more scientific take. Some of the individuals Vaillant speaks to think the tiger certainly attacked Markov as an act of revenge, while others believe he simply had the unfortunate luck to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
2. Tiger facts
This book is full of interesting facts about tigers. Here are a few I told everyone I hung out with the week I was reading this book:
There are more tigers in captivity in Texas, a place with no natural history of them, than there are in Russia’s Far East, a natural habitat for them.
In the last century, the global tiger population decreased by 95%.
If a tiger’s canine tooth breaks, it doesn’t grow back, and it can have critical effects on its ability to hunt and survive. Often, tigers who begin attacking livestock have a broken canine.
The stripes on a tiger exist on its skin too; if you were to shave one, its stripes would still be visible.
3. Vaillant tells the stories of families
This book does a superb job of combining heavy research and facts with human stories. Vaillant includes the experiences of a few of the families involved, some heartbreaking. One that stood out to me was of a young man in the nearby village to where the attack on Markov took place. The young man, recently released from the army, was struggling to find a job. He had been trapping to help support his family and younger siblings, but after the tiger attack, locals were warned to stay out of the taiga. After pressure from his parents to pitch in more, he ended up defying the warnings and heading out into the taiga. He was just planning to be out for one day, but after several days still had not returned home, prompting a search party. The outcome was not good, and the inclusion of how this tiger’s behaviour affected a single family makes for a moving read.
Notable Quote
“To say a tiger is an ‘outside’ animal is an understatement that is best appreciated when a tiger is inside.”
If you like The Tiger, read:
Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght (2020). This is another non-fiction book that takes place in the same province in Russia’s far east. Slaght, a field scientist and conservationist, takes the reader along with him through years of searching for the Blakiston’s fish owl, a massive owl with a wing span of six feet and a height of two feet. Since they are easiest to track in snow, Slaght spends winter after winter sleeping in tents in the Siberian taiga, searching, monitoring and learning about fish owls to help preserve the species.
Part 2: Good Book
Rhubarb and cream cheese buns
Why this bread for this book?
A point Vaillant emphasizes in The Tiger is how valuable the taiga is to those living in Russia’s far east. Those unable to eke out a meagre living from logging or odd jobs turn to the taiga for subsistence. Vaillant explains that the relationship many in this region have to the taiga is hard for us to understand in the west—they literally refer to it as Mother Taiga. People survive by hunting, fishing, harvesting pine nuts, foraging mushrooms, and bee-keeping.
The seasonal rhubarb topping on these sweet buns made me think of how the seasons drive the survival of these living off the taiga. I thought incorporating these beautiful stalks, available only in summer, related nicely to the importance of seasons in this book’s setting.
Recipe
This recipe is from the amazing cookbook Mooncakes and Milkbread by Christina Cho, a collection of sweet and savory recipes inspired by Chinese bakeries. The recipe follows her milkbread recipe until after the dough has risen, and then you cut the dough into 12 pieces. The dough balls are rolled out flat, a few dollops of a tangy cream cheese and lemon mixture are added, and then they are topped with slices of bright rhubarb. The topped rounds are left to rise for 45 minutes, then brushed with an egg wash before popping in the oven. I experimented with adding black sesame seeds on the egg-washed border of a few of the buns, because I love the taste of the oil released from sesame seeds into dough when baked.
They were so cute when they came out of the oven, with the rhubarb becoming even an even deeper red and the cream cheese melting out close to the dough border. The milk bread dough makes these buns so soft inside, and just the right amount of sweet to contrast with the tangy filling and tart rhubarb. I’d love to try these again and experiment with other summer fruit, like sliced strawberries, peaches or nectarines.
Looking forward…
New book I’m looking forward to reading:
Happy Go Lucky by David Sedaris
Bread I’m looking forward to baking:
Sourdough English muffins from Tartine
New album I’m looking forward to listening to while doing both of the above:
Special by Lizzo
Have other books, bread, or music you’d recommend I check out? Reply to this email or leave a comment. And, if you liked this issue, feel free to hit the heart button (it helps other people find my newsletter!)
My saliva glands were doing fine until I came to your final photograph. So unfair, Hannah 😊
My wife and I own a summer home in north central Maine. When I bought the property in 1979 I inherited the best rhubarb patch in Maine.
She grew up on a farm in northwest Missouri, so of course she covers the rhubarb bed with manure from our laying hens in the early fall, when we tend to return to our home in north central Florida..
My job? I harvest perhaps $600 or $700 worth of rhubarb in the late spring and early summer. We mostly use our bounty by reducing it to a most pleasant sauce that turns ordinary muffins into something truly special.
We make lots of batches, some with sugar and some without. Both batches get frozen, and thus can be used many months after we create them.
The "withouts" are marvelous on strawberry or vanilla high cream.
What we don't consume during the summer, we take with us to our winter home in north central Florida.
Thank you for providing such an interesting recipe for my favorite vegetable.
The Tiger sounds fascinating and great! I can’t wait to read it.