Since I have been told, in no uncertain terms, by dozens of people smarter and better than me, and in hundreds of ways and shapes, that my views and opinions are wrong, unwelcome and a threat to solidarity among progressives worldwide, from now until further notice* I will limit myself to translating and posting cocktail recipes from a cookbook entitled Kochen, published in 1988 by Verlag für die Frau in Leipzig.

I have always argued that solidarity is a two-way street. I was wrong. There are people and groups in this world whose views and opinions are better than the views and opinions of other people. If you want to be liked and accepted, you need to understand this and support the correct views and opinions, not have views and opinions of our own. What you should never ever do, under any circumstances, is to criticize or otherwise comment on the views and opinions of our spiritual, moral and political betters.

My first recipe is a doozy known as the Beer Flip.

To make it you will need the following ingredients:

• 100 grams of sugar
• 1 cinnamon stick
• Zest of 1 lemon peel
• 2 bottles of beer
• 2 eggs
• 1 packet of vanilla sugar
• Salt
• 2 shots of cut brandy

Boil two cups of water, half of the sugar, the cinnamon stick, and the lemon zest for a few minutes. Pour in the beer and simmer. Beat the eggs, vanilla sugar, the rest of the sugar, and a pinch of salt until foamy. Gradually pour the beer through a sieve and stir in the cut brandy. This drink is served hot or cold.

Source: Kochen (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1988), p. 310. Photo courtesy of kochbar.de

* The Beer Flip Strike will end when someone makes a donation of any amount (see the left-hand side of this page for details) to this website or when three people show me proof, in the comments to this post, that they have shared a post (any post) from this website either on their own websites or their social media pages in the past week. 

UPDATE (October 1, 2019). It would have been nice, perhaps, to take a break from being the bad cop who brings tidings of Russia that neither the so-called right or the so-called left can bear (the strike was prompted by fresh attacks on me from both sides), but as he has done on two other occasions, a friend of the blog, RB, promptly made a donation of $100 yesterday. It is hard to say how much this means to me.

Donating money, however, is not the only way to support this website. It also means a lot to me when you share what I post here with your friends. That way I know that people are reading the Russian Reader. This has been my only mission since I started the blog twelve years ago: sharing news and views of the other Russias and other Russians with people in other parts of the world who would otherwise not be able to hear these voices. // TRR