A heartwarming adventure across borders and cultures
Julia Ferraro is a foodie and barre teacher who lives in New Jersey, USA. Raised in the Soviet Union, Julia lives with her husband and three grown children. Here, she shares what it was like in the former USSR, how she came to live in America and what it is about Asian cuisine that has turned her culinary world upside down.
Meet Julia Ferraro.
Julia the Foodie.
Image source: Julia Beyond the Barre
These days, Julia has a very good appetite and loves cooking, but that wasn’t always the case.
As a child, she wasn’t exactly a picky eater, or even a reluctant one. Not even close. Put simply, Julia was a non-eater. How things have changed.
Eating in the USSR
Born in 1960s Soviet Union, Julia’s early food experiences were basic, yet rich in cultural and family influences, including in the kitchen of her multi-generational home where she was raised by both her grandmothers and parents.
At that time, the USSR with its 15 republics, was what is referred to today as a multicultural society, and with that it also brought a blend of cuisines from across Europe and Asia.
As we chat, I wonder about images from the USSR during the 1970s and ’80s. I recall when the local news bulletins broadcast vision of Soviet life as being hard, with long queues of hungry people and empty shelves.
Here in Australia, we thought of it as an oppressed country, where food was scarce and people struggled.
But while Julia agreed in part, stating “the shops were empty, but our fridges were full,” she went on to say that no one was hungry exactly.
“Anxious perhaps, but not hungry.”
“How so?” I enquired. I thought it may be due to a black market in food. But no, Julia recalled how the Soviet system of food distribution was not unlike US employer-sponsored healthcare.
“Our employers distributed Zakaz, probably most closely described as food packages,” she explained. “The better the person’s job, the better the quality of food package you received.”
Zakaz, Julia and home cooking
Julia’s mother worked as a journalist for a woman’s magazine under the Pravda Publishing House umbrella, which printed various newspapers and magazines, including the Pravda daily newspaper.
Because her employment was with an organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Central Committee, Julia’s mother ranked higher in the food chain than her seismologist father, and as such she was, according to Julia, “issued fantastic quality food and plentiful supplies”.
The flip side is that her father’s job as a scientist was considered rather boring, and he didn’t fare quite as well.
“They [scientists] were part of “intelligentsia” — and that was a class of its own,” said Julia before continuing, “there were three distinct classes in the Soviet Union: workers, peasants, and intelligentsia.”
This meant her father received low wages and his job was simply regarded as ‘not cool’. Thinking back, Julia can’t recall if her father received food packages at all.
And although home meals were humble, they ate well, wasting nothing. Her mother would mince offcuts of meat to make it go further. Then there were vegetables, eggs, and pickles. And soup was central to everything, especially at lunch, the main meal of the day.
It was a heavy-duty, three-course affair. “Soup of course, a main dish, and compote of some sort for dessert,” said Julia.
Regardless of the austere times, cultural influences shaped Julia’s palate from those 15 Soviet countries: Scandinavian flavours from the Baltic states, Mediterranean notes from Georgia and Armenia, Kazakh meals and Uyghur dishes of north-west China, and even Turkish touches.
The slideshow below is a collection of photographs supplied by Julia.
Julia’s appetite on the rails
Despite Moscow’s cultural melting pot and her lack of interest in eating, there was one place Julia did enjoy food. On trains. With no car, long-distance family holidays meant long train journeys, like the two-night and one full day trip from Moscow to the Black Sea.
Because trains lacked dining cars, families packed their own food to travel with them: cold boiled chicken, hard-boiled eggs, pickles. “It was like heaven to me,” she said.
But only on the train.
Image credit: Loco-Info-dot-com
Back home, her appetite vanished again. “My grandmother would gently rock the table to mimic the train. It didn’t work.”
Julia notes on her blog that “long distance trains and moving scenery outside a window were necessary to induce my appetite”.
America beckons
In the early 1990s, Julia – then a Moscow University graduate who was fluent in English – began accompanying her father on work trips to the U.S. as his translator.
It was in America that she discovered an abundance of steak, something that wasn’t easily come by in the USSR. “The ease of eating a steak was what shocked me more that anything” she mused.
Unlike the cheaper stewed and minced meat of her childhood, American beef cuts were specialised to be grilled, seared, and sliced. It was a revelation.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes! Different cuts for different ways of cooking!”
Julia made several trips with her father before a chance meeting ended with an opportunity that changed her life.
We chatted about how those trips set the course for a new life, which Julia has written about on her Beyond the Barre blog, Day 3 of her 2019 trip to Russia.
On her first trip to the US in 1992, while visiting Washington DC their host offered her a bonus: either financial, or a week in New York with an associate’s family. She chose New York.
While in New York, she met Yassen Nikolaevich Zassoursky, the Dean of her journalism school in Moscow, while taking the elevator in her hotel. That chance meeting led to a late night discussion, and Zassoursky encouraged her to apply to New York University’s journalism program.
New York University
So, she prepared her application and even with limited English, managed to find her way to NYU, after being dropped off by her host family at the George Washington Bridge on the New Jersey side.
“I walked across to Manhattan. Never been there before. Found the subway. Figured out how to get to the West Village where NYU was,” she recalled.
“I found the University, found the school, found the program.”
But when she went to submit it, she discovered the deadline had passed. Despite this, Julia left her application with administration staff and walked away without any hope.
A year later, she received a letter from NYU. They were interested in her application from 1992 and offered her a spot in the course. And so, in 1993, she moved to New York.
While at university, Julia met her husband Tom, who coincidentally had also missed the deadline for the same course the year earlier and, like Julia, had been offered a place the following year. Serendipity, coincidence, the stars aligning or the universe speaking?
It doesn’t matter.
They met in September 1993, and were married just a year and a half later, in February 1995.
This year they celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary!
Julia now has an appetite
If there was only one dish Julia could eat forever, what would it be?
“A few years ago, I’d have said steak and potatoes. But now? I’m torn,” she mused. Right now though, Julia is in awe of Chinese food. Its diversity, cultural depth, and medicinal philosophy.
“In addition to many different cooking techniques, there are numerous styles of stir-frying,” Julia noted, citing one technique that requires, “the experience of age and the agility of youth, where food barely touches the wok.” This means, there is a finite period in life that chefs can cook with this method. Young enough to be agile but mature and experienced enough to cook this way.
Julia said that in China, menus often list not just the dish but also what part of the body it benefits. “We don’t have that here,” she added, reflecting on just how deep the country’s food culture goes.
Okay, so we didn’t quite get to one single dish, but a world of cuisine that she’d be happy with forever. And that’s fine by me.
Image: Julia Ferraro Hot Pot, from Julia With a Good Appetite, January 2025
Life in America Today
Towards the end of our chat, Julia confessed that while she loves travel and experiencing new cultures, she’s a homebody at heart, happiest in the kitchen or relaxing with Tom.
I felt compelled to ask her about current U.S. politics, to which she offered a quiet reflection, grounded in her Soviet upbringing: “It’s in my blood to live a double life. There’s politics, and then there’s what you do in your home.”
This was linked to a Russian saying: “Soup otdel’no, a mukhi otdel’no.”
Translation: “Soup is separate, and flies are separate,” meaning some things shouldn’t mix. “There’s the government, and there’s our life.” Make of it what you will.
Just before we go
I asked Julia one last question: if she could invite one person to dinner, who would that be, and what would she cook?
“Tom,” she answered without hesitation. “No one appreciates my food like he does.”
Lately in her cooking she’s been returning to her roots. Stroganoff, stuffed cabbage leaves, food from her homeland.
But ultimately, right now Julia’s food heart leans east.
That means, for Tom she’d cook the family’s favourite Chongqing Chicken, a fiery dish from Sichuan, served with Chinese greens and rice.
Image: Julia Ferraro
And then there’s rice. Yes, rice.
“Rice is fan in Chinese—meaning food itself. Everything else is secondary. Rice is life.”
A recipe from Russia with love
I was curious to know what recipe she could share that reminded her of her homeland.
She chose Sour Schchi. It’s Russian soup for the soul.
Pronounced Shhhhhhhee, this is a traditional Russian dish that’s essentially sour cabbage soup. It looks and sounds phenomenal. Comprising beef stock, vegetables and lots of cabbage and sauerkraut, this is a dish that you can stand a painted Russian Khokhloma spoon in.
“It is basically the soup we ate every single day for as long as I remember,” recalled Julia, adding “and there are so many variations to make it cheap, fancy, vegetarian, vegan, carnivorous, hot, cold”.
It’s very Russian. And you can find the recipe right here on her food blog, Julia with a Good Appetite: Sour Schchi, The Essence of Russian Food, and she’s also to be found on Instagram.
That’s not the only blog she writes. She owns a barre studio and combines information about her business, JuliaCore Barre Studio with travels and life adventures at Julia Beyond the Barre.
Julia’s an active member of global foodie communities like Around the World in 80 Dishes and One book Three Recipes, both conceived during lockdowns and still thriving today. Check out the hashtags on Instagram and you’ll find shared recipes celebrating diverse cuisines from around the world.
All in all, Julia’s life has taken her from the closed Soviet Union to loving her New Jersey life. I hope she keeps cooking and sharing her culinary discoveries with the world.
Julia and I connected through One Book Three Recipes cookbook sharing group on Instagram. We chatted across the globe in June, 2025.
Copyright notice
This article is not to be reproduced wholly or in part without written permission from its author, Marti Cuatt.
The series title Meet The Foodies is the intellectual property of Marti Cuatt, The Infatuated Foodie.
©Marti Cuatt, The Infatuated Foodie, 2025
What a lovely read! I love that you wrote it!