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Russian food at its best is not just gutsy and sumptuous, but also straightforward. It’s rare for a recipe to need more than half-a-dozen ingredients, usually ones that are easily available abroad (for anything harder to find, try Polish, Baltic, and other Eastern European food shops, or online). The standard techniques, such as chopping and braising, are also simple, and machines can help with the preparation if you’re short of time. It’s crucial, though, to use only fresh ingredients with a real taste, or the results will be disappointing; tired produce has nowhere to hide. The standard oil in the Soviet period was unrefined sunflower, which has a characteristic nutty flavour; it is still widely used. Rape seed oil is also traditional, and olive oil has been used for at least 250 years too, as well, of course, as butter (known by the same word as oil, maslo), and sometimes other animal fats, such as lard. Most of the recipes here use oil rather than butter, and some are meatless as well, though as the recipe for buzhenina shows, when Russians eat meat, they like plenty of it!
As for drinks, most of the dishes go well with wine or beer (or a soft drink such as cranberry mors, kvas, or home-made lemonade), rather than vodka, but for cured herring, it has to be spirits
Simmer together until cooked 2-3 medium-sized, scrubbed but unpeeled, beetroots and 1 onion in 2 litres of [salted] water. Discard the onion, retaining the cooking water. Peel and coarsely grate the beets. In the left-over cooking water, simmer some sliced potato. Slice a carrot into rings and fry. Add to the potato, when cooked, first the carrot, then the shredded young beet stalks and leaves, then the grated beetroot, and finally some chopped parsley and red basil.
For this recipe, you need young beets, still with their leaves and stalks in a perky condition. If you can’t find them, use rainbow chard. You can chop the vegetables rather than slicing them, and use either butter or oil for frying the onion, as you like. The resulting soup has such a beguiling taste, earthy from the roots, and slightly sweet from the onion and carrot, that sour cream is not really needed, but you can add it if you want.
Tamara Pavlovna’s cured herring (September 2003, Ekaterinburg)
Gut, skin, and fillet 3 large herring (to produce 1 kg flesh when cleaned).
Coat with the following mixture:
1 tbsp. salt, 1 half tbsp. sugar, bay leaves, black pepper, allspice.
Place plate or pan-lid on top and weigh down [e.g. with tins].
Leave [in a cool place or refrigerated] for several days.
Atlantic herring have suffered badly from overfishing, and while the price remains low, buying them fresh is rather a Soviet experience, to go by my recent visit to the market in Cambridge:
-- I don’t suppose you ever get herring, do you?
-- Oh yes! A few times a month, anyway. We even had some yesterday, but they sold out straight away. We may have some tomorrow. It all depends on what comes from Lowestoft.
‘Tomorrow’ they also didn’t have any. As a result, I tested this recipe with sardines, which that day were abundant, spanking fresh, and a similar price to herring. Russian Facebook friends have suggested fresh mackerel as another alternative. Sardines, being small, need less of the spice mixture. They can be eaten after 24 hours, and may be too salty after 72, but are perfect after 48 hours. Serve on buttered dark rye bread, with small glasses of chilled vodka, aquavit, or small-batch gin or genever, neat, alongside.
To 6 cloves finely chopped garlic add 2 tbsp pounded walnuts, 3 tbsp vegetable oil, 3 tsp 3% vinegar and 1 tbsp finely chopped dill. Mix well and add to 200-300g cooked or tinned squid, mix again and add 1 tsp finely chopped parsley.
Use very fresh walnuts and mild wine vinegar for this recipe in the Georgian style. Olive oil is preferable, in this instance, to sunflower or rapeseed. The dish works particularly well served warm over sliced boiled new potatoes with a little Aleppo pepper or comparable mild chili spice added. The squid would also be delicious with macaroni or some other robust kind of pasta.
Take one fresh leg of pork, wash it, and lard with cloves of garlic cut in half. Soak in kvas for a day. Then remove and rinse it, peel off the rind, and rub with salt. Roast in the stove till ready and serve hot, with vinegar, mustard, and pounded garlic mixed with sour cream alongside.
This recipe works very well with other cuts, for instance, rolled shoulder, and with smaller joints as well as ones sized for 1840s families and their guests. Removing the rind is not essential, and with the leaner type of modern pig, keeping it on can help make the joint juicy. As usual with a roast, start the cooking on a high heat, then reduce to a lower temperature, and finish by resting. As well as, or instead of, Avdeeva’s suggested accompaniment, Dr Puf’s Lenten version of mushroom sauce works brilliantly alongside.
2 boiled beetroot [cooked till just done and then peeled], 2-3 small to medium salted cucumbers, 3 small apples, 1 big or 2 small sweet peppers, 3 medium tomatoes, all finely chopped; mix and add 1 tbsp dill, finely chopped, 1 tbsp green coriander [finely chopped], salt to taste, and 5 tbsp sunflower oil.
This salad in the Southern Russian or Ukrainian style looks beautiful and tastes delicious. It is easiest to make in the late summer, but a version with salted courgettes, unrefined rapeseed oil, no red peppers, and a little agrodolce to help the winter tomatoes along proved the very thing for a lunch between Christmas and New Year. Extra salt is not needed, though black pepper is a nice addition, and green basil makes a subtler accompaniment than dill and coriander. To brine courgettes (or ridge cucumbers, the traditional version), interleave, in a clean and sterilised jar, the cucumbers or courgettes (the former whole, the latter in 2-inch lengths) with the flavourings (bay leaves, dill or fennel, oak leaves, blackcurrant leaves, plus a couple of chopped cloves of garlic if liked). Make brine with 40g salt to a litre of water and pour over (this can also be done in a bowl). Leave 2-3 days before using.
Take dried mushrooms and grate [or chop] them along with two onions; add a spoonful of flour mixed with Lenten cream [made from pounded almonds, English walnuts, and Brazil nuts]; loosen with some mushroom stock; mix all together and cook, adding a dessert spoonful of good vinegar and a teaspoon of sugar when half-done. This all serves as a sauce for the cutlets, which are made as follows.
Cook fresh or dried chestnuts till soft, pass them through a sieve and mix with a spoonful of Lenten cream. Form into small cutlets; roll in breadcrumbs and place into pastry cases soaked in Lenten cream.
The cutlets are served still in their paper cases, with the mushroom sauce in a sauce boat alongside.
Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work superbly for this dish, cooked till soft and then mashed rather than sieved -- some textural resistance advantages the dish. Breadcrumbing the cutlets and then moistening them sounds counter-intuitive, but if you use cracker crumbs rather than breadcrumbs, and dress the cutlets with sauce rather than nut cream, the combination lifts the dish into a different domain, particularly if the crackers are slightly salty. Odoevsky doesn’t mention seasonings. If you use salty crackers, you won’t need to salt the cutlets, but some freshly ground nutmeg or mace and black pepper work well; chopped mild chilli on top provides a little visual interest, as well as a flavour boost. The original version of the sauce is laborious – allow about an hour to blanch and peel 100g each of nuts, then about 20 minutes’ cooking time – but the results are worth it. An exact balance of mild vinegar and sweetener will produce a taste that, combined with mushrooms, is pretty close to sour cream. You could of course use a vegan double cream, or indeed traditional double cream, if you wanted, but the mushrooms should definitely be wood mushrooms; if dried, use the soaking water to hydrate the sauce.
Beat 4 egg yolks with 1 glass [200g] sugar, then beat in 150 g. [melted] butter and 1 glass [200 ml] smetana (or kefir or milk). Add 500g flour and 1 tsp baking soda [or baking powder, or the equivalent amount self-raising flour] mixed with vanilla and cinnamon [if liked] and [a handful of] raisins. Add [gently] the beaten egg whites, then put into a cake tin and bake about 1 hour. When ready sprinkle the top with powdered sugar.
Crème fraiche or sour cream (20-30% fat) works well instead of smetana. Dried sour cherries are a zesty replacement for raisins. The amount of flour needed will depend on the size of the eggs; if medium-sized, 400g will be easily enough, and the mixture may need slackening with a little kefir or milk.
Two accompaniments:
Add 200 grams coarse rye flour to 100 grams home-made or bought rye starter and mix with 100-200 ml warm water till spongy. Leave to rise in a warm place (e.g. an oven at 30C) overnight. Add 300 grams coarse rye, a large pinch of salt, a dessert spoonful of sunflower oil, and 100 ml buttermilk or kefir mixed with 100 ml warm water. Mix to a sticky dough and scoop into a ball in the centre of an oiled baking sheet. Allow to rise (and spread) for another 2-3 hours. Preheat oven to 120C, placing a baking tray filled with water at the bottom of the oven, then bake on the top shelf for about 70 minutes, raising the heat to 200C for the last 20 minutes. Check with a skewer that the centre is not too sticky. Allow to cool (if you can resist) before cutting thinly. If liked, add before the second proving a small handful each of sunflower seeds and linseed (or pumpkin seed, as preferred) and a spoonful or two of caraway seed or coriander seed.
This bread is closer to a Baltic traditional loaf than to Russian shop bread of the Borodinsky type, since it’s pure rye rather than mixed rye and wheat, and unsweetened. It makes an excellent accompaniment to savoury food. Any leftovers can be used to make homemade kvas: pour a litre of water over 200g dry crusts, add 100g sugar and 7g dried yeast, or a 20g piece of rye starter; leave to ferment in a bowl or large pan, covered with clingfilm, overnight, then decant into clean glass or plastic bottles, leaving room for the liquid to rise at the top. Keep in a cool place and use within 3-4 days. Dried sour cherries can be added to the bottles before they are stoppered.
Coarsely grate 2-3 very fresh and aromatic quinces and push them through the neck of a sterilised 1-litre bottle to come about three-quarters of the way up. Add sugar to come about one-third of the way up. Pour over good-quality vodka to cover, and leave at least a week. This would work well with a plain version of the cake. Sour cherries (no sugar needed, stones cracked to extract the kernels and a few leaves added) make a delectable flavoured vodka, but you may need your own tree.
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