Russia
Black bread, sour cream and preserving - the cooking of a country that spends half the year in the cold.
Russian cooking is shaped by winter and by the need to keep things until spring. Cabbage is fermented, cucumbers and mushrooms are salted, fish is smoked and berries are cooked down into varenye, a loose preserve eaten by the spoonful with tea rather than spread on bread. Almost everything arrives with smetana, the thick sour cream that turns a bowl of borscht a startling pink.
The staples are humble and deeply worked: pelmeni, meat dumplings traditionally made in enormous batches and frozen outdoors; blini, thin pancakes eaten with anything from sour cream to caviar and central to Maslenitsa, the pre-Lent butter week; shchi, a cabbage soup written about for a thousand years. The imperial court layered French technique on top - beef stroganoff and the elaborate olivier salad both came out of that meeting, and the salad survives, in its Soviet-era form, on every New Year table.
Tea is drunk constantly and strong, historically from a samovar, and the sweet things are honey-heavy: medovik, a many-layered honey cake, and pryaniki, spiced honey biscuits stamped with patterns.
- borscht
- pelmeni
- blini
- beef stroganoff
- olivier salad
- medovik
