Cold Appetizers
Together with vodka, nastoykas, nalivkas and kvass, the first things to appear on the table are cold appetizers. Russian cuisine is famous for its great variety of cold appetizers. Prior to any hot dishes the starters are served. They included all sorts of salted, fermented, or marinaded products like cucumbers, vegetable marrows, sauerkraut, mushrooms, apples, cowberries, fish, etc., that are served with horse-radish, vinegar, brine, mustard, garlic seasonings, and other condiments to make them more piquant and spicy.
One can hardly imagine a traditional Russian dinner without cabbage. It is served with onions, beets, cowberries, apples, and other combinations. Black radish is also a very popular appetizer. It is sliced or grated before serving and is served with onions, beets, dried bread, and seasonings of oil, sour-cream, or vinegar. Traditionally, salted and pickled mushrooms have been a favourite Russian appetizer. They are served with oil, sour-cream, potatoes, sauerkraut and onions. Vegetable salad is an age-old Russian dish, despite its French name vinaigrette that was adopted in the last century. In many countries it is known as “the Russian salad.” It is a tasty and nutritious vitamin-rich mixture of vegetables, chopped onions, pickled cucumbers, and sauerkraut mixed into the base of finely chopped diced boiled beetroots, carrots, and potatoes with vegetable oil, vinegar, sugar and pepper. Mixed salads can also contain some fruits, meat and fish.
Various fish appetizers are a prominent feature of a traditional Russian dinner. They are made not only of fish proper, but also of its milt, caviar, and head. Fried, smoked, and salted herring are especially valued as appetizers. Apart from herring, salted anchovy, pike and zander are used as appetizers. No less popular is cold-smoked fish, especially balyk (the backs of salmon or sturgeon). Caviar, undoubtedly, is a must as one of the best “starters” (at least, in well-to-do families). After several small glasses of vodka or fruit liqueurs and a number of different starters, the quests are ready for the main part of the dinner.
The First Course
First comes first, and in Russia it has always been soup to come as the “first” course of the dinner. Russians continue to stick to the age-old habit of having two main courses, the first being a soup and the second – a solid hot dish. The traditional assortment of soups has remained virtually unchanged from the old times. The most important part of any soup is the liquid that holds all components together. It can be meat, fish, mushroom or vegetable broth, brine, beet infusion, or kvass. The principal components of soups are cabbage or sauerkraut in cabbage soup (shchi), beets in borsch, and salt cucumbers in rassolnik. Salted mushrooms or vegetables together with fresh ones, plus meat, fish or mushrooms is in solyanka, and, of course, fish is in a fish soup.
The Second Course
Fish dishes are served first. In summer time it is usually boiled or jellied fish; and during long and cold winters, many Russian families make all kinds of fish galantines. After cold fish comes cold meat. Traditionally plucked and smoked meat products are widely used to make meat appetizers. Tongues, knuckles, liver, and kidney constitute the base of many delicacies. Such a delicacy as boiled crawfish is also often served. Meat galantine made of pork, beef, or chicken was (and still is) very popular. It makes the cooked piglet with horse-radish that is the highlight of the holiday table in a Russian home.
After the cold dishes comes the culminating point of the dinner which is the second, main, hot course where all sorts of food made of boiled and baked dough (with and without filling) or fish cooked in every possible way prevail. Pelmeni and vareniki (cases of dough filled with meat, berries, etc.) are very popular among the Russians. Pelmeni, being smaller than vareniki, have the ends of the crescent connected and nipped together, thus it acquired a round shape. Pelmeni also differ from vareniki by the kind of filling. The former are filled with meat or fish; the latter are with berries, fruits, or cottage cheese.
On Shrove-tide pancakes (bliny) are the main fare in a Russian home. Hot round pancakes symbolize the Sun, the sign of approaching spring. Russians, however, like to eat pancakes on other days, regardless of their being holidays or not. Pancakes can be made plain or with various additions like onions, eggs, or fish. They are served with butter, sour-cream, herrings, caviar, or salted fish.
A real feast for gourmets begins when the second fish course is served. It is there that cooks can display all their taste and fantasy. Dozens of methods for preparing fish are known in Russia like steaming, boiling, braising, baking, frying in friture, cooking with cereals, etc. here are some examples of exotic fish dishes, “Carp Stewed with Beer,” “Sheatfish Baked in Tomato Sauce with Mushrooms,” “Sturgeon Baked with Mushrooms and Onions,” “Steamed Sterlet”. There are many more dishes with names no less enticing.
What kind of meat dishes are usually served at a holiday table? Here several peculiarities should be noted. First of all, there are many dishes made of variety meats or by-products. Russian cooks are remarkably good at that, and one can taste at a dinner such dishes as “feet of lamb stuffed with eggs,” “fried liver,” “ox tongue grilled on spit,” and many other things of the same kind. The second peculiarity is a frequent use of different kinds of stuffing, e.g. “chicken filled with eggs,” “fried goose or duck stuffed with apples,” “chicken stuffed with rice and saffron.” One more peculiarity is that meat is almost always roasted in large pieces and then cut into portions.
Porridge has been a day-to-day meal for Russian families from time immemorial. It is hard to find another dish in any national cuisine that was mentioned in people’s epics as often as porridge. It is made of buckwheat, millet, oats, rice, fine-ground barley, and manna groats. To make porridge more nutritious and tasty, milk, fat, butter, eggs, mushrooms, jam and other products are added; that is why there are so many varieties of porridge in the Russian cuisine.