Kovbyk, lampopo and 6 more old dishes of Russian cuisine

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Many dishes of Russian cuisine that our great-grandmothers fed our great-grandfathers with for centuries are almost forgotten. Only culinary enthusiasts and historians remember about them. And although our ancestors did not eat raw bovine testicles or fried cockroaches, many of the ancient recipes can surprise the modern Russian, and sometimes even cause a certain disgust.

Tyurya

This is the oldest Russian cold soup, which the poor ate back in pagan times, and up to the 20th century. The recipe is extremely simple, but variable: in liquid - water, kvass or milk, bread crumbles, preferably in the form of crackers. If there was oil and onions, some spices, then they were added. To modern people, such food would seem like slop - it is difficult for us to understand why people added bread to liquid, if you can just eat it and drink it.

Vizigu pies

Old Russian cuisine was very economical, they tried to get maximum food from each product. Often it was necessary to come up with dishes from entrails, and even from bones. Viziga is a chord of sturgeon fish, that is, a fish analogue of the spine. It looks like a long cord. After extraction from fish, it is dried, so a semi-finished product is obtained that can be stored for a long time. Most often, vizigu in Russia was used as a filling for pies, mixed with minced fish, but there were other recipes. And in the regions of the fishing industry, the vizigu was sometimes eaten and so, with a bite. Before adding to pies, the vizig needs to be cooked for several hours so that it becomes completely soft. Viziga is one of the healthiest parts of fish. It contains very few calories, but many minerals and vitamins useful for humans. Many may have doubts, but vizigi has a delicate texture and pleasant taste, so perhaps you should not forget about this product.

Loaf with bacon

In Russia, pies have been very fond of since ancient times. But their recipes were somewhat different from those used by modern housewives. Unsweetened pies were called loaves or kulebyaks, and were almost always large. In pre-Petrine Russia, loaves were often prepared with lard, both pork and lamb, and beef. Naturally, this was not the only ingredient in the filling: lard was mixed with onions, boiled eggs, and meat. For our ancestors, who were engaged in hard physical labor all day long, such a high-calorie food helped to maintain strength.

Whole lamb stuffed in parts

In Russia, they loved to stuff meat with passion. Many people still cook stuffed geese at home. But our ancestors stuffed everything that began with porridge, eggs, onions, bread, turnips and much more. It was more profitable and tastier to cook this way - meat juice and fat soaked the filling. And the main type of meat that was used in Russia was, oddly enough, mutton. In any case, such information is given by the ethnographer Mikhail Zabylin in his book "Russian people". Here's how Domostroy recommends a thrifty and thrifty owner to do with a purchased lamb:

“Buy a ram and skin it at home, and save some sheep for a fur coat, and mutton offal is an addition to the table, a consolation too. The housekeeping wife and the good cook have a lot of ideas: they will cook a decoction from the brisket, stuff the kidneys, fry the shoulder blades, stuff the legs with eggs, chop the liver with an onion and, wrapping it with film, fry it in a frying pan. The lungs, also with milk, flour and eggs, will pour it over, and the intestines will flood with testicles, cook the cerebellum with giblets in the broth from the lamb's head, and fill the scar with gruel, and the kidneys - boil or, stuffed, fry, - and if so, from one ram there will be a lot of joy. (The jelly that remains is good to keep on the ice)."

Linen

A sheet is a dried goose of long storage. In the villages, it was cooked in the fall. As a rule, half of the bird was dried, but they could also dry it entirely. The bird was cut in half, the bones were removed, and then salted in a barrel of saltpeter and spices under a press. After salting, the keg was preserved with resin and left outside for the winter. In March, the keg was opened and the contents smoked.

Poppy milk cottage cheese

Poppy was loved in Russia. It was a very popular condiment for sweet dishes. During fasting in wealthy houses, cow's milk was replaced with poppy milk. It is easy to make: you just need to crush 200 grams of poppy seeds and mix with water. Our ancestors loved poppy milk so much that they even managed to make cottage cheese out of it: several ethnographers write about this at once. However, the recipe for the dish and its detailed description have been lost today.

Lampopo

It is both a sweet dish and a drink. Lampopo became very popular in Russia in the 19th century. In the 1850s and 1860s, it was poured in all taverns and restaurants in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Although it was very recently, the lampopo recipe sounds very strange, and gives us an idea of how rapidly taste preferences are changing: custard bread with raisins turns into stale rusks, then they are poured with light beer, which is added with rum, a lot of sugar and lemon juice. In this form, this dish is served on the table. The liquid was drunk, and the crackers were eaten.

Cowboy

This meat dish has been prepared by the Cossacks in the Kuban for a long time. Kovbyk echoes the traditions of frugality of Russian cuisine - it is not only prepared from offal, but also becomes even tastier if the preparation is kept warm for several days, which is very useful on long military campaigns. The cowboy is made from pork entrails. In addition to the stomach of the lungs and liver, the recipe includes a pork head from which the meat is cut. Everything is chopped, mixed with onions and peppers, and then placed in the stomach. Then it is sewn up and pickled - the Cossacks sometimes took it with them all day, so it came out tastier. Then you first need to boil it for two hours, and bake it for the same amount of time, smeared with oil.