Kisselny shores

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

In Russian cuisine, there are widely known dishes (cabbage soup, porridge, pancakes) and there are temporarily forgotten ones (kali, kundyum, levash). Kissels are at the intersection of these two varieties: while remaining a common Russian dish, they are rarely prepared according to the original recipes. "Rivers of milk, jelly banks" - ironically speak of fabulous well-being, without thinking about how you can build banks from modern liquid jelly. At the same time, in national Russia, there was a specific dish behind this proverb: the hardened oatmeal jelly was cut into pieces and consumed with milk.

According to the "Tale of Bygone Years" (XII century), jelly was included in the diet of Russians already in the X century. The annals describe a military trick used in 997 by the inhabitants of Belgorod during the siege of the Pechenegs. The wise old man commanded the starving Belgorodians to prepare a mash for jelly from "oats, wheat or bran" and to dig a pot with it into the ground. In the second well, they placed a kadi with full water, sweetened with honey. The Pechenegs were invited to negotiate, cooked jelly in their presence and treated them along with the well-fed, thereby demonstrating that it was pointless to continue the siege - "We have more to feed from the ground." The etymology also indicates the ancient origin of jelly from grain flour: the words "sour" and "jelly" are cognate and related to the word "kvass". Unlike unleavened pea jelly, oatmeal, rye and wheat jelly were placed on dough or sourdough, and therefore had a sour taste.

The usual jelly on potato starch began to enter Russian life at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century, but they became widespread only by the end of the 19th century. The assimilation of potato flour by Russian cuisine as a new thickener caused a natural development of the culinary tradition. The first and most popular recipe was cranberry jelly, which became a link between grain and potato flour jelly. Remaining jelly in the original sense of the word (cranberry is a sour berry), it belonged to a new variety of this dish - jelly on starch, many of which will no longer be sour, but sweet. At the same time, potato jelly remained a dish: they were cooked very thick and served chilled with milk (almond or cow) or cream.

Oatmeal and other cereal jelly

In "sketches on folk aesthetics" "Lad" (1982), Vasily Belov called oatmeal jelly "the favorite Russian food." This dish has firmly entered the figurative structure of the Russian language and Russian folklore: oatmeal jelly is mentioned in fairy tales ("Geese-Swans", "Three Kingdoms", "The Sea Tsar and Vasilisa the Wise"), folk songs, proverbs and sayings.

The remains of sifted oat flour (sowing) were poured with water in the evening and fermented; in the early morning, the infusion was strained and boiled until thickened. Wheat and rye jelly was prepared in a similar way in milk or water. A somewhat complicated technology involved the use of rip (from "drain"): the bran or unseeded flour was fermented, poured over with water and left for several days, changing the water, which became more and more transparent. This is how the saying about distant relatives was born - "the seventh water on jelly". Usually jelly was cooked from raw ripe, but the recipe for drying it to obtain "jelly flour" has also been preserved. They could also boil grain jelly and cook for them with rip without a fermentation stage - such recipes are given, for example, in "Ruskoy Povarna" (1816) by Vasily Levshin.

“Hot jelly thickened before our eyes,” writes Vasily Belov, “you need to eat it - do not yawn. They had a bite to eat with rye bread, seasoning with sour cream or vegetable oil. The cooled jelly froze, and it could be cut with a knife. From a spreading jar, they would tumble it into a large dish and poured it with milk or wort. Such food was served at the end of the meal, as they said, "over-filling." Even the most well-fed were obliged to at least take a sip … ". This is where the proverb "Kissel and the Tsar always has a place" came from - in Russian peasant cuisine, oatmeal jelly was considered a delicacy. In the version processed by chefs, it was served "with honey nourishment, or almond milk, or nut butter."

There is a similar dish in German cuisine - Haferschleim, which has played a well-known role in Russian literature. In 1816, the young romantic Vasily Zhukovsky translated Johann-Peter Gebel's idyll "Oatmeal jelly" (Das Habermuß in Alemannic German), where this food symbolizes idyllic rural life: “Children, oatmeal jelly on the table; read a prayer; / Sit quietly, do not dirty sleeves and do not meddle in the pot; / Eat: every gift to us is perfect and the giving of the blessing”, etc. The poem has received wide readership, becoming a programmatic work of the emerging Russian romanticism, with a characteristic of this trend attention to the national order.

Oatmeal jelly with well-fed was a traditional memorial food, which was served at the end of the table. In this capacity, he is repeatedly found in the novel by Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky "In the Woods" (1871-1874): "Nikitishna cooked different kinds of kissel: wheat with almond milk for honored guests, oatmeal with honey fed on the street." The Bolshoi, Maly and Nizhniy Kiselny lanes existing in Moscow are echoes of the Kiselny Sloboda, which was located near Sretensky, Mother of God-Rozhdestvensky and the Varsonofievsky monasteries destroyed by the Soviet regime. The settlement was inhabited by kisselniks who cooked jelly for the commemoration.

A dish of peasant cuisine close to grain jelly was salamata - "liquid unleavened jelly from any flour", as Melnikov-Pechersky defined it. However, oatmeal and other jelly made from grain flour were not only a sign of peasant household life: in the menu of students and gymnasium students of the Academy of Sciences, approved by Mikhail Lomonosov in 1761, oat jelly with well-fed is present in the "Jelly" section.

Pea jelly

Another original Russian dish was pea jelly. It was prepared even easier than oatmeal: pea flour was brewed with water, avoiding the formation of lumps, brought to a boil, poured into bowls and cooled. As Vasily Belov notes, “many loved him, they ate him hot and cold on fast days. When cold, the frozen pea jelly was cut with a knife and poured abundantly with linseed oil. Serving with hemp oil was more traditional.

In the cities, pea jelly was popular as a street food, the industry of which in the Russian Empire was very developed and diverse. Alexander Bashutsky in his "Panorama of St. Petersburg" (1834) noted that "a Russian does not at all care about the time or place of his breakfasts or dinners. He eats wherever it happens and when he feels the need for it: a digger sits down to breakfast on the bank of his groove, a coachman eats sitting on a box, a painter on a roof or a forest, a cabby on the street next to his horse. In accordance with these habits, in St. Petersburg, besides taverns or simple tavern establishments for the people, hundreds of peddlers walk the streets or stand near bridges with food and drinks corresponding to the seasons."

Selling jelly by hand was called jelly, and the merchant himself was called jelly or jelly. In the book "National Images of Industrialists" (1799), this profession is described in detail:

“Jelly vendors walk the streets with a tray on their heads, and when they stand in the market, they supply their tray on trestles; which are made of wooden blocks folded crosswise and tied at the top with a cord. Kissel is put on a board, covered with a white rag, at the other end of the tray is a fair number of wooden plates, and the same forks or matches; for those who require jelly, the distributor cuts off a piece, and cuts it on a plate into small pieces, and pours hemp oil from the flask that he has for the best relish; then the guest, using a sharp wooden match like forks, eats with appetite. Kiselnik, with his movable table, moves from place to place several times a day, and stops more where he sees enough working people and sailors. Here is a sawfly of a tree, who, having his tool in his hands, and an ax in his belt, satisfies his hunger with jelly. Kissel is usually boiled from pea flour, and is mostly consumed during fasting."

Kiselnicheskie brought in a modest income. In the parable "Kiselnik" by the famous Russian poet of the 18th century Alexander Sumarokov, the pea kissel merchant, trying to improve his affairs, sinks to stealing icons from the altar. In the satirical poem "The Lamentable Fall of Poets" by another poet of the 18th century, Vasily Maikov, a scene is cited as deliberate nonsense where "the ministers are selling pea jelly."

Oatmeal and pea jelly were popular folk dishes, but as the quotes above show, pea jelly was more common in cities and labeled as food for the working people. In particular, cabbies liked to have a snack with pea jelly. “It was especially difficult to serve in cabs' taverns,” recalled Vladimir Gilyarovsky. - There were a lot of them in Moscow. The yard with logs for horses is outside, and inside there is a “skating rink” with food. Everything is at the rink: cheek, catfish, and pork. From the cold, the cabman loved what was fatter, and hardened eggs, and rolls, and hearth rickets on bran, and then always pea jelly."

Kissels on potato starch

The first experiments in potato cultivation in the Russian Empire were undertaken privately in the first half of the 18th century in accordance with the general European trend. Potato growing began to receive state support in 1765, when the Senate Instruction "on the cultivation of earthen apples" was issued. The earliest extant Russian cookbook, The Newest and Complete Cookbook (1790, 2nd ed. 1791) by Nikolai Yatsenkov, already contains a recipe for making potato flour - starch. It is noteworthy that it is proposed to use it for milk jelly (on almond and cow's milk), for cranberry jelly, the author recommends flour from "Sarochin millet", that is, rice. In the "Economic description of the Perm province" of 1813, potato jelly is mentioned as a sign of the urban way of life: peasants use potatoes "baked, boiled, in porridge, and they also make their own pies and shangi (a kind of pastry) from it with the help of flour; and in the cities they spice them up soups, cook them with roast and make flour from it for making jelly."

The production of potato starch on an industrial scale began in the Russian Empire after 1843, as part of a set of "most energetic measures for the spread of potato crops." The number of potatoes sown increased significantly, but still could not be compared with grain crops: in 1851-1860, potatoes were planted in Moscow province 10 times less than grain crops, and in Vologda province - 23 times less. Therefore, judging by explanatory dictionaries and encyclopedias, until the end of the 19th century, potato jelly was much inferior in popularity to grain jelly and pea.

In the Dictionary of the Russian Academy (1789–1794), oat jelly is singled out as the main one, buckwheat and pea jelly is also mentioned (similar to the second edition of 1806–1822). In the "Dictionary of Church Slavonic and Russian Language" (1847), jelly is defined more broadly as "a food prepared by means of leaven and boiling from various kinds of flour," but only oat jelly is given as an example. A similar definition of jelly as a sour powdery jelly (oatmeal, rye or wheat; pea jelly is mentioned separately) is contained in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl, published in 1863-1866 (similar to the second edition of 1880-1882). But in the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron, published at the turn of the 20th century, potato jelly is brought to the fore: “powdery jelly, made from potato flour and fruit juices (cranberry, cherry, red or black currant, raspberry, apple, etc.), is seasoned lemon zest or cinnamon, less often cloves, etc.; served with milk. Prepared without fruit juice, oatmeal, rye, and wheat K. is put on dough and sourdough; pea - unleavened."

Many Russian cookbooks of the 19th century contain recipes for potato jelly. As Maksim Syrnikov notes, “if you spell out any of those recipes, you get a jelly of such density and consistency that you can’t call it a drink”. Indeed, berry, fruit and milk jelly on potato starch were predominantly cold desserts. Probably, the tradition of consuming them with milk (almond or cow) or cream passed from grain jelly. Recipes for hot liquid jelly are much less common in cookbooks and are given separately.

Cranberry jelly

Cranberry jelly was probably the first berry to appear in Russian cuisine and was especially loved. At the end of the 17th century, it was served on the table to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Adrian, along with grain jelly: "cold" with full, cream or juice and "hot" with molasses or butter. (The fact that in this case we are talking about jelly made from grain flour is confirmed by Vasily Levshin's Ruska Povarnya.) Based on the recipe given by N. Yatsenkov, it can be assumed that initially cranberry jelly was prepared on rice starch. With the assimilation of potato starch by Russian cuisine, cranberry jelly began to be prepared on its basis. It is known that in 1829 "potato cranberry jelly" was served to Pushkin. With the penetration of cranberry jelly into widespread folk life, it was called "red" in contrast to "white" oatmeal.

This jelly could be served hot as an independent dish or chilled with milk / cream and sugar. According to the testimony of Saltykov-Shchedrin, in St. Petersburg in the 1870s in the Maloyaroslavl tavern, "cranberry jelly with sated food" was served. Sometimes it was used as a gravy: in the magazine "Moskvityanin" for 1856, along with "various cold jelly with cream", there is a mention of "a boiled crust doused with hot cranberry jelly with sugar."

Cranberry jelly has become a link between jelly made from grain and potato flour, demonstrating the natural development of the Russian culinary tradition. On the one hand, cranberries are a sour berry, and the powdery jelly from it was jelly in the original sense of the word. Cooking it with sugar reproduced the sweet and sour flavor characteristic of oatmeal jelly with well-fed. On the other hand, cranberry jelly belonged to a new variety of this dish - on starch, many of which will no longer be sour, but sweet. At the same time, "sweet jelly" as a special dish was already mentioned in the "Domostroy" of the middle of the 16th century. It is not known for certain what they were at that time, but it is very likely that this was the name given to grain jelly with full or molasses.

Almond and milk jelly

Another popular variety of jelly made with potato starch was almond jelly, which was boiled from almond milk. It is repeatedly mentioned in the "Summer of the Lord" (1927-1944) by Ivan Shmelev as a lean meal. In "Moscow and Muscovites" Vladimir Gilyarovsky at the commemoration dinner "was served with almond jelly with almond milk." Milk jelly was also prepared from cow's milk and cream with the addition of bitter almonds.

These recipes are close to cereal jelly with milk, especially wheat. At the same time, the influence of blancmange is obvious, which was widespread in Russia from the end of the 18th century as a dish on the ceremonial table. Compare in "Eugene Onegin": "Yes, here in a bottle with resin, / Between roast and blancmange, / Tsimlyanskoye is already being carried." In Russian cookbooks, the main difference between almond / milk jelly and blancmange was that the latter used fish glue or gelatin rather than potato starch.

In the "Painting for the Tsar's Food" (1610-1613), compiled for the Polish prince Vladislav, it is said: "On a dish of white jelly, and in it a ladle of fresh milk, put cream." There is a temptation to see oatmeal in milk in "white jelly", in accordance with popular usage. However, most likely we are talking about one of the variants of blancmange (for example, on rice starch), which at that time was popular in Europe among the upper classes of society. In the cookbook of Ekaterina Avdeeva and Nikolai Maslov in 1912, it is milk on potato starch that is called "white jelly".

Kissel in Soviet times

At the beginning of the 20th century, jelly in Russian cuisine was presented in all its diversity, including the most exotic options. The aforementioned cookbook contains recipes not only for "melon" and "chocolate" jelly, but also jelly from sago (cereal from granular starch extracted from sago palms) with spices, which is recommended to be eaten "hot with raspberry jam".

In Soviet times, there was a rift familiar from the history of bread wine: if the explanatory dictionary of Ushakov (1935-1940) was still focused on the system of meanings of imperial Russia, then the dictionary of Ozhegov (1949) fixes a break with the Russian tradition: into "gelatinous liquid food" (italics mine - MM).

In the bible of Soviet cookery, "The Book of Delicious and Healthy Food" (1939), jelly is presented quite well, including almond and oatmeal ("Kissel from oatmeal with milk"). They are offered to be cooked "of medium thickness and thick" and served "hot and cold". At the same time, recipes for berry and fruit jelly are given in the section for sweet dishes, oatmeal got into flour dishes along with dumplings and pasties, and pea is not mentioned at all. In the same book published in 1952, which is considered exemplary, almond jelly and jelly from oatmeal were excluded, although oatmeal itself remained and it was proposed to cook something like salamata from it.

The destruction of a single class of dishes was accompanied by the gradual liquefaction of jelly on starch, their transformation into a drink. In "Kitchen on a Stove and a Primus" (1927) K. Ya. Dedrina gave the proportion of liquid and starch 6 × 1, which corresponds to pre-revolutionary standards. In the "Book of tasty and healthy food" of 1939 and 1952, a close ratio is given: two tablespoons of potato flour are placed on one glass of berries. In the same 1987 book, there are already four glasses of liquid for two tablespoons of starch.

By the end of the Soviet period, the idea of potato jelly was reduced to the modern level, and for centuries the oat and pea jelly, beloved by the Russian people, were withdrawn from culinary use. It got to the point that in 1992 doctor Vladimir Izotov managed to patent a recipe for ordinary oatmeal jelly as a medicinal dish.

The originality of Russian jelly

The transformation of the powdery jelly into a hot drink disrupted the natural relationship of Russian cuisine with the culinary traditions of other European nations. The resulting confusion is fully reflected in the "Culinary Dictionary" (2002, published posthumously) by William Pokhlebkin. He divided jelly into "Russian" (rye, oatmeal, wheat and pea) and "berry-fruit", which supposedly are "sweet dishes of Western European cuisine." According to Pokhlebkin, it is customary to cook thick jelly in Western Europe, and in Russian cuisine, it is believed that jelly of medium density is accepted. The triumph of half-knowledge is the proposal to eat lean pea jelly with meat broth or gravy.

Gelatinous dishes, like jelly, are widespread in Western European and in general world cuisine. A prime example is rice pudding, found in a variety of varieties around the world. However, the proximity of the recipes is equally characteristic for oatmeal, pea, milk and berry-fruit jelly, which is natural with close trade and cultural exchange.

A fairly accurate analogue of grain flour jelly can be found in British cuisine of the 17th – 19th centuries - flummery. This dessert was prepared from soaked oat or wheat seedlings, but without fermentation, and was served with honey, cream and other additives. The presence in the Russian tradition of the stage of fermentation is remarkable, since our cuisine as a whole is characterized by a sour gamut. Flammery is considered a variety of puddings, of which there are a great many in English cuisine. Also in Great Britain there was an analogue of our salamata - gruel. It was this dish that formed the basis of the diet of the inhabitants of the workhouse in the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

The German equivalent of oat jelly, Haferschleim, has already been mentioned. In addition, in German and Danish cuisine there is a dish completely similar to jelly on potato starch: it. rote Grütze, dat. rødgrød - literally "red grits". This sweet dessert with red summer berries was originally made from cereals, then potato starch was used as a thickener. Rote Grütze is also served chilled with milk or cream.

In French cuisine, berry-fruit jellies, which were prepared with the addition of fish glue, and later gelatin, are the closest to starch-based jelly. In the "Almanac of Gastronomes" (1852-1855) by Ignatius Radetzky, which presents Russian-French cuisine of the mid-19th century, the names of jelly are duplicated in French as "gelèe (kissel)". At the same time, Radetzky does not mix these dishes: the book contains recipes for raspberry and cranberry jelly and jelly from the same berries, and also separately presents similar recipes for almond jelly and almond blancmange.

Turkish delight (Turkish delight), which is cooked on starch with rose water, mastic tree resin or fruit juices as the main flavoring essences, has a similarity to jelly jelly on potato starch. An analogue of pea jelly is easily found in Italian cuisine - it is corn flour polenta (hominy in Eastern Romanesque countries).

In the Russian culinary tradition of the 19th century, jelly was perceived as a kind of dish and was not mixed with jellies, blancmange, puddings and other foreign dishes that were close to them. There is no reason to single out jelly on potato starch from this series as a "dish of Western European cuisine". Starch (rice, potato, maize) was used as a thickener in many European countries, and Russian cuisine, with its assimilation, kept pace with the times, while maintaining its originality.

Kissels in modern Russian cuisine

In our time, the ironic saying “there is jelly for seven miles” (that is, to go on a long journey for what is at hand) can be safely used in the literal sense. Even liquid berry jelly is rarely found in cafes and restaurants, not to mention other varieties of this dish.

In a number of establishments, oat and / or pea jelly appeared thanks to Maxim Syrnikov. These are the Dobryanka Russian cuisine store in Novosibirsk, the Voskresenye Moscow restaurant and the Russian Village in Vladimir. In St. Petersburg, oatmeal jelly can be found in the Pomorsky restaurant.

Of particular interest are the author's versions of traditional Russian jelly. Chef and co-owner of the Moscow restaurant Delicatessen Ivan Shishkin successfully modernized the pea jelly recipe: “I brought it almost to perfection, although it contains only pea flour, water and vegetable oil. But I smoke flour, cook vegetable broth, use marmite (British yeast paste with a strong salty taste - MM) for the sauce that gives the dish, excuse me, the taste of meat. I fry pickles in a special way, make decorations from fresh shoots. " Shishkin presented the author's pea and oat jelly at the Moscow gastronomic festival Omnivore 2013 and subsequently introduced pea jelly into the spring menu of 2014. The Lenten menu of 2014 of the St. Petersburg restaurant of new Russian cuisine "CoKoCo" also includes author's pea jelly from the head chef Igor Grishechkin - with "smoked carrot puree, fries and chips from Borodino bread." Unfortunately, the history of the rethinking of jelly in modern Russian cookery is, unfortunately, limited to these two examples.

Maxim Marusenkov