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Russian cuisine
Russia is the world’s largest country, so if differs greatly from region to region. The same can be said about Russian national cuisine, which is rather varied and based on different cultural and historic traditions. Usually any national cuisine is formed under the influence of two main factors: religion, which prescribes eating certain kinds of food, and climate, which determines availability of various vegetables, fruit, meat and fish products. Orthodoxy, which has traditionally been an official religion in Russia, doesn’t forbid any food. But long fasts prescribing abstinence from meat and other types of animal source food, explain why Russian cuisine includes many vegetarian dishes. And long severe Russian winters help to understand why hot fatty soups and broths are so popular in this country.
The most popular Russian soups, which are well-known all over the world, are borshch, shchi, and the cold summer soup okroshka. There are a lot of regional recipes for these dishes, but traditionally, both borshch and shchi are cooked from hard meat or bone broth and are served hot with sour-cream and rye bread. Sometimes, for example, during a religious fast, meat can be substituted by fish or mushrooms. Borshch is always cooked with beet-root, which gives it a saturated red colour, and shchi must be based on fresh or sour cabbage. As for okroshka, it is mainly cooked in summer. It is a cold soup, where instead of meat broth kvass is used. It contains cold meat (usually beef), boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, cucumbers and green onion. All the ingredients are chopped and mixed. Okroshka is usually served with sour-cream, mustard and horseradish.
Pelmeni is one more famous Russian dish. Small balls from minced meat are wrapped into dough made of flour and eggs and then boiled in salted water usually with bay leaves. Pelmeni can be served with sour-cream, table vinegar or horseradish. The filling can be made of any sort of meat – pork, beef, lamb or chicken. But the best pelmeni contain a mixed minced meat, for example, pork and beef, or pork, beef and lamb. A vegetarian analogue of pelmeni is vareniki, which is more popular in Ukraine. Fillings for vareniki can be made of cottage cheese, mashed potatoes, mushrooms, berries and so on.
The most popular Russian national salads are vinegret, Olivier salad (abroad it is sometimes called Russian salad), and “dressed herring”. Vinegret is a purely vegetarian salad, which is cooked from chopped boiled vegetables (beetroot, potatoes, carrots), fresh or sour cabbage, pickled cucumbers and onion. It is seasoned with vegetable oil. Olivier and herring salads are mayonnaise-based and rather substantial. The first one is cooked from boiled vegetables, eggs and boiled meat (which nowadays is often substituted with sausages), and the second one is a layered salad made of pickle herring, boiled potatoes, carrots, beetroots and eggs. Sometimes the herring salad also contains apples.
Of course, such a Russian national dish as blini should not be left unmentioned. Depending on the method of cooking and filling, blini can serve as a dessert or an appetizer. Blini are made of batter, which is poured on a hot frying pan and fried. Blini can be cooked of wheat, rye, oat, or buckwheat flour. They are served with run butter, sour cream, caviar, vinegar pickled mushrooms, berries or jam. Traditionally, blini have been cooked during the Maslenitsa festival, at the end of winter, before the Great Fast.
A well-known Russian national beverage is kvass. Traditionally it used to be made of malt, rye bread and fresh water. Nowadays, in order to simplify the process of fermentation, they often add yeast into it. Traditional Russian kvass is a soft cooling beverage. It has a sour taste, and it can be used as a base for cold soups.