Every country has its own unique cuisine. Cooking and baking is a kind of art, so only professional cooks know Russian cuisine in all its minutest details. By the way, in Russia, one needs to study at a special college for at least 2 years to work as a cook. So here I’ll try to describe Russian food in general. Soups play an important part in the Russian cuisine. People cook broth from all types of meat, fish or so called Lenten or oil soups without any meat. Some times you can even try milk or fruit soups that are usually sweet.

The most popular Russian soup is of course, the so called “borch” (cabbage soup with tomato sauce). You need to cook any type of meat broth, then put onions, stewed beet, stewed or fresh cut cabbage, cut carrots, celery, fennel and other specious and of course tomato sauce or just cut tomatoes. Amounts of everything are determined according to the resulting taste you want to get. Almost every Russian woman has her own variant of borch that could include up to 18-20 ingredients. Another popular type of soup, is so called “schy”. Broth (usually from beef) is cooked separately from all the other ingredients despite greens and spices. When it’s ready you cut boiled carrots, onions, eggs, sometimes turnip, small pieces of boiled meat are put in the broth. Schy and borsh are usually eaten with soar cream.

Russians eat all kind of meat and fish now, but several centuries ago they never ate birds or pork. They boil, fry meat, cook cutlets and shish kebabs (barbeque on sticks from beef or pork wet in vinegar or vine) and so on. Traditional Siberian meal is pelmeny. People make dough from 2 glasses of flour, 1-2 eggs, and a half a glass of water. They unroll the dough in thin slice and cut it in round pieces. Then small amounts of salty forcemeat are rolled in the pieces. The result (pelmeny are boiled for 30-40 minutes).

There is a sweet variant of pelmeny called vareniky. The difference is that instead of meat you need to put some berries, jam or sweet cottage cheese. Talking about fish it could be fried, boiled or salted. Herring is one of the Russian favorites. A traditional Russian meal is so called herring in fur coat. To cook it you need 6 baked potatoes, 4 boiled eggs and carrots, 2 boiled beets. Everything is cut in very small pieces (better to use a grater). First, cut pieces of salty herring are put on a plate, then a slice of a potato, a slice of carrot, a slice of an egg, an a slice of beet. Add range after each slice and don’t forget to salt.

Russians make numerous types of salads, usually containing vegetables. The easiest vegetable salad is a mixture of cut tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, greens and spices with a range. They also know many ways to marinate vegetables especially cucumbers, tomatoes and cabbages. They usually do it in sterilized glass banks adding salty boiled water, greens and spices. Russians prefer black bread to white bread. The Russian black bread has a very specific taste. It’s baked from rye flour with yeast in special furnaces and sometimes has nuts, raisin or spices inside. At home the Russians bake bliny similar to pancakes. There are many ways to cook them. For example you can make pastry from 10 egg yolks, 2 spoons of sugar and a little bit of salt adding 10 glasses of flour, 3 glasses of milk and 1 spoon of butter. Shake everything very good and then bake as usual pancakes.

Other types of Russian pancakes is an olady. They are as small as cookies and usually sweet. Pastry is made from 3 egg yolks with 2 spoons of sugar, 1 glass of soar cream, 2 spoons of hot butter, 2 glasses of flour. Add 2 spoons of milk with a half of teaspoon of soda vanished in it, mix, then fry on pan until its thick and yellow. Some people add sweet cottage cheese or cut in small pieces fruit instead of soar cream. Here is a way to bake a traditional Russian Easter cake called kulich. Pastry: 4 glasses of milk, a half of glass of yeast, 2.2 pounds of flour, mix everything (wait until the pastry will grow up), then 2.2 pounds of flour, a half of a pound of hot butter, a tea spoon of cinnamon, 8 egg yolks mixed with 1 pond of sugar, 1 glass of raisin, mix everything. Let the pastry to stay one night, then put into a form and bake for approximately two hours.

Finally for somebody who is interested – you can make something similar to famous Russian vodka at home! Take 6 pounds of sugar, 0.4 pounds of yeast, 30 liters of warm water and mix very good. Wait 6-7 days and then pour out taking away everything superfluous. WARNING: you need to have special bottles (e.g. for making vine) to make it or you can poison yourself.

P.S. Everybody who risks to try to cook something from what`s shown above should follow the order of adding ingredients strictly to get a good result. As Russians usually say before eating: Приятный Аппетит!

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