I love our south and have been working on it for a long time and I can confidently tell you that nowhere else in the world has I tasted as delicious as here. And given that in Russia in general, and in the south in particular, it is very difficult to find a truly traditional, local cuisine with mayonnaise, instant noodles and frozen cutlets unspoiled, every discovery turns out to be even brighter and tastier. Of course, I could go into the details of the climate, soil and cultural connections that led to this diversity, but let’s get right to the table! There are so many delicious things!
Let’s start with vegetables and greens. From bright red, prickly Krivyankov and pale pink, huge Astrakhan tomatoes, somehow chopped as if with a modern artist’s brush, tinted with lemon yellow, blue-black, striped-orange tomatoes from other southern regions, with purple curls of sprinkled Yalta onions and soaked in oil from the heart – Frost sunflower or Kuban corn. Bundles of basil and tarragon, whose size and flavor make wedding bouquets jealous, are scattered on the table or turned into purple and green lemonades and compotes. Baked potatoes with lard. Peppers stuffed with turnips, carrots, parsnips and parsley root and stewed in strong broth. Not just one product, but a whole category of blue food: deep-fried and grilled, charcoal-cooked and brutally made into porridge, flavored with herbs, garlic, vinegar, nuts, and hence fragrant oil. And forget the word “eggplant” until you are at a respectful distance from the southern edges.
Then pickle. Of course, cucumber and cabbage that bind the nation together like a tongue. But turn your eyes left or right – and miracles begin.
Bunch of grapes soaked in pinkish, transparent green, salted tomato containers filled to the brim with brine, pickled hot pepper in strips. The lips are all the same blue, covered with cobwebs of dill. And, of course, the legendary salted watermelons: even not every local person agrees to eat them, but mystically, these gray-green balls with an annoying taste, like actors in zombie movies, are still embodied on the table. But real diamonds (more precisely, colored, sapphire) are plums impregnated, and especially gorse: bright purple balls, sweet-sour-salty, aromatic with cinnamon and cloves, local bright and fatty meat – lamb, duck, Goose.
And fish! Huge, cabbage-stuffed carp like pre-Diluvial giants. Also fried cabbage with carp caviar, fresh and sauerkraut. Seasonally, in late winter, there is also royal pike caviar, made strictly with sunflower oil into a sugar-white mousse and served with pancakes with onions. And in the spring – the royal fish Don herring season, which is cooked in the simplest way – a book flattened in a pan and fried without any seasonings and sauces. Black Sea anchovies sprinkled on small, hard salted, grilled and marinated bright red peppers. Galagan – dried mullet or vobla caviar, Southern Russia’s answer to bottarga, excellent with pasta and scrambled eggs, but especially tursha, long purple-green green beans that are barely removed from the grill. Oh, and of course, wow! His praises can be sung for hours: with this or that fish, in fish or chicken stock, with or without tomatoes, with herbs and roots, with a fire-grass, a glass of vodka and other household magic, believe it or not. . What about crabs? From the same Aunt Governor in “Puck”? Sea bream, fish and chamomile were also removed from the Red Book by local ecologists, collected in heaps like waste paper and consumed at the speed of tabloid novels.
Wine, of course, and local of course – crispy whites, strong reds, weightless, acidic sparkling.
Of course, it should be served with Black Sea mussels cooked with onions and apple cider, as is the custom here; dried beef patterned like a semi-precious mineral, lard Mangalits from Hungarian hairy pigs, Kalmyk horse meat sausage, perfectly settled here; the same smoked cheese as galagan and tsogol, and turshu – salted unripe apricots.