Russia is not just buckwheat and vodka, Borodino bread and caviar. In this column, I will talk about things worth trying in different parts of the vast country.
The first is a cowboy.
Cuban delicacy. For a real cowboy, they take a pig’s stomach, fill it with meat taken from the pig’s head, and first send it to a boil (and certainly with various spicy herbs like pepper, garlic, and tarragon), and then cook it until golden brown. Despite the similarity of technology, it is completely different in texture and taste from Scottish haggis, more like mashing or roasting.
The second is chapra.
Don spice, a kind of Kazakh ketchup. In its most basic form, it’s just salted tomato puree. Not crunchy greens, but soft, rotting reds. More creative people are experimenting with chapra – adding some garlic, herbs and some spice to salted tomatoes. The most basic and necessary supplement is again salty hot pepper. You can marinate and steam chicken or fish in chapra, it makes a great scrambled egg, you can serve it to the table just like ketchup. Chapra can be found in every market in Don.
The third is Dagestan sausage.
A wonderful meat product that definitely deserves to be among the greatest similar inventions, like the Armenian basturma or the Spanish jamon. Fresh lamb (with fat, of course) is chopped quite finely, salted (sometimes they can add a little spice), sausage is made from minced meat, and hung to dry in a fresh draft, following the process closely (such a sausage can spoil in an instant). But if everything is perfect, then drying and fermenting sheep fat gives it a very specific, specific aroma, similar to the most fragrant cheeses.
In Dagestan, sausage is treated without respect – it is boiled and fried with potatoes. But a good Dagestan sausage should be best served in its pure form as a delicacy, with a glass of good wine.
Fourth, the court.
Tatarstan is ahead of many regions in terms of gastronomic characteristics: dried goose and kazy, echpochmak, gubadia and chakchak, of course. However, cortlamay is not observed on gourmet radars, which is a pity. Cool stuff.
To get kortlamay, they first make kort, one of the main Tatar fermented milk products. Kort is similar to cottage cheese, but its technology is different – katyk, the Tatar analogue of ryazhenka, is melted over low heat until dry. The finished kort is mixed with ghee and sugar to create a thick, sweet curd cream. With Cortlamay you can bake pies, cakes, add it to cheesecakes and generally use it wherever you need a rich sweet creamy flavor. But the most authentic way is to simply eat it with strong Tatar (i.e. black tea with a bunch of different herbs). Look for Cortlamai in the Central Market in Kazan.
fifth – nardek.
It’s also “watermelon honey”. A product from the lower reaches of the Volga and Don, which arose clearly under the influence of the Caucasus. Nardek is watermelon juice boiled to a thick consistency (mulberry doshab and pomegranate narsharab are made in the same way in the Caucasus). Nardeka honey has a viscous texture and a very bright, sweet and sour flavor. Of course, it was actively used in desserts – it was used to knead the dough for gingerbread, served for breakfast with fresh bread, but still the most interesting option is mustard with nardek.
The homeland of Russian strong mustard is only the Lower Volga region. German colonists began making their usual seasonings from the local hard mustard variety. And nardek reveals this sharpness perfectly. Look for mustard with nardek (and pure nardek) in Volgograd – at the airport, in souvenir shops and in the shop in the museum in the same German colony in Sarepta.
He is the sixth Talgan.
The basis of the diet of the nomadic peoples of Central Asia from Tibet (called tsampa) to the steppes of South Siberia, where, for example, they were eaten by Tuvans and Khakass. Honestly, the traditional way of using talgan is pretty brutal—make it a slurry with butter, milk, and dark green tile tea.
But if you knead the custard or pancake batter on a talgan basis (as some Siberian restaurants do), it gets an excellent nutty, toasty flavor and grainy texture. It is difficult to find the best pair for Siberian fish and caviar. Look for Talgan in stores in Southern Siberia.
seventh – Ruby oil.
To put it bluntly, of course it’s just butter. In fact, it’s not easy at all. The main thing is that in Yakutia they use very special raw materials. Our cows (and any fashionable European dairy breeds) cannot survive in the extreme Yakut climate. Here they breed their own special breed – very short, hairy, they give very little milk, but the milk is incredibly fatty and saturated. It is pre-fermented and only then whipped. It turns out a fat with active, bright acidity (in fact, this technology is called sour cream) and a rich, almost yogurt taste.
Ruby butter is very specific for spreading its taste on bread (although there are amateurs here), but it perfectly manifests itself in any manipulations with the dough, and as a culinary product in general. It is constantly and everywhere sold in the Central Market in Yakutsk.
Eighth – accepted lineage.
The mysterious ingredient in the “same” Olivier salad recipe. There’s been a lot of talk about the recipe being lost and that we’ll never learn. But it is not.
To begin with, the essence of this product can be deciphered with a simple language exercise. The word “soy” in the 19th and early 20th centuries meant any “colonial” sauce in general, not just soy. In this case, as the second word says, Cain. True, he meant that geographic aspect in general, not Afghanistan.
Pedigree is a sauce in the style of British colonial sauces, the same Worcester or ketchup. Moreover, soybean was quite successfully produced in Soviet times, at least before the war, when there was still a lively connection with pre-revolutionary times. And judging by the Soviet recipes, it was indeed a kind of hybrid of Worcester and ketchup, a very strong, rich fermented sauce. And some artisans have started the production of accepted soybeans and are now looking for them on the Internet.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.