Russian Food and Regional Cuisine

Great book if you are interested in Russian food

I've just served up an amazing meal made from recipes from this book for my dinner club friends. I wanted to offer them something new and interesting and the Borshch, the Aubergine 'caviar' and the Golubtsy didn't disappoint. It was a really culinary adventure.

No pictures

OK Needs time I think Surprised it was paperback

I wish I could give more stars to this book because it was clearly written with love for Russian food and significant knowledge of Russian culture (literature in particular). The author also rightly recognises the fact that the Russian cuisine is complex, an amalgamation of many historical periods and national influences (European, especially French), also recognises the big division between the food tradition before and after the Revolution. But at the end of the day, it's a cookbook, and the recipes are just wrong. All national regional cuisines have some kind of essence one could recognise them by, for example - olive oil, garlic, oregano and tomatoes - would point one in the direction of the Italian cuisine, but this book's recipes are missing that essence. The author tried to adapt the recipes for the western tastes, and if one follows the recipe it might give out an edible result but it wouldn't be a Russian dish, which should be the point of any national cuisine cookbook. Many recipes fail because there are certain small and subtle details that make or break a dish, and those are missing or wrong. Being born in the USSR and spending significant periods of my life in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia and the Caucasus, I know what I am talking about. Just to give an example, in her recipe of Coleslaw from Almaty, in the first version, the author recommends to salt and squeeze the cabbage (which is correct), but then she recommends to drain off the cabbage juice - this is absolutely wrong and would result in something inedible. The cabbage juice IS the point of salting and squeezing the cabbage - fermented cabbage juice has many beneficial properties, one of the reasons why this dish (cooked to a proper recipe) is good. Many Russian dishes, and not just Russian, are prepared in advance in order for them to develop the right taste and acquire their beneficial properties. For example, to prepare the gravlax one needs to leave it in the cold place to develop the flavour and to acquire the right consistency, in the same way this cabbage salad needs to keep its juice and needs to be left in a warm place for 15-30 minutes and then it needs to be stored in the cold. Apart from this, what would really make it Russian national dish, different from Coleslaw, is the addition of herbs: dill and parsley. Other common additions are carrot (never apple, as in the book), and cranberries or red currants (which we used to collect by the bucketful in the forest). I have not read all the recipes but some that I have read were a complete disaster: Golubzy is quite common in many Slavic countries as well as in Germany, and one never uses buckwheat in it, or raw rice. One should use half cooked rice (that still has some bite to it). The onions should be sauteed to transparence. Absolutely never use lean meat - it's usually a mixture of pork and beef, or pure pork or it would be inedible. I could go on and am only touching a tip of an iceberg. I think it's an interesting book for people who want to have some idea of the Russian culture, as long as there is an understanding that it's not a Russian cookbook.

The item description misleadingly implies that this is a 2015 book, when in fact it's a reprint of a 1989 book (the author is deceased). I already own several English-language Russian cookbooks of that era (PLEASE TO THE TABLE by Bremzen and Welchman, 1990, is the one I would recommend) and while they represent a good survey of both traditional and Soviet recipes, I've been on the search for a cookbook that reflects contemporary Russian cuisine, of which RUSSIAN FOOD is most definitely not.