Hearty Appetites

On the whole, Russians go for quantity. They are heavy eaters and the word ‘diet’ is Greek to most of them. If an Englishman invites you for afternoon tea, you will get a cup of very good tea, possibly accompanied by a small biscuit. If a Russian invites you for tea, don’t ever eat before visiting. On your arrival you will see a table bending under the weight of food.

The Russian national dish is ‘kasha’, thick cooked grain or groats – very tasty and nutritious. Buckwheat ‘kasha’ is the king.

There is hardly a dish which Russians would eat without a large slice of bread – you just cannot feel fed if there is no bread on the table.

Russians eat 3 meals a day – breakfast, a midday meal and an evening meal but few people are satisfied with this arrangement so take regular snacks. Breakfast can be anything from bread to kasha or pasta, always with a lot of tea. Some people drink coffee.

The heaviest meal is taken in the middle of the day. Soup is an absolute must. If there is no soup, then it’s not a meal, it’s a snack. Russian soups have absolutely nothing in common with those funny-looking substances offered in the West in tiny bowls. Russians demand large platefuls of hot soup, cooked with cabbage, beetroot, potatoes, carrots and onions, with a large chunk of meat and a generous portion of ‘smetana’, roughly translated as sour milk cream.

Before the soup there is an appetizer such as mixed fresh vegetables served in a large bowl with sunflower oil or smetana. The soup is followed by a dish which must include a good portion of meat or fish accompanied by kasha, pasta, potatoes or other boiled vegetables. After this tea or coffee is served with a sweet biscuit. Having swallowed all this, a Russian either crawls back to work and sleeps the rest of the day in his office chair or if he is at home, spreads his tired limbs on a sofa and covers his face with a newspaper.

The evening meal looks very much like the midday meal but without the soup. So naturally you get hungry by bedtime and to go to sleep on an empty stomach is unthinkable. So there is one more meal, secret and therefore wisely unnamed after which the Russian slaps himself on his visibly expanded belly and goes to bed, sufficiently content.

The table on feast days and holidays differs from the everyday one, not only because of the quantity of food displayed but also its diversity. A large number of things are consumed only on special occasions. There might be black and red carviar or pickled or smoked fish or mushrooms of all kinds. In Russian forests mushrooms are found in abundance.

Russians eat tons of jam. It is good manners for guests to taste their hostess’s jam, express admiration and ask for the recipe of which there are millions.

As for snacks, at every corner you can buy little pies fried in boiling oil. Small shoemaker’s nails are said to be considerably more harmful to the stomach but easier to extract. The taste of both is similar.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 821