Miscellaneous SIG Food Notes

MHoll@aol.com (Predslava) - Paskha are for Easter exclusively. Syrniki are fried cheese patties, vareniki are cheese pastries, lenivye vareniki are boiled cheese dumplings. All served with sugar and sour cream. Blinchiki s tvorogom are like cheese blintzes with Ricotta or farmer cheese. Vatrushka is a kind of cheesecake but with a more interesting texture.

Predslava: "What do you use to mold paskha?" We don't. However, at church, they sell paskha molds: a hinged pyramidal wooden box. Seems simple enough to make, if you have the tools (I don't). "Also, any ideas for making kulich without using coffee cans? Do you know what do they use in Russia? Don't depress me and say "coffee cans". " Don't know. We've always used coffee cans lined with parchment paper and a circle of cardboard at the bottom. We also used other cans, to make "individual" kulichi for the kids.

Volkova: Hi, when we make pasha and kulich for Easter, we go out and buy a new flowerpot for the occasion. Last time I bought a plastic one, but I think next year I'll get terracotta, to help absorb some of the excess liquid from my homemade cheese. I'm a complete heathen, I bake kulich in a (angel food) tube pan, because we don't drink coffee, don't have any coffee cans. The tube pan is nice and tall, so even though the kulich doesn't look "right", it has lots of room to grow up as it cooks. Maybe one day I'll discover that someone I know actually drinks coffee from cans. Everyone seems to buy the stuff in the little resealable bags these days.

From MHoll@aol.com: Pirozhki can be lenten or not. The pastry used for them varies, but it's usually a bread-type dough, and if they're filled with meat, then it's a rich dough with butter and eggs. Actually, it's a circle, folded down the middle over the filling -- one piece of dough. Are they crescent-shaped? Not really, just a pudgy half-circle. If you mean can one une croissant dough? It's a complicated dough to make from scratch. If you mean can one use the store-bought refrigerated crescent-roll dough? It's very awkward to work. If you really don't want to make the dough from scratch, then you can use puff pastry sheets, or pie dough. But yeast dough is best. Some cooks fry the pirozhki, some bake them. My mother does the latter, and brushes each pirozhok with a yolk glaze before baking. Pirogi (full-size pies) are made the same way, except they're baked in one big piece and cut instead of being baked into finger-food sized pastries.

Here is a modern recipe that uses a sour cream dough. Remember to not bake the pastries quite as long if the ham is already cooked. This sounds like a nice lunch item to take to an event. --Yana

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
Title: Ham baked in the dough

1 kg pork
bread kvas
salt
pepper
for the dough:
200 g butter
200 g sour cream
400 g flour
salt
1 ea egg to brush

Soak pork ham in bread kvas and leave in a cold place for a night. Take out meat and dry with a paper napkin, sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Mash butter, add sour cream and stir carefully, salt to taste. Stir in flour. Knead the dough and leave under the towel to "rest". The dough must be plastic and pliable. Roll out the dough in a square 0,7 cm thick to put the pork on. Put the pork in the center and pinch the opposite edges. Put the ham on a wetted baking sheet the seam down. Pierce all the surface with a fork. Brush up with egg. Decorate with different leaves and flowers made from the rest of dough and then brush with egg again. Bake in the oven 200 C for 1,5-2 hours. After 30 minutes the dough is golden, but the meat is not ready yet, so cover the surface of the dough with a wetted sheet of kraft paper. Wet the paper regularly. After 1,5 hour of baking pierce the meat with fork, if the juice is clear, the ham can be served.

From: Jenn/Yana:
>Which parts of the Domostroi (Pouncy edition) are post-period? I know the
>main chapter with the recipes is. What about the material in brackets?
The explanation of which parts of the Domostroi are period for us can be found in the introduction. I have reduced them down to this, which I previous posted to the Cook's List: The sections with recipes (chapters 64:2 through 66) are not period and may be of a _foreign_ origin, as Pouncy points out in her introduction. She says that they were added on sometime between 1600 and 1625. The wedding section (chapter 67) and its menus do not appear until after the addition of the recipes sections, again out of SCA-period. Now, I _am_ an advocate for making the cut-off date for SCA-period Russia sometime in the mid-17th cen (pre-Peter the Great), but the recipes sections should be used with recognition of their OOP-ness.

Hello my dear subscribers, Today we are talking about Russian ancient and unfairly forgotten beverages.

Honey beverage was an obligatory drink of the nobility. Monastery honey beverages were known as the most famous. Many tzars sent their cooks to perfect honey cooking skills to monasteries. There were so many different honeys: White Honey, Red Honey, Boyar Honey, Simple Honey and so on. But they made distinctions of two ways of cooking: there were boiled and drawn honeys. To improve the taste and colour, they could add fruit juices or berries. Diluted with juice, honey didn't contain any alcohol and was considered as the most splendid vitaminous beverage.

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

Title: Ancient Cherry Honey
Categories: Beverages, Russian Yield:
1 kg honey
2 c water
2 kg cherries

Put honey in enamel pan, add water and boil stirring regularly and taking froth off. Put well washed cherries without bones in the bottle with a narrow neck and pour warm syrup over. Cover bottle with a wet sheet and leave in a warm place for three days to ferment. After that cork the neck with a sackcloth up and put in the cellar. You can taste honey beverage three months later, it will be as better as longer will be season. -Olga-