Russian cuisine relies on resilient ingredients that thrive in the continental climate of Eastern Europe, such as buckwheat, cabbage, garlic and mushrooms.
At the same time, their dishes reflect the country's southern expansion, trade contacts with the West and foreign cultures incorporated into the Empire, which enriched the menu and overhauled traditional recipes.
Toronto-based historian Alison K. Smith, who has devoted exemplary studies to the food culture of pre-revolutionary Russia, in her latest book, Cabbage and Caviar, illustrates a thousand years of Russian history through the prism of dietary compulsions, suffering, and pleasures.
Kerstin Holm
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The book combines the historical panoramic view with beautiful illustrations, an instructive glossary, a scientific bibliography and selected recipes to cook at home.
Smith recreates history in a grounded manner through weather challenges, famines, agricultural and culinary innovations.
She also reports on luxury menus – roast swans or pineapples from the orangery – but goes where the moderately well-to-do intelligentsia eats, in simple restaurants, among friends at home or in the cafeteria of Moscow's Lenin Library.
Even in the nineteenth century, the people subsisted mainly on bread
Since there was no Russian middle class most of the time, Russian authors or European travelers to Russia report on black bread, the cabbage soup shchi and buckwheat porridge as the frugally monotonous main components of the national diet for centuries.
There were also onions, garlic, mushrooms and cucumbers, the latter preferably marinated.
The Dutch Russian traveler Nicolaes Witsen, later a mentor of Tsar Peter the Great, noted in the seventeenth century that even Muscovite court cooks prepared meat with such a quantity of onions, garlic and pickles that it was inedible for tongues like his.
Even in the nineteenth century, the people lived mainly on bread, preferably made of leavened rye dough, which was sprinkled with salt and enjoyed with the milk-sour bread drink kvass.
The British missionary and Russian traveler Robert Pinkerton testified in the 1830s that hard-working farmers and soldiers lived on practically nothing else.
A modification up until the Soviet era was the tyurya, in which kvass and a little linseed oil were poured over chunks of bread and garnished with onions.
In summer, kvass was and remains the basis for cold soups with cucumber and dill (okroshka) or beetroot leaves (botvinja).
Roasted oatmeal Tolokno, which is currently experiencing a renaissance, was valued for porridge and soups, as well as dandelions, nettles and sorrel for salads and soups.
Asparagus, artichokes and the aforementioned pineapple have also been grown on noble estates since the eighteenth century, which is why the conservative prince Mikhail Shcherbatov denounced the “corruption” of the elite through their penchant for luxury even under Catherine the Great.
The educated Shcherbatov was a staunch defender of serfdom, but he was concerned that the growing fad of high lifestyles would increase the risk of famine in the countryside.