Soviet Recipe Postcards--Cooking With Potatoes

“All in all, no other garden craze has been surrounded by so many legends, fairy tales, myths and fables as the potato….” So begins the introduction to this collection of potato recipes produced by Lenizdat, a Soviet publishing house. (I’ve previously blogged about their soup and sandwich recipe cards.)

Potatoes are indeed big in Russian cooking, but I usually think of them in simple recipes, like soups or maybe boiled or fried and served as sides to meat. Let’s go on a retro-photo tour and see just how much you can do with potatoes in Russian cuisine. Like most old recipes, these are vague about proportions and cooking times. Email me (yulinkacooks at yahoo dot com) if you’d like specifics, and I’ll do my best to translate and clarify.

Potato Kebabs--Who says there’s no vegetarian food in Russia? Granted, the editors suggest you deep fry the potatoes in lard before skewering them, but feel free to use vegetable oil.

French Fries!--Again, the recipe calls for lard, but these fries are to be served with cucumbers and pickles, tomatoes, sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, salad, mushrooms and pickled lingberries and apples. Take that, McDonald’s!

Soup With Potato Dumplings--called ooshki (ушки), or “little ears” in Russian, which aren’t unlike gnocchi. 

Waldorf Salad (from French cuisine—editor’s note)--Boiled potatoes, apples and walnuts, with mayo, lemon juice, salt and sugar for the dressing.

Potato and Meat Casserole--Call it Shepherd’s pie. You mix mashed potatoes with eggs, butter and sour cream, and place the mixture in a buttered pan. Top with browned onions and ground beef, and bake. Serve with pickles, sauerkraut, vegetables and “greenery” (zelen'/зелень in Russian, meaning fresh herbs like parsley and dill). This recipe, and the one below, make good use of leftover mashed potatoes.

Potato Roll Stuffed With Eggs--Make dough out of mashed potatoes, stuff it with hardboiled eggs and bake. Good with schi (sauerkraut soup), according to the recipe!

Beef and Potato Stew--I like this photo because it shows the essential condiments to the Russian stew—rye bread, pickles, sauerkraut, tomatoes, dill and peppers. And that’s probably kvass--rye bread beer--in the mug.

Other recipes included in this set are stuffed potatoes, deep-fried potato dumplings (smazhenzi/смаженцы, from Slovenia), and, from Belarus, potato dumplings with mushrooms and pork (kalduni/калдуны) and potato pancakes (draniki/драники, which I once made). Contact me for recipes.

Mushrooming Forth

I'm back to my old tricks--pickling and marinating vegetables. This time, I'm trying a recipe for pickled mushrooms from Anne Volokh's The Art of Russian Cuisine. I've been looking for a good recipe for Russian-style pickled mushrooms for ages, but I've never found one that was really satisfying (this attempt is the closest I've gotten).

Volokh's recipe is different from my past attempts because it doesn't call for any liquid or vinegar--just mushrooms, aromatics (garlic, dill) and salt. You weigh down the mushrooms with something heavy (like my big bottle, above). The mushrooms release liquid, which becomes the brine. They're properly pickled in 10 to 14 days. Stay tuned for an update.

From the archives: A recipe for marinated mushrooms from Anya von Bremzen's Please to the Table

Some Notes on Russian Cookbooks

Move over, Please to the Table; I’ve got a new Russian cookbook to play with. It's Anne Volokh’s 600-page The Art of Russian Cuisine, published in 1983. (Anya Von Bremzen’s 1990 Please to the Table, by the way, has been my main inspiration for this blog.)

I haven’t had a chance to try any of Volokh’s recipes, but I’m impressed by the scope of her book. All the usual Russian foods (borsch, pelmeni) are well-represented, but so are lesser-known dishes such as seledka pod shuboi (herring in a fur coat) and Napoleon (tricky but popular layered cream cake). The chapters on making your own rye bread and pickling and preserving fruits and vegetables are extensive. Volokh’s recipes are more detailed than Von Bremzen’s, and she included handy diagrams for work-intensive dishes such as vareneki (dumplings) and multi-layered pies.

If there’s a downside to the book, it’s that Volokh spends a bit too much time on 19th-century Russian haute cuisine. (The amusing author photo in my edition shows Volokh wearing what looks like a 19th-century hat and gown.) Has anyone in Russia cooked dishes like poached sturgeon with cream sauce and Veal Prince Orlov between, say, 1920 and 1995? There’s little from the former Soviet republics with the exception of the most well-known dishes like plov, the Uzbek lamb and rice stew.

Von Bremzen, too, includes grouse and such in her book, but she also extensively covers the foods of every USSR satellite nation from Estonia to Tajikistan. I like that she notes Soviet-era food shortages and adaptations 20th-century home cooks have had to make. Unfortunately, Von Bremzen's recipes often need some tweaking and her ingredient proportions tend to be off.

I've heard from blog readers that Volokh's recipes are more precise, so I'm looking forward to perusing her book and trying some of her recipes, starting with pickled mushrooms.