Wheat Berries with Honey and Nuts

Kut’ya is strongly associated with ritual. An ancient dish, it was served at funerals to send off the dead. In some areas of Russia, people ate the grain right at the gravesite, tossing a handful onto the coffin, where it might “moisten the dry lips of the dead.” This funereal connotation appears in Fyodor Sologub’s novel The Petty Demon. Sologub’s hero is the provincial schoolteacher Peredonov, one of whose essential traits is paranoia. Peredonov imagines the threat of poisoning everywhere