In The Days of the Tsar

Classic Recipes

Appears in

Published 1983

About

Russian cookery had its heyday in the late-nineteenth-century court of the tsar and the homes of the gentry and nobility, when fantastic dishes were created to please discerning masters—Salad Demidoff, Pheasant Souvoroff, Veal Orloff, Beef Stroganoff, Nesselrode Pie. The fanciest chefs were all French, and the fanciest dishes resulted from a mixture of traditional French cookery and native Russian methods, as the original Russian foods received a flair they had previously lacked.

Still, Russian cookery did not blossom overnight. It took many years before gastronomy in Russia reached that state of refinement we consider its haute cuisine today. This evolution seems striking when one considers that the early Slavic tribes subsisted mainly on coarse gruels and primitive brews. The first written account of food occurs in the Russian Primary Chronicle, a history set down by a clerical scribe in Church Slavonic, a language now dead for many centuries. This entry is dated A.D. 997; the scene is the ancient town of Belgorod.