“Russian cuisine has a sour-fermenting taste”: interviews with culinary historians Olga and Pavel Syutkin

The Syutkins are gastronomic historians. For 15 years they have been blogging about food, studying the culinary traditions of Russians and writing books. Recently they published a monograph "Russian Cuisine: From Myth to Science".

We met with Olga and Pavel and talked about regional food differences, the challenges of adapting old dishes, and the future of the Russian culinary school.

About work on books and family life

Which of you came up with the idea to write a book together?

Olga (hereinafter - O.): It all started 15 years ago. I have always enjoyed cooking, but I often ran into one problem. Here you make something tasty, and after a week or two you sometimes don’t even remember what it was. It's a shame! “You have to write it down,” my husband told me. “Better start a blog.”

"I? Blogger? Yes, for nothing! I answered. I didn't like it at all back then.

But then at some point it dawned on me: “We should write a book!” Just for myself. With all the recipes we love. Plus, you can give it to friends and acquaintances.

Pavel decided to approach this issue seriously, in compliance with publishing standards. Therefore, we invited a professional editor and artist to take photographs. The first book was called The Kitchen of My Love.

And then came the idea to writeUninvented history of Russian cuisine». And off we go… Now I am an experienced blogger grandmother. I am happy to lead social networks, communicate with subscribers.

Paul (hereinafter - P.): Yes, blogging is an important task in our work. There we “run in” many stories, which then end up in books. It is convenient and very important for us to test our thoughts on an audience of thousands, ask for advice, and receive criticism. After all, unlike some authors, we do not consider our opinion to be the ultimate truth, but we also learn all the time.

How do you arrange work in pairs?

P.: We have a division of competencies, I'm more into historical theory, and Olya is more into practice.

If we talk about the sequence of actions, then the first stage is, of course, the collection of material. Further - its analysis and building your own concept. After all, our task is not to dump a basket of interesting facts on the reader.

We are interested in understanding how the evolution of certain recipes and technologies took place. Not just to say: “Instead of turnips, people began to use potatoes,” but to try to superimpose this fact on how Russian society developed and see important patterns.

What could be the novelty of our approach? As always, the most interesting is at the junction of different specialties. We have - story and culinary culture. And we, each from our own belfry, are trying to analyze these processes and find the logic.

What sources are you looking for information from? Tell us on the example of your latest book "Russian Cuisine".

O.: I am mostly in cookbooks. For example, I remember very well cabbage soup with crucian carp that my grandmother cooked. And recently I came across a recipe for this dish from Gerasim Stepanov, a blind culinary specialist who lived in the middle of the 19th century. Such discoveries are always accompanied by fireworks of joy - thanks to them, you want to learn more and more.

P.: But, of course, it was important for us to maintain a scientific, unemotional, historical approach. To this end, we have studied almost all historical publications from the Russian State Library related to gastronomy. Including - from her Fund of rare and valuable publications relating to the XVIII-XIX centuries.

Yellowed books were taken out of the vaults, which over the past decades have been opened a maximum of several times. Vasily Levshin, Sergey Drukovtsev, Gerasim Stepanov, Ignatiy Radetsky are authors who could be considered classics and founders of Russian cuisine of that time.

In addition, of course, contacts were needed with local historians and with people who are engaged in local regional cuisine - for example, with specialists in Arkhangelsk gingerbread or Kolomna marshmallow. We had a lot of conversations with them while writing the book.

Field research is also important. Our book about Suzdal cuisine will be released soon. In order to write it, it was necessary to meet with the carriers of the recipes. The same local grandmothers who still remember how they cooked in their families before the war, in the 50s. After all, Soviet cuisine is also part of our culinary culture.

Let's not forget about not quite prescription things. The past of Russian cuisine is also the work of our prominent historians: Ivan Zabelin and Nikolai Kostomarov. As well as numerous sources: chronicles, memoirs of foreign travelers, monastic books and even Novgorod birch bark letters.

Without studying all these materials, it is impossible to form an objective vision. It is no coincidence that there are hundreds of references in our books. All this in order to create a multipolar picture of Russian cuisine.

What was the most difficult part of writing the book?

O.: The first cookbook that more or less resembles, if not a technological map, then at least an attempt to create one, is the work of Ekaterina Avdeeva, written in the 1840s.

Prior to this, cookbooks were purely descriptive: "Take a chunk of meat, beat it with a butt, sprinkle with onion and pepper." There were no measurements in pounds, minutes, or degrees. It’s good if the author wrote “a glass of cereal”, “a bucket of water”. But even these old Russian measures sometimes had different meanings for different products and epochs.

The difficulty was to turn such an algorithm into a recipe familiar to us. To do this, I had to cook intuitively: to identify the proportions of the ingredients myself so that any housewife could reproduce the dish. At the same time, it was important to take into account that the products have also changed since that time. For example, flour used to be coarser, eggs smaller, and sugar not as sweet.

It's a completely different world. I had to take into account all these nuances and only then give the recipes to readers with a clear conscience. Although I am not a chef, I think I have experience and flair. I manage to adapt the recipes to bring the consumer closer to the original taste, and at the same time make the dishes appetizing even today.

Pavel, what was the most difficult for you?

P.: The hardest part was probably the most enjoyable. Some of our stories are entire historical investigations. For example, once we had a question: has Easter cake always been the same as it is now? Today you can read any nonsense about it... Up to the point that it - long and with white icing at the end - symbolizes... I won’t even say what.

When we began to study this issue, we thought: something is not right here. Could there have been some molds in a Russian hut of the 16th century with which it was possible to bake a high Easter cake? And then after all it was necessary to water it fudge sugar! He probably wasn't the same as he is now.

We began to approach the issue from different angles. They even found artistic canvases on which Easter cakes looked completely different. And in the end, we found out that it used to be hearth - that is, it was baked without a form, on the hearth of the oven. And it looked like a loaf. And the very name "Kulich" came to us only around the 17th century.

So, based on our own understanding and understanding of historical processes, we finally confirmed our guess. This is akin to the professional intuition of detectives, which also helps them in their investigations.

And in history with borscht other important requirements for the historian of cuisine appeared: the presence of a good outlook, understanding of the international context, knowledge of languages. It was they who allowed us to understand that the old borscht did not at all resemble today's. That kvass was added to it then, including beetroot.

Throughout Eastern Europe, fermented beet leaves and hogweed were then used for this. A study of the works of European botanists of the 17th-18th centuries showed that red beets are an achievement of breeders of a relatively recent era. Before that, it was black or yellow.

So red soup before the arrival of this new beet in Russia was simply impossible. Here are just acquaintances with the domestic "Domostroy" and conversations with the priests about the monastery cuisine to understand this, as you understand, would not be enough. History is a science that requires serious qualifications.

About the varieties of Russian cuisine

— I would like to continue the conversation about borscht. When did the difference between Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian cuisines appear? At what point in history?

P.: The formation of national cuisine is possible only when a nation is being formed. If we are talking about Russian cuisine, then this happened at the end of the 15th century - during the reign of Ivan III. Then the common territory was entrenched, the issue with Tatar-Mongol yoke, a unified management system arose: landownership and the legal system - the “Sudebnik of Ivan III”. And it is no coincidence that half a century after that, in the 1550s, Domostroy was published, a book that, among other things, describes the Russian cuisine that had developed by that time.

That's just parallel to this is the development of not only Muscovy, but also other Slavic territories. Thus, the culinary traditions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which united not only the Baltic states, but also a huge part of present-day Ukraine and Belarus, were not similar to the cuisine of the Muscovite state.

This state formation was territorially southwest, more interacted with Europe, experienced a significant influence of the culture of the Crimean Tatars and was not under the protectorate Hordes. It developed in its own way. It was there that Ukrainian and Belarusian cuisines were formed in the 16th-18th centuries.

At the same time, the similarity of Russian and Ukrainian cuisines is hard to deny. We have, for example, curdled milk, in Ukraine - ryazhenka. It's almost the same thing, but with some nuances.

— And what cultures influenced Russian cuisine?

P.: I often compare the history of Russian cuisine with a book. We flipped back 100 pages - and now Mikoyan brings Mortadella sausage, which becomes Doctor's with us. And also the habit of drinking orange juice from America, which - well, there are no oranges in Russia - becomes tomato.

Turning another 100 pages back - the beginning of the 19th century - we are faced with French influence: champagne "Veuve Clicquot", "Strasbourg imperishable pie", fire cutlets. Then - the Petrine era, there is no need to comment on how much everything came.

Another 100 pages - the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who took Kazan and Astrakhan, and black caviar, grapes, Tatar fried belyashi came to Russia, which became our carp pies.

Russian cuisine has always experienced foreign influence. And there is nothing wrong with that. The same fate was with any European cuisine. No one cooked in their own saucepan. Everyone took the best from their neighbors. This is fine.

O.: Yes. It is always important to know what is happening in other cultures. When they ask me if I only cook dishes of Russian cuisine, I am surprised. If this were the case, I would not be able to work with my kitchen, I would not be able to know it to the fullest.

— How does Russian cuisine differ regionally? Maybe you could give an example of how the same dish looks different in different regions?

O.: The same borscht. For example, Rostov is completely different from what we, Muscovites, imagine. It is called "red" because instead of beets they add tomatoes to it. We would call it soup. And Taganrog borscht, for example, is cooked with beef tails. Perm - with millet.

Or, for example, heather. Smolensk vereshchaka is a meat dish. When the meat is fried in a pan, it makes a characteristic sound - screeching. And in Siberia, vereshchaka is called scrambled eggs.

- You write: “In the USSR there was an attempt to create a new model of nutrition. Whether it succeeded is a moot point even today.” Could you elaborate on this? What was this experiment and why could it fail?

P.: In a sense, this experiment was a success. I often say that in Soviet Union there were two national projects in the humanitarian sphere - this is mass education and the new Soviet cuisine. For a time they were successful, but they suffered the same fate as socialism in general.

There is a lot of speculation about Soviet cuisine. Like, the Bolsheviks came, destroyed the Russian culinary tradition and created an ersatz in the form of catering. It is both so and not so.

In the 1920s, the aristocratic fine cuisine was indeed thrown back for understandable ideological reasons. A slice of the cheapest, most democratic, workers' and peasants' food was taken. This helped to feed the people and solve the problem of food in difficult years.

However, in the 1930s there was an attempt to revive the old cuisine under a new ideological flair. If we look at the first edition of the 1939 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, we will find many recipes from the work of the noblewoman Elena Molokhovets. Soviet authors did not refer to it, but almost verbatim quotations can be found inside.

The culinary issue has always been ideological for the authorities USSR.

It was impossible to raise salaries overnight and provide everyone with cars, but to produce Soviet champagne - yes.

So they showed: before it was drunk by all sorts of bourgeois, but now every worker can buy himself a bottle for the holiday.

In the Soviet years, the development of cooking went more in the direction of technology, sanitation and GOSTs - so that you can do relatively tasty, but standard. But the kitchen as a creative process was relegated to the background.

O.: Yes, creativity has moved into notebooks. All sorts of masterpieces like Mimosa salads or herring under a fur coat were recorded there. They were invented by Soviet housewives, not some food institute.

In this sense, confectionery is very indicative. Of course, cakes bought in a Soviet store, decorated with roses from margarine, not the height of confectionery craftsmanship. People wanted to try something different.

The only problem was that the recipes for these store-bought cakes were designed for public catering - for 100 servings, kilograms of butter. But the right recipes for the house passed from hand to hand. Cakes "Bear in the North", "Napoleon" or "Honey cake", for example, existed then only in this format.

It became easier for Soviet housewives only after Robert Kengis wrote the book “Homemade cakes, pastries, cookies, gingerbread, pies, gingerbread, pies”, where he tried to shift all these catering formulas into the language of the home cooking.

— And what is Russian cuisine now?

P.: Russian cuisine is still in the process of its formation. Despite the fact that in the USSR there were many wonderful discoveries, two powerful problems were observed.

The first is isolation from the whole world, when we did not know either new products, or ways to work with them, or cooking techniques that arose throughout the 20th century. The second - already in the 70s - was a food shortage, which led to the washing out of more expensive and high-quality products and to the primitivization of the cuisine.

Therefore, after perestroika, in the mid-90s, foreign cuisines flooded in waves: French, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Mexican. For people it was a culinary discovery. And Russian chefs had to master the accumulated international culinary experience. In the 1990s-2000s, they went through the same school that, in a good way, they had to go through the entire 20th century.

In the first decades after the collapse of the USSR, there was a feeling that Russian cuisine was backward, containing only fatty and unhealthy dishes. But gradually, both professionals and people of a wide range began to understand: if the dish is well prepared, make it tasty and tasty with today's vision. wholesome food, then this culinary tradition has a right to exist.

Therefore, today the task of Russian cuisine is to jump over this barrier, to become a world-class cuisine. It's about reinvention - what Heston Blumenthal calls rediscovering in relation to old English cuisine. Rethinking old technologies and products in such a way that they become understandable to a modern person.

Today we do not wear bearskin hats, onuchi and unsheathed sheepskin coats. So why should Russian cuisine remain a set of porridges, cabbage soup and thick pies? She also has the right to her development.

O.: Yes, every cuisine has its own character and taste. And it can and should be shown and carried in new dishes that will sound modern.

- And what is this character? What taste does Russian cuisine have and how does it differ from others?

O.: For example: Georgian cuisine has a spicy and spicy taste due to bright spices. Jewish cuisine, Ashkenazi, is sweet, because sugar is added to many dishes - in the same fish and meat.

Russian cuisine has a sour fermentation taste. We have black bread, sauerkraut, barrel cucumbers, sour cream, cottage cheese, kvass... All of them are created by sour-milk fermentation.

Other kitchens may partly use this technology, but in a completely different capacity. Territorial and biospheric differences influence. The same cheese: in Italy - one, in France - another. And so you can sort out each kitchen - highlight the prevailing tastes in it.

— What do you think will happen to Russian cuisine in 100 years? How does she transform?

P.: When we wrote The Uninvented History of Soviet Cuisine, we also tried to answer this question. And the answer was simple: everything depends on the fate of the country and its evolution. If it embarks on the normal path of natural development without any "special" or incomprehensible path leading to it, then it will become part of world culture. It will take the same place as the great Russian cuisine at the end of the 19th century, when any European restaurant perfectly understood what beef stroganoff, borscht, pig a la russe are.

And if this does not happen, our cuisine will again turn into a Soviet public catering - patriotic, Orthodox, patriarchal. We will enjoy spirituality from two types of meat - pork and beef, two types of sauce - ketchup and mayonnaise, two types of bread - white and black ...

O.: And one cheese called "Cheese".

— In general, should we be afraid of cultural isolation?

O.: Of course. Isolation, this whole special way, the great "spirituality" and "continuity" is a dead end. Many of today's talented chefs went through an excellent European school, studied with the world's best chefs. And today, on this basis, they develop our cuisine, using regional products, technologies and historical tastes.

When we talk about the future of Russian cuisine, we need to understand that subconsciously we mean the future of the Russian restaurant business. Development still does not occur through home cooking. The latter will remain the same for a long time to come. Yes, and its role, alas, is decreasing: people are less and less likely to cook at home. Easier to buy dumplings and sausages.

P.: I think we can draw an analogy with fashion here. The restaurant is a haute couture, when the girls on the podium walk in some fancy fantastic outfits. Some of this then, years later, comes into normal fashion and begins to be sold in mass markets. Something remains a fantasy.

Today, Russian cuisine in restaurants is often experimental. And this is very important. The kitchen is always an experiment. Not necessarily lucky. But without that, we're not going anywhere.

O.: At the same time, modern chefs really reflect the taste of Russian cuisine and shades of regional cuisines.

P.: Yes! This is the task: that with all the experiments, Russian cuisine continues to be Russian. Here, by the way, one can also draw a comparison with fashion. Here is an example: do you cease to be a Russian person if you are wearing Chinese sneakers or a French dress? Probably, this does not particularly affect your perception of life and self-identification.

Why then should the kitchen be different? Why, if we do not put turnips in a dish, but, say, artichokes, then this is a tragedy and a betrayal of the Motherland?

O.: Artichokes - not so scary! And here's the bat... (Laughs.)

About different dishes

- Which of all the dishes you cooked seemed the most delicious?

O.: When I was 30 years old, for me, “kurnik” was some kind of magic word. It seemed to be such an incredible, fancy cake that I would never be able to cook it. But when I did it, I believed in myself - I realized that I can! The same thing with fire cutlets - now I can proudly boast: “Here I have delicious fire cutlets!”

P.: And, of course, gingerbread.

O.: Yes! How did I forget the gingerbread! Their preparation also seemed to me a difficult task, which I must learn. Now I have a large collection of gingerbread boards, and I cook this dessert all the time. If only you knew how much kids love it! Where do they get it from? Some kind of love for the honey test at the genetic level.

Gingerbread is a separate layer of our Russian culture. They were completely different - not only Tula. And with wheat, and with rye flour, and almond, and with filling... Probably, we will soon write a book about gingerbread.

- It would be great! And what dish seemed the most unusual?

O.: Probably an old Russian cabbage. It is very similar to cabbage soup, which we all tried one way or another. It seems to be nothing unusual - a simple and understandable taste... But one day in one of the recipes we saw that in Russia they added plum leftovers to them.

P.: Levashnik is such medieval canned food. The baked apple was rubbed in puree, removing the seeds and peel, mixed with plums, berries or honey and sent to the sun. Apples have pectin - it gels the mixture. And the result is something like thick marmalade - figs. Then you could do anything with it: send it to pies, to cabbage.

O.: But since we didn’t have a left-hander, I thought, why not put plum marmalade in my soup? And literally one spoon brought cabbage to a completely different level. As the journalists who tried it said, “out of the flat old Russian melancholy, you made a new 3D taste.” Indeed, the sweetness added some zest.

What dish was the most difficult to prepare?

O.: You know, I have not been looking for difficult ways for a long time. It is better to cook something simple and understandable that everyone can repeat.

Our cuisine, during its active development in the 19th century, could afford the complexity of dishes and serving. Today, in the home kitchen, this is unlikely to be in demand. The simpler and more effective, the more attractive.

P.: Yes, and sometimes in this simplicity there are real diamonds that we forgot about. For example, we recently discovered Nesselrode pudding. It is named after its inventor, the Chancellor of the Russian Empire, not only a diplomat, but also a famous gastronome.

O.: Yes. When we read the recipe, we thought: “Well, where do we get chestnut flour?” Then it turned out that there was chestnut paste in the stores. What about dried berries? Let's buy dried cranberries. And although the recipe looked complicated, it turned out that in fact there is nothing supernatural in it!

— Can you tell us about your creative plans? Did you say that you are writing a book about Suzdal cuisine?

P.: The monograph on Suzdal cuisine is already ready and handed over to the publishing house. If not this year, then next year it will appear on the shelves.

Today we are thinking about the culinary history of early Russia. The time period from the 9th to the 16th century remained unlit in gastronomic terms. This is a little explored part of our history. And, of course, it will have to be studied only by hints that are scattered in Russian chronicles, birch bark letters, church teachings, testimonies of foreigners. But the more difficult the task, the more interesting.