Some notes on Russian food

Welcome to Amanda's dinner table! (Well, Maria Nikolaevna's table, but after I ate dinner). As I write this post, it's almost 8:30pm and a little gloomy out. The sun has been setting later and later here, normally around 10pm, but today it's been raining so it's overcast and foggy. This picture is from a few days ago and I was able to convince myself to drink the tea that night. As it gets less frigid outside, it's harder for me to drink tea after dinner. 1) I don't like tea, and 2) I don't understand how people drink hot beverages every morning/evening and don't burn alive during the warmer months. On this particular night, I had stove-fried potatoes and a mixture of mushrooms, onions and sour cream. It's greasy, it's messy, it's delicious.

I wanted to comment a little on food, since I've experienced so many different edibles in these past few months. So here are my thoughts:

• Americans should eat more beets. Borscht is actually really good and not at all like what I thought it would taste like.
• Russians really like sugar wafer-like sweets. My host mom calls them vafly (waffles), but they're basically variations on sugar wafers. My favorite are the ones in this picture at the top left, which have a slight coffee taste to them. The other thing on the plate is a cherry marmalade candy, which could give you cavities just looking at it. It's a jelly-like substance made into a square, then covered in sugar. They are one of the very few foods I've had to turn down. I can and do eat foods here that I'm not crazy about, but this was one of the few things I just could not consume again.
• Another thing on that short list of Foods I Cannot Eat Again - pickled tomatoes. I practically hugged my host mom when she gave me FRESH cucumbers with my dinner last night (and tonight again!) Russians have a long tradition of getting their winter veggies via pickled veggies, but I can barely stand them. I could stand the sour cucumbers (which weren't quite pickles, yet. Like they were removed before being fully pickle-fied), but the sour tomatoes lose all their wonderful flavor and just become soggy, vinegar-y lumps of evil.
• Russians have a rare talent in that they can make flavorless cake. I've had cake at several different locations and I've yet to find out how they can make chocolate cake that tastes like it has no chocolate or sugar in it.
• One of my absolute favorite foods at the school cafeteria (and in general in Russian cuisine) is Syeld Pod Shuboy, which translates roughly to Herring Under a Fur Coat. It sounds like the grossest thing ever and should thoroughly disgust me, but I tried it before I figured out what the name actually meant and loved it. It has this beautiful pink color on top of beets and mayo. Underneath that is herring, onion, mayo and who knows what else. When Russians do salads, it tends to be of the Potato Salad family, where it's a bunch of stuff mixed together with copious amounts of mayo. Another salad that I love here is Olivier salad, a traditional dish in Russian cuisine and frequently eaten on holidays (my host mother served it for Women's Day). It contains stuff like peas, carrots, egg, mayo, and ham all diced and mixed together. Both these salads are served cold.
  

  

  A very fancy picture of Herring Under a Fur Coat



Olivier Salad