There’s more to Russian cuisine than beef stroganoff, piroshki, and borscht

There are many misconceptions about Russian food, exacerbated almost certainly by Russians who opened restaurants overseas and played up to the stereotypes. If you’ve read any classic Russian literature, you will know the cuisine is far more varied than the vodka, caviar and zakuski that overseas Russian restaurants emphasise (although it’s true that all three of these are important to celebratory meals).

In Please to the Table (1990), Russian-born American food historian Anya von Bremzen and art historian John Welchman take us back to Russia. In the introduction, they write, “What we have set out to do is to convey some real sense of the almost giddying diversity of Soviet cooking, and to dispel the prevailing myth that there is little more to Russian (or Soviet) food than blini and borscht.

“We are also setting out to redeem the sad reputation of the cuisines of the USSR, the result of more than fifty years of constant food shortages and the substandard restaurant cooking and service that visitors have had to endure in Moscow and Leningrad. There is some quite marvellous and adventurous food to be had outside the republic of Russia and the essence of Soviet food will never be found in an uneven struggle with a greasy plate of chicken Kiev or an order of tough Stroganoff.”

The cuisines of the USSR (the book was published a year before the dissolution of the Soviet republics) were influenced not only by each other, but by outside cultures as well. “Few of the dishes in our sphere are wholly unrelated to one or another of the great cuisines of the world – Middle Eastern, French, Chinese, Scandinavian, or the simple fare of the Eastern European plainlands.

“You will find a profound French influence on classic Russian cuisine; Chinese and Indian influences in Uzbekistan; Turkish and Persian in the Caucasus; and Scandinavian in the Baltic republics […] In Uzbekistan, alone, for example, you can find people from Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, China, Korea, Mongolia, Russia, and Ukraine; and there are also sizeable communities of Jews and Gypsies.

“Here you might sit down to a dinner that includes a dish of stuffed vegetables imported from Turkey; Uzbek filled fritters (samsa, from the Indian samosa); steamed dumplings of Chinese origin; and a beloved Russian herring dish, dressed Scandinavian style.”

All the Russian dishes you’d expect are in the book: chicken Kiev, salad Olivier (which is usually listed as Russian salad in restaurants outside Russia), beef stroganoff, borscht, stuffed cabbage, pelmeni and piroshki.

Less familiar dishes include Azerbaijani meatball soup, Estonian fried smelts, salmon-stuffed veal with caviar sauce, apple soup with apple dumplings, mushroom-stuffed fillets of flounder, chocolate meringue cake, and crème brûlée ice cream.