Русская кухня
Russian Food
B2 · Upper Intermediate · non-fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
An upper-intermediate documentary that explains a cuisine by its equipment and its calendar rather than by its recipes. A Russian masonry stove has nowhere to fry: food goes in after the fire has burned down and cooks for hours in falling heat, which produces soups, porridges and pies and almost no frying at all. The Orthodox year then removes meat, milk and eggs for roughly two days in five, which is why the tradition is so extraordinarily good at mushrooms. It also delivers a correction: most of what the world calls traditional Russian food is nineteenth-century restaurant cooking with a French accent — and one thing, the order in which restaurants everywhere now serve you dinner, went the other way.
Characters
- The Russian stove (Русская печь) — The determining fact
- The fasting calendar (Постный календарь) — Roughly two days in five
- Lucien Olivier (Люсьен Оливье) — Restaurateur, 1838–1883
- Anastas Mikoyan (Анастас Микоян) — People's Commissar for Food
Vocabulary from this story
- кухня — cuisine, kitchen
- печь — masonry stove
- огонь — fire
- жар — residual heat
- горшок — earthenware pot
- сковорода — frying pan
- плита — cooking range
- блюдо — dish
- суп — soup
- щи — cabbage soup
- каша — porridge, grain dish
- пирог — pie