Belarusian cuisine. Knyshi Traditional menu for Belarusian lunch

National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. As part of the project, we invite you to look at cooking through the prism of time. Leafing through the cookbooks in the library's collections from the times of Peter the Great to our recent past - the Soviet period, we will focus on those recipes and advice that reflect the features of everyday life that most clearly characterize the era and way of life of their time and add taste and tangibility to the perception of history.

So, about the traditions of Belarusian cuisine. At a superficial glance, one might get the impression that Belarusian cuisine is one of the branches of all-Russian cuisine. However, this is far from the case. The culinary art of Belarus has long been influenced, on the one hand, by the Slavic peoples surrounding Belarusians - Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and on the other hand - by their non-Slavic neighbors: Lithuanians, Latvians. National differences were intertwined with religious and class differences. As a result, the basis of modern Belarusian cuisine was the cuisine of the rural population, which was formed under the influence of both Russian and Western (Polish, Lithuanian) culinary traditions, but received Belarusian processing.

The main thing in traditional national Belarusian dishes is not the special composition of the products, but the process of their processing. Two diametrically opposed methods were used: either the use of large, indivisible masses - baking a whole leg, a whole fish, etc., or, conversely, chopping, grinding the product, turning it into a homogeneous mass. The last technique was borrowed from Polish cuisine, and it was the one that received the greatest development. The established tradition of preparing one common dish, which has the qualities of both the second and the first at the same time, left its mark on the favorite culinary techniques of cooking - baking, prolonged cooking, steaming and simmering foods.

The overcooked, shapeless nature of the dish was recognized as an ideal; Such dishes as bigos, mochanka, as well as semi-sweet dishes of malt and kulaga have a traditional semi-liquid-semi-thick consistency. There was also a widespread method of artificially thickening a dish, when flour and starch were added to it - the so-called pinned.

The first information about the nutrition of Belarusians can be found back in the 16th century in the so-called. inventories - descriptions of landowners' property, which lists the products stored in pantries. In the 17th century, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included Belarus, books with culinary recipes appeared in Polish, for example, “Compendium ferculorum” Art. Chernetsky (1682). The 19th century became the time of popularization of Belarusian national cuisine. The most famous publications of this period are “Gospodyni litewska...” by G. Tyundzevitskaya (1848) and “Kucharka litewska...” by V. Zavadskaya (1874). And although they were printed in Polish, the book “Lithuanian Housewife” could well be called “Belarusian Housewife”, since it reflects the economic and culinary experience of the residents of the Minsk region. This book was reprinted many times (1851, 1856, 1858, 1862, 1873); it was published in a Belarusian translation in 1993 ("Lito's Gaspadynya", Mn., 1993).

We offer you recipes from the book by E. Zaikovsky and G. Tychka “Old Belarusian Cuisine” (Minsk, 1995), compiled from sources of the 19th-20th centuries, including the aforementioned book “Lithuanian Gaspadynya”.

There were two types of Belarusian soups: cold and hot. Hot ones were mostly flour, vegetable and cereal, using pork or lard. Among them are krupenya, watering, zhur. In soups, zakras, stabbed, and vologs were widely used - products added for thickening. Cold soups - kholodniki - were prepared on an acidic basis (kvass, whey).

Dilute half a pound of oatmeal with water and leave it in a warm place for a day or more to sour. Then strain through a sieve and boil until it thickens. Fry pieces of lard, adding chopped onion, and season the zhur with this. Eaten with boiled potatoes.

The predominant use of oatmeal, rye, barley, pea flour and ignorance of yeast led to the absence of traditional pancakes and pies in Belarusian cuisine. Most flour dishes were prepared from “raschina” - a solution of flour and water that spontaneously soured. Among them are drachena, babka, and dumplings. Many of these dishes were also made from potatoes.

Potatoes entered the territory of Belarus 75-90 years earlier than in Russia. National cuisine knows more than two dozen recipes for potato dishes. Most often they were prepared from grated potatoes - either raw or boiled - tosh, coma, sorcerers, potato pancakes. Whole potatoes were more often consumed in stewed form - stews, smazhenki.

Coma

Peel the potatoes, boil and mash, adding hot milk. Fry the onion in lard or oil and season the potato porridge. Roll it into balls the size of a small apple, roll in flour and brown in a frying pan with butter. They eat comas with milk, cucumbers, and sauerkraut.

Sorcerers of Count Tyshkevich

Boil the dried mushrooms, crumble them, add finely chopped onions fried in oil, two raw eggs, a little salt and pepper. Chop a piece of fatty smoked ham as finely as possible. Take as much of it as you took mushrooms. If there is little fat, add fresh lard and mix with mushrooms. Make the dough by taking three cups of flour, two or three eggs, salt, water. Roll out the dough thinly and cut into small circles. Place minced meat on the dough, cover with another circle and seal the edges. Place the sorcerers in boiling water and cook until they float to the surface. Strain and drizzle with melted butter and well-fried onions before serving.

Meat dishes, especially pork and lard, occupy a significant place in Belarusian cuisine. The meat was stewed with stews (vegetables, cereals) and flavors (spices, mushrooms). The best pieces of pork, lamb, whole carcasses of hare, turkey, and goose were baked in one piece - they were cooked squatly.

Baked kumpyak

Soak kumpyak (kumpyak is a ham, thigh part of a carcass, usually pork) overnight, wash in boiling water, rinse, wipe and put in rolled out bread dough. Cover with dough on top, seal thoroughly, sprinkle with flour and bake for a couple of hours in a melted oven, as for bread. After this, peel off the bread crust, remove the skin while the meat is warm, sprinkle with powdered sugar and cinnamon and place in the oven to form a golden brown crust. Kumpyak prepared in this way is juicy and has a delicate taste.

Pork was used to prepare homemade sausages, corned beef, and vandlina - lightly smoked ham, which was used for such a famous national dish as mochanka.

Mochanka

Cut half a pound of pork with skin and half a pound of sausage and fry it. Take half the amount of corned beef and fry it too. Dilute two tablespoons of wheat flour with cold water and pour into a saucepan with boiling water, stirring all the time. Add salt, bay leaf, pepper, fried corned beef, finely chopped onion and sausage with pork. Place everything in a warm oven for half an hour.

There are almost no sweet dishes in classical Belarusian cuisine. Their role was played partly by drinks (various fruit kvass), partly by berries and malted dough - malt, kulaga.

Kulaga

Berries, maybe viburnum and rowan (but not cranberries), put in a light oven (in the oven) and when they are heated, beat them with finely ground flour, then put them in the oven again. Kulaga can be lightly seasoned with honey. They eat it both warm and cold. Can also be spread on bread.

The proposed recipes seem to us quite understandable and practically feasible today. Prepare and share your impressions with us! Next time we will introduce you to recipes from the culinary bestseller - the book by E. Molokhovets “A Gift for Young Housewives”.

The information was prepared by a researcher at the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts of the Central Scientific Library. Yakub Kolas NAS of Belarus Inna Murashova based on materials from the library collection.

TUT.BY - only with taste...

Knyshi are pies of Belarusian cuisine. The dough is fresh. At the same time, thanks to the “knish” technology, the dough casing turns out to be unique. I like unleavened dough knishes better than regular unleavened dough pies. I baked knishes with potato filling and with sauerkraut filling.

KNYSHI

2-2.5 cups flour
0.5 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder or 0.5 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon 9% vinegar
0.5 glasses of water
1 egg
a little less than half a glass of odorless vegetable oil

The dough can easily stand in the refrigerator for three days. Therefore, you can prepare it in advance.

Sift 2 cups of flour into one bowl, add salt and baking powder (soda).

In another bowl, stir the egg, water, vegetable oil, and vinegar.

Gradually introduced the liquid phase into the bulk phase, stirring. If there is not enough flour, add. Today I needed 2.5 cups because the egg was very large.

Knead into a smooth, plastic dough (the consistency of an earlobe). There is no need to knead for a long time.
Place in a bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour.

There is not as much dough as it might seem. The lump is small.

I made two fillings today.

Filling 1. Boiled potatoes, mixed with fried onions and champignons.
Filling 2. Fry the onion, then add sauerkraut. I fried it with onions and added a little sugar for a hint of flavor.

For further cutting, divide the dough into 2 parts. Roll each part into a rectangular layer. We roll it out soooooo much that even the table is visible through it. Just make sure that the dough does not stick to the table, because flour the table before rolling.

Place the filling along the long side, moving away from the edge.

Carefully roll into a tight roll (along the long side).

Use the blunt side of a knife to make “dents” along the length. Carefully.

And carefully “unscrew” it piece by piece.

We seal the ends.

Now we place each workpiece on one of the ends and use our fingers to make a hole.

This is what a “cup” looks like.

Place on a baking sheet (bake on a silicone mat). Lubricate with yolk mixed with a little milk. And put it in an oven heated to 200 C. Bake from 25 to 40 minutes (depending on the specific oven). Up to a pretty color scheme.

While hot, the dough crunches. Thanks to the technology there is a layering effect. I like knishiki with milk. Some people like it with sour cream.

I forgot to write that it turned out to be 16 small knishes.

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Belarusian cuisine was formed under the influence of neighboring states - Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine, plus differences between the culinary tastes of ordinary people and the dominant gentry. The latter preferred German cuisine; the artisans borrowed a lot from the Jews who populated the country en masse since the 17th century.

Features of Belarusian cuisine

The main food product - the second bread - was and remains potatoes: sorcerers, pancakes, casseroles, drachena, babka, as well as dishes from meat, vegetables, mushrooms with the constant addition of potatoes. There are three ways to prepare potato mass:

• Tarkovannye potatoes - raw potatoes are grated and cooked together with juice.
• Wedge mass - after grating, the raw potato mass is filtered.
• Mashed potatoes are boiled and crushed mass.

In the national cuisine of Belarus, “black flour” was actively used - rye, oatmeal, buckwheat, barley, pea. Raschin Belarusian pancakes based on oat flour bear little resemblance to Russian ones, since they are baked from raschin - a spontaneously fermented leaven made from flour and water. Pies are not found in Belarusian cuisine at all.

Among dairy products, butter, sour cream, whey and cottage cheese are actively used as a “whitening”, “sourdough”, “volog” for many dishes with the addition of flour, vegetables, mushrooms and potatoes.

Pork is most often used to make sausages and wandlina - lightly smoked ham or loin. It, like lamb, is baked to prepare the national dish “pyachisty”. Among other meat dishes, “bigus” – cabbage stewed with meat – is popular.

Vodka ("garelka"), "zubrovka" (tincture of "garelka"), and "krambambulya" (an alcoholic drink made from vodka and honey) are used as alcoholic drinks.

Kissel, kvass, kulaga, purees, and casseroles are prepared from fruits and berries. Kissel in Belarus can hardly be called a drink - it is very thick and healthy, with the addition of wild berries.

Belarusian national dishes

The main products used in Belarusian cuisine have remained almost unchanged. But the processing methods and quality composition of dishes are different today. Previously, festive machanka was prepared from liquid rye or wheat dough, into which lard, onions, sausage, and pepper were crumbled and baked in a pot in the oven. Now all the products are fried in a frying pan, preparing a sauce from them. Pancakes are made from flour and served with this sauce.

Traditional menu for Belarusian lunch

Cold appetizer – Minsky salad. Cut the boiled potatoes into cubes, add shredded cabbage and chopped boiled champignons. Season with oil, sugar, vinegar.

The first dish is broth with “sorcerers” and ears. Place “sorcerers” (similar to large-sized dumplings), pre-boiled for 5 minutes in boiling water, into clear bone broth and cook until tender. Ears are prepared from unleavened dough, cutting the layer into diamonds. Pinch the opposite ends, bake in the oven and serve with broth.

Hot meat dish - potato fray. Flour, salt, soda, pepper, onion, fried with bacon, and fried pork slices are added to grated raw potatoes. Mix everything thoroughly and bake in a greased frying pan. Serve drachena hot, with butter.

Sweet – Belarusian jelly. Leaven is made from cold oatmeal and water. When it sours well, filter and brew thick jelly. Cool in molds, and when serving, pour over berry syrup. Can be served with cold milk.