Recipes: Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson
Music: We've maybe been slacking a bit on the Russian music, but there might have been some Russian guitar at the beginning of the night...
Herring Pate
2 fresh herrings, filleted
4 tbsp butter
1 tbsp creamed horseradish sauce
Black pepper
I was seriously concerned about this "fresh herring" as nowhere in the directions does it say "cook" the herring. Being uncertain, and thinking I would never find cured herring fillets, I just bought a jar of pickled herring in cream sauce, thinking, why not? I threw it all into the food processor and it was the least favorite snack of the night. It wasn't horrible, but even I didn't eat that much of it. As it turns out, after buying the jar, there were cured fillets right in my backyard Pathmark which might have made the dish tastier. And Wikipedia has this to say about raw herring: served as a Dutch delicacy, Hollandse Nieuwe, (Dutch New), is raw herring from the catches around the end of spring and the beginning of summer. This is typically eaten with raw onion. So, Bethany and Carey, when in Holland...
Chicken Bitki
1 tbsp butter
4 oz mushrooms, finely chopped
1 cup fresh breadcrumbs
12 oz ground chicken
2 eggs, seperated
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2 tbsp flour
3 tbsp oil
Salt and pepper
Lettuce leaves and sour cream to serve
Cook the mushrooms in the butter over medium high heat for 5 minutes or until all the juices have evaporated. Mix crumbs (crushed crackers - if have no idea where your Pathmark keeps its breadcrumbs and never have bread in your house), chicken, yolks, nutmeg, and mushrooms. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Kitchen helper Jerillyn was going to do this with a whisk "because it says you have to," but I turned her on to the hand mixer and saved her from carpal tunnel. Fold the egg whites into the mixture and shape it into flattened and elongated meat balls (oblongs instead of spheres). Roll in the flour to coat and then fry 10 minutes or until golden brown and cooked through. The original recipe doesn't call for sour cream, but we found ours to be a bit lacking without it.
Everyone liked the Bitki better than the pate. Small wonder.
About the book:
I have read way ahead since my last blog and am trying to fill in the gaps. One of the things Tolstoy constantly circles back to, and back to, is the idea about who is responsible for the great, man-made events of the world. He has Napoleon thinking always that he is responsible. Tolstoy tells us in asides this is absurd. He seems to believe (though his repetition and insistence imply that he was not 100% certain) that the greater the man, the less control he had over his own decisions. There is some merit to it, I suppose, in that, had the Grande Armee not wanted to got to war, Napoleon would have been arrested as a lunatic for trying to rile them up. In a nutshell, Tolstoy seemed to think (and this is where his theory falls down, folks) that somehow the world is ready for massive numbers of people to move from West to East and so a Napoleon must arise with a great idea to conquer Moscow. It was the will of the something which makes the people want to support a Napoleon. He never uses the word god. He simply states that the world was going to do it, and Napoleon, or any great leader, far from being responsible, is simply carried by the tide, incapable of stopping himself even if he wanted out (which, being Napoleon, he didn't).
I find it troubling, because, he has a point. How on earth can one person be responsible for so much human turmoil? But then, where does the idea originate? Economic depression perhaps? The latent human urge to create upheaval and reroot ourselves? Tolstoy never touches on it, and we are left looking backward at the events of the past, possibly missing the signs for the future.
No new music: Sorry.
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