Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Piroshki, Yablonchna Babka, and A Few More Words About War

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes: Culinaria: Russia by Marian Trutter

Music:  War and Peace - Prokofiev

Piroshki

Russian Yeast Dough


1 1/2 oz dry yeast
1 cup milk
2 tsp sugar
Generous 1 lb flour (the internet claims this is about 3 1/2 cups)
2 egg yolks
8 1/2 tbsp butter
1 pinch salt
Beaten egg for sealing and glazing


Dissolve the yeast into 7 tablespoons of lukewarm milk (this is most important, if the milk is cold it will clump up and probably damage the whole process).  Add the sugar, cover and leave for 15 minutes.  Stir half the flour into the yeast mixture with a wooden spoon to make a "pre-dough"; mine came out more or less dry after this.  Cover and leave in a warm place for about an hour or until it has doubled in size.  Beat the egg and butter until frothy, add salt and remaining milk and work into a smooth mass.  Add the remaining flour and knead on a floured surface until the dough no longer sticks.  


Once the dough is ready, you can roll it out until it's about 1/4 in thick and cut it into rounds using a glass cup.  I think I make mine a bit too thin...

For the fillings, the book has a super long list of things that people bake into piroshki.  I opted for the following 4, the "recipes" for which I more or less made up. I'm just going to list ingredients and leave the proportions up to your imagination.

Mushroom and Onion - Brown onions in butter then add mushrooms and cook until almost all the liquid is removed.   

Potato and Curd Cheese - for this I once again squeezed all the liquid out of the American cottage cheese and mixed it in roughly equal proportions with the mashed potatoes.  I added just a tiny bit of cream to make it a bit easier to manage.  An important note about the potato filled piroshki, they need to have some kind of holes poked into them, or decorative slashes added to their tops, otherwise all the yummy potato cheese filling explodes out of them. 

Sauerkraut and Onion - I browned onion in butter and added slightly more sauerkraut than onion. 

Ground Chicken - kitchen helper Jay browned onions, garlic and ground chicken in a frying pan and I ran it through the food processor.

Fill each round with about a tablespoon (or less) of filling, brush the edges with beaten egg and seal.  Brush the sealed piroshki with beaten egg and bake at 425 degrees for about 10 minutes or until golden brown.  Serve hot with sour cream and sauteed onions.  The dough will make about 60 piroshki.

This was the first batch; I forgot to brush them with egg, and they were a tiny bit over cooked (the original recipe said 20 minutes - I took these out after about 13 minutes) but they were very tasty - and you can see what I meant about the potato filling coming out.  The second batch came out beautifully and I was too busy eating to remember to take any pictures of it.

Another note about making piroshki, at first I was sealing them by hand, which I'm not very good at, then I remembered that years ago, I'd bought a dumpling press at a market in Chinatown.  That made my life much easier and made piroshki production a lot faster. I also suggest making the fillings ahead.  It's exhausting trying to do it all in one night - so exhausting that I shoved everything in the fridge and put it all together the next day.

Yablonchna Babka

 (Apple Bake)

1 1/3 lb apples, peeled, cored, and chopped into small pieces
Lemon juice
9 tbsp sugar
4 eggs separated
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of Salt
Butter for greasing the pan
Confectioners' sugar and fresh apple slices for garnish (optional)


Preheat oven to 340 degrees and grease a small baking dish with butter  Coat the apples with a bit of lemon juice immediately to prevent browning.  Beat the sugar, egg yolks, and sour cream in a bowl until frothy.  Beat in the flour, cinnamon, and salt.  Hand mix in the apples.  Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and gently fold into the rest of the batter.  Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

This recipe has so much egg in it, it's almost a custard.  I didn't have any extra apples left for garnish and I don't like confectioners' sugar, so I just ate mine plain.  Rich and delicious.

About the book:
At one point in the novel, Pierre starts to feel as though he must "do something." So he goes off to watch the battle of Borodino.  Thinking he will be out of the way, he lands himself smack in the middle of the target for the heaviest French fire.  He nearly dies there, is almost captured by the French, almost kills his would-be captor, and isn't heard from by anybody for many days after.  He feels himself an utter coward for running away, remembering how earlier he had seen soldiers marching toward the battle exchanging witty banter with the wounded being carted back.  He wonders (as do I) how they can continue marching forward when they see the mirror image of their future selves in the wounded and dying.  Another of the many ways in which war makes no sense to me.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Carters' Millet, Golubsty, and I Didn't Read This Weekend

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Recipes:  Cooking Around the World: Russian and Polish by Lesley Chamberlain and Catherine Atkinson

Music:  Downloaded a yoga video to burn off some of this sour cream, but no new music

Carters' Millet

1 1/4 cups millet
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
4 oz bacon
1 tbsp olive oil
1small onion, thinly sliced
3 cups mushrooms, sliced
1 tbsp fresh chopped mint (had I been able to find any of this, I'm sure it would have added a lovely flavor)
Salt and pepper


Rinse the millet in a sieve.  Mix in with the stock, bring to a boil, then cover and simmer 30 minutes.  Fry the bacon until crisp, remove from the pan, reserving some of the fat.  Add olive oil to the pan and brown the mushrooms and onion for about 10 minutes.  I added some Asparagus, because it was in my fridge and about to go bad.  It added some color and flavor.  Mix all ingredients with the millet and heat through.

Golubsty

(This is actually a Polish recipe, according to the book, 

but I'm sure the Russians eat something similar)

1 large Savoy cabbage (emphasis on large)
2 tbsp sunflower oil
1 lb of ground beef, lamb, or pork
1 tsp ground corriander
5 tbsp stock
2/3 cup cooked long grain rice
chopped fresh parsley (I didn't even have dried parsley - oh well)
2 tbsp butter melted


For the sauce:
1 1/4 cup sour cream
2 tbsp tomato puree (we used tomato paste)
1 bay leaf
Salt and Pepper


Preheat the oven to 350.  Carefully remove 12 outer leaves of the cabbage, rinse, blanch in a pot of salted boiling water for 4 minutes, remove and pat dry.  Buying a smaller cabbage because you are thinking to yourself, "what the heck am I going to do with the rest of a large cabbage?" is a mistake.  It will make wrapping your "parcels" much more difficult.


To make the stuffing, brown the meat in a frying pan for 5 minutes, remove and drain off excess fat.  Add the oil to the pan and cook the onion for 5 minutes.  Stir in coriander, meat, stock, rice, and half the parsley, salt and pepper.  Simmer for 5 minutes. Place a tbsp of filling in a leaf and wrap it up.  If you bought a small Savoy cabbage and missed the step about blanching it, kitchen twine will help you out a lot on this recipe (I actually found the missing twine, it was under the couch - I don't understand either).  Arrange in one layer in a baking dish and brush with melted butter.


Heat the sour cream, tomato puree, and bay leaf, stirring until bubbly. Stir in remaining parsley and salt and pepper.  Pour sauce over the cabbage. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes.  Uncover and cook an additional 15 minutes.

We forgot to cover them.  They didn't get dried out, but the sauce could have been creamier.  We didn't do a lot of things on this recipe.  Probably because my kitchen helper Jerilyn brought over 2 bottles of our favorite pink prosecco and we started drinking before we started cooking.  This is a warning about the dangers of cooking while under the influence, kids.  It wasn't a tragedy this time, but ugly things can start to happen in your kitchen. We suggest staying sober while chopping your veg, and doubling the sauce to make this recipe extra yummy.

About the book:  I was going to read yesterday, but my Kindle battery was dead.  Instead I read about some English Kings and Queens.  I won't bore you with the details, but I will say this, George III sure lost some prime real estate.

Book 11 - Chapter 22 - Herring Pate, Chicken Bitki, and Tolstoy Contemplates the Causes of Great World Events (A Lot, and Kind of in Circles)

Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
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.