Ukraine traditional foods
Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine National Technical University ' Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute'
UKRAINE TRADITIONAL FOODS
Student: Korkh Eugene
Group: Е-35
What best Ukraine traditional foods do you know? Is it the borshch that first pops up in your head? No doubt, it is the main representative of Ukrainian culinary talents abroad, beside pierogi or varenyky, as they are called here, and vodka or horilka.
However, Ukrainian cuisine extends much farther than that! You won’t find the scrumptious gems in most restaurants or cafes. Ukraine’s top secret foods are best cooked at home, by the hard-working hands of ourbabusya (more commonly known as babushka), and in the welcoming guesthouses of rural Ukraine.
BORSHCH
We absolutely have to start with borshch! There is a scary saying, speculating that no Ukrainian girl will be able to get married, if she does not know how to prepare borshch. And oh my – we all make sure we do!
This traditional soup, made out of beet root and up to 20 other ingredients, is a staple dish in every Ukrainian family. We love our borshch with all the depth of our Ukrainian hearts – hot and cold, fresh and stale, for lunch or for breakfast, as a meal or even as a healing medicine against the winter colds. Every housewife has its own secret version of borshch, and no restaurant trial can ever compete with the real, steaming hot home-made borshch.
Traditionally borshch recipe is a basic stir-fry of grated beet root with tomatoes, added to a generous soup of vegetables – onions, carrots, fresh or pickled cabbage, peppers, and whatever else is available from our house garden. For the true state-of-art samples of this dish you have to head to the hidden-away villages of Carpathian Mountains, where borshch is cooked not on the gas stove, but is left to simmer for hours in the coziness of wooden oven. Pour it in the clay pot, drip in a spoon of fresh sour cream, snack up on a garlic-sprinkled pampushky and you’ll be able to understand what the true Ukrainian heaven looks like!
VARENYKY
Just like borshch, traditional dumplings spearheaded the voyage of Ukrainian cuisine across the globe. Quite a common site in many supermarkets, varenyky or more commonly known as pierogis are what bread is to most other nations. Combined with the piping-hot plate of borshch, those two are Ukrainians’ food of choice in sickness and in health.
Conveniently varenyky can be made out of the cheapest ingredients available. Dough is a simple mix of flour, water and salt. And stuffing can be anything: from mashed potatoes with mushrooms and fried onions, pickled cabbage, minced meat and even cherries! The sweet version of varenyky is usually served with sour cream and honey, and is a tasty and healthy substitute for the calorie-counting sweets lovers.
BANOSH WITH BRYNZA
The highlands of Carpathian Mountains and the far-away areas of Transcarpathia are revered to as the kingdom of Ukraine’s most luscious dishes. Bordering with no less than 4 countries (Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Moldova), Carpathian cuisine brings together the best tastes of each land. However, region’s most famous contribution to Ukrainian menu is banosh.
This traditional food of highland shepherds is essentially corn flour, cooked in sour cream, with the tasty additions of brynza – local salty sheep cheese, wild white mushrooms (preferably hand-picked from the nearest forest!) and shkvarky (scrunchy bits of pork fat). Those, caring about the calories, can easily omit the last one. The true banosh is cooked on fire, thousands of meters above the sea level in the midst of impressive Carpathian peaks and flourishing valleys, and always by men.
UZVAR
Uzvar is traditional Ukrainian drink of choice ! It’s typically served during Christmas Dinner, and is regularly cooked in the local households. This refreshing beverage is actually a compote, made out of dried fruits. Most popular ingredients are dried apples, pears and apricots, with some grandmas adding prunes, raising and honey to sweeten the already savory drink.
PASKA
Don’t stare at the monumental and tantalizing roll of kielbasa in the background! The king on this photo is actually the round, decorated bread – or the famous Ukrainian Easter dish ‘paska’. This sweet egg bread is the rightful companion of the grand meat sausage. Paska is the favorite staple of Ukrainian Easter breakfast tables and is loved by both adults and children. Baked in dozens, it’s a popular give-away during Easter family visits.
Curiously enough, one has got to try 12 different paskas for Easter to get plenty of good luck for the next year. And the task could not be easier! This mouth-watering bread is made of eggs, flour, sugar, butter and yeast. The best paskas are usually baked in wooden ovens, and with as little disturbances as possible.
Great Ukrainian housewives instruct that during the baking of paska, no one should be allowed into the kitchen, except the housewife herself – to avoid the unnecessary noise and not to distract the bread from molding up into the most delicious pastry of Ukrainians. Keep in mind that paska is baked only once a year, on Orthodox Easter!
Kutia
It resembles koliva from Serbia or Romania (used usually for funerals), but the latter is mixed only with walnuts, sugar and raisins.
Kutia was also part of a common Eastern Orthodox tradition in the Russian Empire, which had waned in popularity as a result of the official atheism of the former Soviet Union, but has had a subsequent resurgence in Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet Republics. Radonitsa is one such holiday during which it is served. To this day kutia is served at funerals across Russia as a dish of remembrance.
Traditionally it was made of wheatberries, poppy seeds, honey, various nuts, dried fruit and raisins. In many recipes milk or cream is also used. In some Slavic countries, rice is the main ingredient.
As a tradition, Ukrainians tossed kutia upwards to the ceiling. The amount that attached to the ceiling indicated how successful next year harvest was. Alternatively, another interpretation was if it did stick to the ceiling, the household would have a lot of luck that year.
Nowadays, other ingredients (which were unavailable or just too expensive in earlier centuries) like almonds and pieces of oranges are added. In some places (like Poland,Ukraine, and western Canada), unprocessed wheat grain for kutia is easily available in stores. In others, where it is harder to find, it can be replaced by other similar grains likebarley.
Chicken Kiev
Despite the original French name, the recipe is unknown in French cuisine, where the term côtelette de volaille refers to chicken breasts in general and is used synonymously with chicken fillet or suprême. The French term also denotes a minced chicken cutlet. The general Russian term for chicken cutlets, kurinaya kotleta (куриная котлета), refers predominantly to minced cutlets, whereas kotleta de-voliay is applied exclusively to the stuffed chicken breast dish. The latter name appears in the pre- and post-revolutionary Russian literature (in cookbooks, as well as in fictional prose and in poetry) since the beginning of the 20th century and is usually mentioned as a common restaurant dish.
The recipe in the classical Russian cookery textbook The Practical Fundamentals of the Cookery Art by Pelageya Alexandrova-Ignatieva (which had eleven editions between 1899-1916) includes a complex stuffing similar to quenelle (a mixture of minced meat, in this case the rest meat of chicken, and cream) but with butter added. It also points out that "the cutlets de volaille are made from whole chicken fillets, in the same way as the game cutlets à la Maréchale". The recipe is preceded by a similar one for grouse cutlets à la Maréchale with a quenelle and truffle stuffing.
The term à la Maréchale ("marshal-style") denotes in French cookery tender pieces of meat, such as cutlets, escalopes, sweetbreads, or chicken breasts, which are treated à l'anglais ("English-style"), i.e. coated with eggs and breadcrumbs, and sautéed. According to the Russian food historian William Pokhlyobkin, dishes à la Maréchale were created in France during the reign of Louis XIV and were introduced to Russia after the victory over Napoleon in 1814. Numerous recipes of such dishes, some of them with stuffings, are described both in Western and Russian cookbooks of the 19th century. Among the stuffed versions, on finds recipes for a rabbit à la Maréchale filled with duxelles and a fowl fillet à la Maréchale stuffed with truffles and herbs in The Modern Cook (1859) by Charles Elmé Francatelli. A similar filet de poulets à la Maréchale with herbs and forcemeat is also found in La cuisine classique by Urbain Dubois (1868). Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives, the most successful Russian cookbook of the 19th century, has included since its first edition in 1861 an elaborate recipe for grouse à la Maréchale stuffed with madeira sauce with champignons and truffles.
The Russian Tea Room Cookbook notes that chicken Kiev was "most likely ... a creation of the great French chef Carême at the Court of Alexander I." Marie-Antoine Carêmespent just several months of the year 1818 in St. Petersburg, but made a profound impact on Russian cuisine at this short time. The reforms carried out by his followers introduced in particular meat cuts, such as cutlets, steaks, escalopes etc. into Russian cookery. However, it is unknown whether it was Carême who created the Russian côtelette de volaille.
While the roots of this dish can thus be traced back to the French haute cuisine, the origin of the particular recipe known today as chicken Kiev, with the elaborate stuffings replaced by butter with herbs, is disputed.
Pirozhki
Pirozhki ,is a generic word for individual-sized baked or fried buns stuffed with a variety of fillings. The stress inpirozhki is properly placed on the last syllable: [pʲirɐʂˈkʲi]. Pirozhok is the diminutive form of the Russian pirog (пирог), which refers to a full-sized pie. Pirozhki are not to be confused with Polish pierogi, which are similar to the Ukrainian and Russian varenyky.
A common variety of pirozhki are baked stuffed buns made from yeast dough and often glazed with egg to produce the common golden colour. They commonly contain meat (typically beef) or a vegetable filling (mashed potatoes, mushrooms, onions and egg, or cabbage). Pirozhki could also be stuffed with fish (e.g., salmon) or with an oatmeal filling mixed with meat or giblets. Sweet-based fillings could include stewed or fresh fruit (apples, cherries, apricots, chopped lemon, etc.), jam, quark or cottage cheese. The buns may be plain and stuffed with the filling, or else be made in a free-form style with strips of dough decoratively encasing the filling.
Potatoes among American crops became very popular when the vegetable was brought and adopted to the Eurasian climate. Before then, the ingredient was not available as it took more time to acclimatize to continental regions like Russia and Ukraine. Before then, the ingredients would contain more vegetables and fruits, as well as duck, goose and rabbit meat, uncommon today.
Kalach
Ukrainian kolachi (plural) are made by braiding dough made with wheat flour into ring-shaped or oblong forms. They are a symbol of luck, prosperity, and good bounty, and are traditionally prepared for Svyat Vechir (Holy Supper), the Ukrainian Christmas Eve ritual, most often in the form of three round bread loaves stacked one atop the other with a candle in the middle.
In the area around Kiev, it was custom for a midwife to give a kalach as a gift to parents, as part of a fertility blessing. Kalaches were also used in funeral ceremonies.As well in Galicia and Bukovina they were given by children to their godparents in ceremony called a кола́чини (kolachyny) or кола́чання (kolachynnya).
Bread dishes such as kalach are highly prized for their artistic craftsmanship. The Bread Museum in L'viv, Ukraine, contains many examples of intricately woven kalach, paska, and babka.
Bublik
Bublik (also Booblik or Bublyk) ( Russian and Ukrainian : бублик , Polish : obwarzanek , Lithuanian : riestainis ) is a traditional Central and Eastern European bread roll . It is very similar to a bagel , but somewhat bigger and has a wider hole. Bubliks often also have a much denser and 'chewier' texture than bagels. The bublik is acknowledged to be the progenitor of the bagel.
Bubliks are members of a class of bread products made from dough that has been boiled before baking , which also includes bagels, baranki , sushki , and other similar breads. In Russian and Ukrainian, bublik is often used as a generic designation for any ring-shaped product of this class.
The beigl (or bagel) spread from Poland across all areas with significant Jewish population, soon reaching Ukraine (Southern Russia at the time), [1] where it was influenced by similar products and where it got its current form. These products are Russian (mainly Moscow) baranki, Greek koulouri ( κουλούρι ) [2] or Turkish Simit . They form a dough ring about twice as big as a common bagel, usually with a denser and drier texture. Its name was also heavily russified to the current form —bublik. The city of Odessa is most commonly considered the birthplace of the bublik.
Bubliks are made from yeast -leavened wheat dough that commonly contains milk , butter , and egg whites and is rather sweet. Poppy seeds are a popular addition to the dough, as well as several other fillings. For savory bubliks, sugar is omitted and instead grated cheese and a few drops of onion juice can be added. Bubliks are featured by professional bakers in their shops and at country fairs and regional markets. They are usually strung on a string by the dozen.
In Russia and Ukraine bubliks are usually treated not like bread , but like a type of pastry, eaten as a complement to tea or coffee . Therefore, bublik dough is generally sweeter and denser than that of bagel dough, and they are usually glazed with egg yolk. By far the most popular variety of bublik has a liberal amount of poppy seeds added to it.
Bubliks are usually eaten as is, but it is not uncommon to dip them into a beverage, a practice that came from eating sushki and baranki, which were very similar in taste, but rather dry and hard and not easily palatable unless moisturized. Another common way of eating bubliks is to break them into several fragments and to eat them with jam (varenye ), sour cream (smetana ), or other similar dips . While they often accompany tea, bubliks, again unlike modern bagels, are rarely considered a breakfast food.
Aspic
Aspic is a dish in which ingredients are set into a gelatin made from a meat stock or consommé. Non-savory dishes, often made with commercial gelatin mixes without stock or consommé, are usually called gelatin salads.
When cooled, stock that is made from meat congeals because of the natural gelatin found in the meat. The stock can be clarified with egg whites, and then filled and flavored just before the aspic sets. Almost any type of food can be set into aspics. Most common are meat pieces, fruits, or vegetables. Aspics are usually served on cold plates so that the gel will not melt before being eaten. A meat jelly that includes cream is called a chaud-froid.
Nearly any type of meat can be used to make the gelatin: pork, beef, veal, chicken, turkey, or fish. The aspic may need additional gelatin in order to set properly. Veal stock provides a great deal of gelatin; in making stock, veal is often included with other meat for that reason. Fish consommés usually have too little natural gelatin, so the fish stock may be double-cooked or supplemented. Since fish gelatin melts at a lower temperature than gelatins of other meats, fish aspic is more delicate and melts more readily in the mouth.
Vegetables and fish stocks need gelatin to maintain a molded shape.
Historically, meat aspics were made before fruit- and vegetable-flavored aspics or 'jellies' (UK) and 'gelatins/jellos' (North America). By the Middle Ages at the latest, cooks had discovered that a thickened meat broth could be made into a jelly. A detailed recipe for aspic is found in Le Viandier, written in or around 1375.
In the early 19th century, Marie-Antoine Carême created chaud froid in France. Chaud froid means "hot cold" in French, referring to foods that were prepared hot and served cold. Aspic was used as a chaud froid sauce in many cold fish and poultry meals. The sauce added moisture and flavor to the food. Carême invented various types of aspic and ways of preparing it. Aspic, when used to hold meats, prevents them from becoming spoiled. The gelatin keeps out air and bacteria, keeping the cooked meat fresh.
Aspic came into prominence in America in the early 20th century. By the 1950s, meat aspic was a popular dinner staple throughout the United States as were other gelatin-based dishes such as tomato aspic. Cooks used to show off aesthetic skills by creating inventive aspics.
Aspic can also be referred as aspic gelée or aspic jelly. Aspic jelly may be colorless (white aspic) or contain various shades of amber. Aspic can be used to protect food from the air, to give food more flavor, or as a decoration.
There are three types of aspic textures: delicate, sliceable, and inedible. The delicate aspic is soft. The sliceable aspic must be made in a terrine or in an aspic mold. It is firmer than the delicate aspic. The inedible aspic is never for consumption. It is usually for decoration. Aspic is often used to glaze food pieces in food competitions to make the food glisten and make it more appealing to the eye. Foods dipped in aspic have a lacquered finish for a fancy presentation. Aspic can be cut into various shapes and be used as a garnish for deli meats or pâtés.
The preparation of pork jelly includes placing lean pork meat, trotters, rind, ears and snout in a pot of cold water, and letting it cook over a slow fire for three hours. The broth is allowed to cool, while also removing any undesirable fat. Subsequently, white vinegar and the juice of half an orange or lemon can be added to the meat so that it is covered. The entire mixture is then allowed to cool and jell. Bay leaves or chili can be added to the broth for added taste (the Romanian variety is based on garlic and includes no vinegar, orange, lemon, chili, bay leaves, etc.). However, there are many alternate ways of preparing pork jelly, such as the usage ofcelery, beef and even pig bones. Poultry jellies are made the same way as making pork jelly, but less water is added to compensate for lower natural gelatin content.
Salo
Salo is a traditional predominately Slavic food consisting of cured slabs of fatback (rarelypork belly), with or without skin. The food is commonly eaten and known under different names in countries across the region. It is usuallysalted or brine fermented, hence the names slonina/slana/szalonna (solonýna in Ukrainian means any kind of salt-cured meat, such ascorned beef). The Eastern European one is sometimes treated with paprika or other condiments, while the Southeast European one is often smoked. The food is also popular in Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia.
The Slavic word "salo" or "slanina" as applied to this type of food (it has other meanings as well) is often translated to English as "bacon" or "lard". Unlike lard, salo is not rendered. Unlike bacon, salo is not necessarily bacon-cured. Salo has little or no meat (skeletal muscle), and low-meat high-fat bacon commonly is referred to as salo. It is also identical to Italian lardo, the main possible differences being the thickness of the cut (lardo is often sliced very thinly) and seasoning: East Slavic salo uses salt, garlic, black pepper and, possibly, a bit ofcoriander in curing process, while lardo is generally seasoned with rosemary and other herbs.
