Apples and oranges and other food

[igenlode]

I did finally get my elderflower cordial steeped and strained (through a sieve to remove the floating petals and then through a freshly-laundered handkerchief to remove the rest of the bits) and bottled, but I have to say it didn't taste at all the way I remembered, and I'm not sure I like it. I don't know if the problem is that I picked blossom from a tree I'd never used before (they did smell a bit funny when they were sitting in the bag on the kitchen counter, but then people complain that elderflowers 'smell of cats'), that I carried them around for several miles in hot weather on my way home and visited several shops en route in my search for lemons, that I picked them earlier in the year than normal, that I didn't wash out the bottles adequately (maybe the 'soapy' edge is quite simply leftover washing-up liquid from my efforts to remove the old smell of blackcurrant squash?) or that I squeezed the citrus slices too much in an attempt not to waste all that expensive fruit. On reflection, it tastes more like weird orange squash than elderflower cordial. I also feel that despite having 2lb of sugar in it, it isn't as sweet as it ought to be, which again leads to that edge in the flavour (and makes me suspect bitterness from the citrus peel).

However, I have three pints of it and must have spent about five pounds on the ingredients (for which price I could have bought a bottle of Belvoir Cordial!), so I am drinking my way resolutely through it, being low on squash in any case. Now that I am no longer expecting it to taste like any elderflower cordial I've ever had before, I am making progress towards teaching myself to regard it as 'refreshing'...

After fishing them out of the cordial bowl, I used all the so-arduously-acquired citrus slices to make A Florendine of Apples and Oranges ("very popular in Georgian times"), which is basically whole slices of oranges and lemon poached in syrup before being baked with cooking apples and spices under a pastry lid. It looks very tasty, but eating it is reminiscent of eating unchopped marmalade by the spoonful -- of course it has to contain vast quantities of sugar to make the ingredients even vaguely palatable, and is still pretty sour and chewy. I had to serve it with wasteful quantitities of custard to dilute the poached orange peel enough to make it edible. (Interestingly, slices of lemon completely disintegrate long before slices of orange are cooked through - relative thickness of the peel, I suppose.)



I also constructed -- with rather more success -- a poor man's solyanka, using the end of a jar of olives, the end of a jar of pickled gherkins, the second half of the sauerkraut, the second half of a decanted tin of tomatoes that had been in the fridge rather too long and had a few islands of mould, the end of a very dried-up knob of cheese, and some soft English smoked sausage instead of Eastern European dried sausage (or even chorizo). It tasted surprisingly authentic... apart from the sausage. I would have tried the vegetarian (Lenten) version, but like the majority of Russian Lenten recipes, it depends on dried mushrooms to substitute for a meaty flavour.
(Vegetarian versions on the Internet appear to be based on mashed potato!)



As usual, I substituted the 'marinated berries' of the topping with home-made chutney, which amounts to the same thing ;-D

Edit: Russian cookery in a style that I recognise: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/16/the-borscht-belt
I've made (or at least read about) most of these. But my kurnik was delicious -- an excellent way of padding out the scraps from a roast bird (though my recipe doesn't put blini -- which is what I assume the journalist means by 'crepes' -- in it!)

Comments

[erimia]

I didn't even know that baked solyanka is a thing - the only version I know is the soup one.

This article is interesting. I remember reading a couple of posts from Syrnikov's livejournal, though I wasn't very interested in any kind of cuisine to read further.

[igenlode]

I believe the baked version is known as 'Moskovskaya solyanka". It's the version I encountered first and secretly prefer, although I have made it as a soup as well. I acquired the recipe in a set of bilingual cards I got in Moscow for the price of one rouble, and it was one of the more successful ones in the set. (I've never been in a position to attempt stuffed duck, baked sturgeon or tongue in aspic, I've never really fancied okroshka or ukha (hard to get decent river fish in England anyway), and my pelmeni were a chewy and sticky failure.)

I later acquired another recipe for it in the Penguin "Food and Cooking of Russia" (which also gives it as 'one of the classic Russian soups') and generally cook a sort of combined version. Here is Elena Molokhovets' recipe:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bz7ADwAAQBAJ&pg=PT124

(I do own a copy of Mrs Molokhovets but have never really been able to use it, I'm afraid; I seized upon the volume with great excitement in a bookshop in my second journey to Russia after buying the Penguin book, which refers frequently to it, but my culinary Russian was never good enough to be able to skim through the hundreds of recipes to any useful effect. I can barely make out enough of this one to see that it sounds like the version I know, baked in layers and garnished with berries, rather than the soup.)

It sounds as if Syrnikov got interested in Russian cookery about the same time that I did :-p
Of course another generation has gone by since then, so that sort of food probably seems much more quaint and antiquated now. I've never quite forgotten being served soup with the dried fish heads still in it (I'm sure it was a sign of great favour that I got the head in my bowl!)

[watervole]

A Florendine of Apples and Oranges did sound lovely, but the flavour you describe does sound very plausible...

[igenlode]

I think the proportion of apples ought to have been higher. I was stuck using the fruit that I happened to have in the house, which was one rather small Bramley.

And to be fair, the modern recipe did direct that you should peel the citrus, with only a footnote to say that it was originally intended to be made with whole Seville oranges -- I used the unpeeled slices because that was what I had and was trying to use up. So it was probably authentically Georgian (poached Seville oranges would have been exactly like chewing marmalade!) but not as the cookery book intended.

[watervole]

I guess modern tastes are much sweeter (and hence modern diabetes, etc..

[igenlode]

Humans, like other creatures, have always craved sugar from natural sources, it has been valued as a preservative throughout recorded history, the rich discovered that cane sugar could be used to create wonderful decorative structures, and it was believed to have a beneficial laxative effect (hence 'comfit-boxes' provided for eating after meals). It's just easier to get hold of these days.

Only by by sustained effort have domestic fruits been bred to become sweet enough to eat uncooked -- Warden pears and Seville oranges, which were mediaeval varieties of fruit, are inedible raw, and in fact for a long time people believed that eating raw fruit was dangerous and 'had an adverse effect upon the humours'.

[watervole]

Interesting. Hadn't known that, but as soon as you say it, it makes sense.

Which raises the question of whether wild animals eat them? Presumably they do, so it seems likely that we may have at some point (eaten them raw), until we acquired too sweet a tooth from eating other sweet stuff.

[igenlode]

The fruits decay, so micro-organisms certainly eat them :-D

I'm assuming wild animals do -- mice and birds certainly eat crab-apples and pippins. The traditional assumption is that sugar content is an indication of ripeness, and that our fruit-eating ancestor apes prefered to seek out the ripest fruit.

The Red Indians used to eat berries, and wild strawberries and bilberries are palatable in their existing form even to the modern taste. Russians collect wild currants, which are -- in my experience -- pretty flavourless, but not sour in the way that crab-apples are, or bitter like Seville oranges. Gooseberries (at least until very recently) are an interesting example of a domesticated fruit that has been bred for size but is still inedible in its raw state, as is rhubarb.

I don't know at what point apples, for instance, became domesticated -- probably thousands of years ago. Apparently apples have a particularly high propensity not to breed true, hence grafting, and wild apples today are enormously varied in palatability: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160523-kazakhstans-treasure-trove-of-wildly-flavoured-apples
So it's entirely possible that our ancestors simply happened to discover that some apples were sweet enough to eat raw and some weren't, although the task of breeding from the 'good' ones would have been extremely difficult compared to breeding, say, grass into wheat. (Quite apart from anything else, apple generations are a lot longer...)

Interesting article on apple genetics: apparently the European crab apple is a distinct species from the ancestral Asiatic apple, and modern domestic apples now have ancestry from both. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/5/apples-of-eden-saving-the-wild-ancestor-of-modern-apples/