An Odyssey in Pies

[igenlode]

I ended up consulting Mrs Molokhovets in all earnest last night, having stimulated a small bowl of my sourdough starter into life as a substitute for the continuously-unavailable dried yeast, then discovered that the pie recipes in my English-language Russian cookery book all expected the cook to have eggs and butter available as well. So I had the idea of trying to find the section on Lenten cookery, from which a shortcrust dough recipe had been quoted, on the assumption that raised pie dough would feature there as well. (My experience is that shortcrust pastry is quite unsuitable for any type of pie that is pulled up around the filling, as it is much too stiff and fragile; it's only suitable for draping over the top of a rigid container.)

Once I'd worked out that the contents page was at the back of the book, with the aid of a dictionary I did manage to decipher the various dough recipes, which are helpfully supplied before the pie recipes -- once I'd remembered that the Russian for 'butter' (prohibited during Lent) and 'oil' (used as a Lenten substitute) is in fact the same word, causing no end of confusion! However, I didn't actually use any of them, largely because the quantities were enormous -- apparently a 'funt' (cf German "Pfund") is 409 grams, and the recipes were for one and a half pounds of flour -- and because I really couldn't believe either that I was reading the instructions correctly or that they could possibly be correct.

For example, recipe 1811, 'Lenten dough with yeast for making pies (and pirozhki)', lists a quarter-stakan (measuring glass) of oil in its ingredients, but doesn't appear to tell you to add it at any point: the instructions only mention flour, water and yeast. (I do like the instruction to knead the dough 'until it comes away from the hands' -- which was precisely the criterion I found myself applying repeatedly while trying to incorporate more water, overcoming a temporary extreme stickiness every time!)
It also suggests glazing the finished pies with boiling water, oil mixed with cold water, or beer ("pivo") before baking, presumably as a substitute for an egg or milk glaze, but none of those sounded very practical.

Recipe 1813 (1812 is the same as 1811, only for deep-frying) appears to instruct the cook to add a large volume of boiling water (kipyatka) to the initial yeast mixture, which seems guaranteed to kill it instantly. (It also instructs you to pour in oil "as stated in No. 1811", but as already mentioned, No. 1811 only seems to give instructions for pouring in warm water mixed with yeast before putting the mixture to rise...)

So, after reading through the various suggested fillings (which all involved fish, or mushrooms, or eggs, which I didn't have) I ended up doing what I would probably have done in the first place and improvising a recipe by adding oil, water and flour to my sourdough yeast mixture. I was so worried about running out of flour that I added rather too little liquid, whereas I usually add too much and then knead in extra flour -- the result was that I spent about twenty minutes working in extra water a half-tablespoon at a time until the dough finally looked right. Then it spent about eighteen hours rising at room temperature until I got round to going out and buying some ingredients for fillings...

I ended up with hard-boiled egg, chopped cabbage, a bag of date-expired 'vegetable soup mix', a.k.a. pre-chopped root veg, and some Polish kabanos, all of which simmered together gave me something like an Eastern European Cornish pasty ;-p

I'd forgotten just how tiny a quantity of filling (about 1/4 teaspoon) can be fitted into a 7cm circle of dough -- so much for my idea of putting little spoonsful of jellied stock in on top! -- so I had vast quantities of filling left over. Also, I made the mistake of using fresh spring greens instead of hard cabbage, and my 'cabbage' was in long strips which kept sticking out of the ends ;-p

But the pirozkhi actually came out quite nicely, despite taking over 24 hours to make; the sourdough pastry behaved perfectly, stretching up around the filling without breaking or leaking, and then puffing up when baked. I cooked them seam-upwards, so they ended up looking rather like miniature Cornish pasties... and some did split!


Now I need to find something to do with a largish volume of meat-and-veg stuffing/pie filling. Stuffed cabbage leaves with sour cream, maybe?

Comments

[erimia]

These pirozhki look delicious. And also very elegant with this seam - most street food or home-cooked pirozhki I've seen were flat, with the seam smoothed over, which makes them look a bit boring.

What I've heard about Molokhovets' book indicates that it does use large portions, which is appropriate for the time when it was written, I guess, but less so for the modern life.

If you have any troubles with reading Russian recipes you can consult me. :) Is your Molokhovets' book in pre-Revolution Russian, by the way? It would be a little more difficult to read then, but still relatively doable.

[igenlode]

Soviet Russian edition -- it has a section at the beginning telling you how much all the various foodstuffs ought to cost (one pound of first-class wheat flour for six kopeks, or five kopeks for second-class flour, and only three and a half for rye flour :-p)

Printed Moscow 1993, which would probably have been the year I bought it. The title page is set in old Russian type (although not old Russian spelling -- I did encounter pre-revolutionary texts at university!), but the rest is standard Soviet print.

My main trouble with trying to query Russian on the Internet is that I don't have access to a Cyrillic keyboard, and phonetic transliteration is weird on my brain ;-D
I can read Cyrillic letters without any confusion, but trying to type the way they *sound*, when they correspond to existing Latin characters pronounced in a different way, is incredibly confusing. It's much easier for me to type CCCP than to try to transliterate it to 'SSSR', which doesn't mean anything to my eyes.

[igenlode]

By an enormous coincidence, I just came across a passage from one of my old letters complaining that I had to read everything from the 'Russian section' of the Internet out loud from the transliteration before I could understand it; that was in the days before the Internet supported Cyrillic characters at all, and everything had to be uploaded in 7-bit ASCII. I'd forgotten that...

[watervole]

How does the sourdough pastry work in practice? I'm curious as we are currently using sourdough to make our bread. How did you make it? What was it like to eat?

[igenlode]

It basically is bread, or at least bears the same relationship to bread as pizza dough does. (My pizzas always taste very bready, probably because the base is too thick and/or the topping too wet.) In fact the recipe says that if you have any pie dough left over, you can make it into bulki, which are basically bread rolls (or 'leavened buns' as Google politely puts it).

But English cookery doesn't use yeast pastry, so the applications are rather limited.

You make it the same way you would make bread; by rubbing in the butter to the flour, or else adding oil together with the activated yeast liquid and egg (assuming you're not in Lent, or living under lockdown), and then kneading it into a dough texture and setting it to rise. Then, unlike bread, you roll it out thinly and treat it as pastry. It's stretchy and flexible, and of course it rises again after being rolled out and puffs up in the oven -- just like pizza dough.

For emergencies in English recipes, I'd recommend wartime potato pastry; it saves on fat, makes flour go further, and has similar flexible qualities to yeast pastry without the resemblance to bread! To every 6oz flour take 2oz cooking fat and 2oz grated raw potato, bind with water and roll out to use as normal -- I actually prefer this pastry to standard shortcrust for pasties. If you object to the visible flecks of potato in the baked crust, you can use a fine grater or boil and mash them first, but the difference is purely cosmetic.