Blackberries and elderberries are wild fruit that you pick on wasteland (you can't buy elderberries commercially anywhere, although supermarkets now advertise expensive plastic boxes of pre-picked blackberries, like pre-grated cheese).
Cherries are long since out of season here; I bought a box of late strawberries and tried them in my second batch of dough, but I think my first attempt was actually better. The chopped-up bits of strawberry had hard lumpy edges that jutted out, rather than fitting better than the round berries, and it didn't help that I was too lazy to measure out the minimum amount of water to fit under the trivet in the pressure cooker, so misjudged it and used too much -- which meant the second batch of vareniki effectively got boiled rather than steamed, and stuck together even worse :-p Still tasty with honey and yoghurt.
Eastern European cuisine doesn't seem particularly bland from the perspective of this end of the continent, although that may be since traditional English cooking has itself been accused of being irremediably bland! It involves a lot more sour and fermented flavours than we are used to, from rye flour to smetana and sauerkraut -- and of course a lot of what I knew as 'Russian' food was Soviet cooking, including all the Caucasian republics.
The contrast I mainly notice is that recipes often tend to involve cooking all the ingredients separately beforehand and then layering/mixing them together before heating them through (compare a pirog to the similar Cornish pasty, in which the raw ingredients are expected to cook inside the casing and create gravy).
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-09-19 11:42 pm (UTC)Cherries are long since out of season here; I bought a box of late strawberries and tried them in my second batch of dough, but I think my first attempt was actually better. The chopped-up bits of strawberry had hard lumpy edges that jutted out, rather than fitting better than the round berries, and it didn't help that I was too lazy to measure out the minimum amount of water to fit under the trivet in the pressure cooker, so misjudged it and used too much -- which meant the second batch of vareniki effectively got boiled rather than steamed, and stuck together even worse :-p
Still tasty with honey and yoghurt.
Eastern European cuisine doesn't seem particularly bland from the perspective of this end of the continent, although that may be since traditional English cooking has itself been accused of being irremediably bland! It involves a lot more sour and fermented flavours than we are used to, from rye flour to smetana and sauerkraut -- and of course a lot of what I knew as 'Russian' food was Soviet cooking, including all the Caucasian republics.
The contrast I mainly notice is that recipes often tend to involve cooking all the ingredients separately beforehand and then layering/mixing them together before heating them through (compare a pirog to the similar Cornish pasty, in which the raw ingredients are expected to cook inside the casing and create gravy).