Russian Cuisine

Russian cuisine has peasant roots in rye bread and grain porridges of buckwheat, wheat, millet and rye, with cabbage soups, salting, pickling and fermentation as essential preservation methods against a harsh climate that makes agriculture unviable much of the year. Aristocratic Russian cooking was reshaped from the eighteenth century onward by French culinary technique and, later, French chefs such as Marie Antoine Careme, who introduced fine mincing, sauces and course sequencing to the tables of the Russian nobility. Culinary historians commonly divide its development into four periods: Old Russian cuisine from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, Old Moscow cuisine in the seventeenth century, the cuisine of the Petrine and Catherinian courts in the eighteenth century, and Petersburg cuisine from the late eighteenth century to the 1860s. Dumplings called pelmeni, traditionally frozen and stored through the winter in Siberia, were adopted from Finno-Ugric peoples, whose language gave the dish its name. Beef Stroganoff, sauteed beef served in a sour cream based sauce, originated in mid-nineteenth century Russia and later spread worldwide.