[LifeStyle] You won't surprise anyone with a steak now, but you need to look for a delicious soup

[Drosel]

Russian Cuisine Preservation Foundation Chairman, chef, writer Maxim Syrnikov in an interview with the world on the Day of Soup, which is celebrated on April 5, the chairman of the Foundation for the Preservation of Russian cuisine "Russian Cookery", chef, writer Maxim Syrnikov NEWS.ru he put an end to the dispute, whose borscht, told about the variety of native Russian soups and how the inhabitants of the offices "hunt" for "normal chowder".

— How would you rate the po[CENSORED]rity of soups in Russia? Have we finally switched to fast food and semi-finished products or not yet?

— Fortunately, it's not final yet. Anyway, the first thing a novice hostess or owner learns to do, if he cooks, is soup. Still, it is impossible to do without borscht, vegetable soup in Russian homes.

 

— But the soup takes a long time to cook, and there is always not enough time. What should I do?

— Firstly, not all soups are cooked for a long time. Secondly, they talked about vanity in Soviet times. I remember perfectly well how all sorts of magazines like "Workers" printed recipes in a hurry in the 1970s and referred to the fact that "the modern hostess is very busy." 50 years have passed since then. And what has changed? Nothing. Someone really rushes from office to office, and someone still spends some part of the time at home. And no one canceled the weekend.

And then, we are used to focusing on the Moscow public, who spends 1.5 hours on a one-way trip and goes home through some kind of fitness. It is clear that when he crawls home, he will not be up to soup. But there is also a huge Russian province that lives by different rules. I live in a city with a po[CENSORED]tion of 15 thousand people (Ostashkov. — NEWS.ru ), and I assure you that almost every house has soup. People harvest sauerkraut and make cabbage soup. I go to markets, to shops and see how meticulously housewives choose beets for borscht. So it's actually fine.

I know for sure that in big cities there is a serious category of people who do not eat or cook at home or do it extremely rarely, but go to middle-class establishments and look for restaurants, cafes, canteens where there are delicious soups.

Steak, sushi and pizza will not surprise anyone now. Everyone prepares them, you can buy them at every corner. But a normal, delicious soup should be looked for.

Such establishments with good stews are actually in great demand. Young chefs often turn to me for advice, they are all looking for interesting solutions for soups.

— Which soups are native Russian. Pickle, botvinya — many more?

— There are a lot of them, moreover, for every taste, for any time of the year. The same cabbage soup, which is sometimes treated lightly, has many types and methods of cooking. Previously, in Russia, certain soup was prepared every season of the year. For example, from crumbs, cabbage seedlings, fish, turnips. There are cabbage soup without cabbage at all — with sorrel, nettle. Not because of poverty, our ancestors cooked from wild plants, but because it is really tasty and healthy. There are soup with ham, corned beef, mushroom — the so-called Valaam, or monastery. The variety of cabbage soup is an absolutely Russian tradition.

It's the same with borscht. There are documents of the XVI century that borscht was prepared from wild plants in the Arkhangelsk region.

— And if we talk about cold soups, is there a Russian alternative to gazpacho (a dish of Andalusian cuisine, a light soup made of fresh vegetables ground into puree)?

— I laughed a lot when reading the letters of the Russian writer Vasily Botkin — I was like that under Catherine II and Pavel Petrovich. He was one of the first to visit Spain and left a memoir where he wrote that Spanish cuisine is pretty crappy, and all that is there is a good okroshka with cucumbers, which is called gazpacho.

Cold soups are an absolutely Russian feature. These are lean, meat, fish, mushroom okroshki. And the so-called cold summer prison: when it's hot and you don't want to eat anything, fresh rye bread is simply filled with kvass with onion, dill. You can add grated root vegetables — radishes, garlic. Very refreshing delicious cold soups. And of course, pickle dishes, which are also not cooked anywhere except in Russia: solyanka, hookah — a traditional old Russian dish on cucumber pickle, lean, fish pickles grown from this hookah.

I can name 25-30 traditional Russian chowder offhand without much difficulty. Our traditions of cold and hot soups are huge.

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— How do you answer the fundamental question, whose borscht?

— The dispute about whose borscht is full of teeth, it's time to put an end to it. In my opinion, everything here is obvious and documented by cookbooks of the XIX century and many other documents.

Borsch is a Russian dish, which has a Ukrainian version, which differs from other types of borscht only by the presence of lard in any form — whether lard was added or fried vegetables on lard.

Wow, the Ukrainian version of borscht. In general, this is a Russian dish.

— In recent years, detox nutrition has become fashionable in Russia, and because of the rise in price of meat, fish, poultry, Russians limit the use of these products. What soups can Russian cuisine offer to such people?

— If a person for some reason does not want or cannot cook meat broth - well, fine. Russian cuisine helps people who refuse meat well. A huge number of dishes of Russian cuisine have lean options. A Russian person has been fasting for a thousand years, there are more fast days in the Orthodox calendar than fast days. And there are a lot of lean stews, for vegetarians — the very thing.

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— Which soup is the most fashionable today?

— There is no such thing. Every chef or home cook comes up with recipes for himself, to his taste. I can say that when I worked as a chef in Vladivostok for two years (and the residents of Primorye have very special tastes, these are certainly not Muscovites or Novosibirsk residents, they all grew up on seafood there, especially young people), then at the request of visitors I often cooked a hodgepodge with halibut and seafood. Why not? I ate with pleasure myself. There is no Russian tradition in shrimp, of course, but it is delicious.

— How often should I eat soup? Doctors say different things — someone advises soup every day, someone - twice a week...

— (Laughs). I'm a bad illustration for talking about healthy eating. I'm not a doctor and I don't really understand nutritionists, because too often I hear absolutely contradictory opinions. Who to believe is completely unclear. I think it's better to ignore their advice and focus on your own well-being.

I know for sure that I definitely need a plate of any hot soup every day. It's important to me. And I know a lot of people for whom this is also important.