Petersburg Cuisine

Menu of the Buffet on behalf of the Government of St. Petersburg on October 29, 2019.

Images are provided by the Committee for External Relations of St. Petersburg

Dish Recipes

Kalja Soup with Pickles

Cooking rules

Chop peeled white roots, celery, leek, parsley, small onions and pickles, blanch, put 2 peeled chickens and, adding broth, cook until tender. When the roots and the chickens are ready, drain the broth, add cucumber pickle to taste, clarify with egg whites and strain through a napkin into a soup cup. Add also the roots and chickens cut into pieces. You can add trimmed young sorrel and lettuce, quenelles and a green tarragon leaf.

English Roast Sirloin of Beef

Cooking rules

Take a tender top sirloin with a bottom sirloin and fat, cut off the backbone evenly, remove the flank, tie with Dutch thread, marinate on a baking dish with Provencal oil and chopped onion and leave until the next day (turning it over several times and pouring Provencal oil over it). Then take it out, wrap it in paper, fix it on a spit with iron studs and roast over low heat for 4 hours, pouring its own juice, which will leak out onto the baking dish placed under it. Before serving, remove the paper, glaze, put on a plate and add juice. Fried potatoes, juice in a gravy boat and scraped horseradish on a plate are served separately. As a rule, the roast beef is cut at the table by the host, but if you need to serve it sliced, then proceed as follows: cut away the top and with bottom sirloins with all the fat, slice both sirloins into thin portions, put two pieces on a plate and serve hot for each person, so that the roast beef does not get cold, or cut out the sirloins, slice and lay out so that the roast beef looks whole, and serve. Roast beef cooked in this way is called roast beef a la modern and served with side dishes a la tortue, windsor ashpo and so on.

Pelageya Aleksandrova - Ignatieva Prakticheskiye osnovy kulinarnogo iskusstva (Practical Foundations of Culinary Art). Moscow, Eksmo, 2020.

Pike Perch Au-gratin

Cooking rules

After removing the spine and guts of a whole pike perch through the back, as for the Colbert dish, wash, sprinkle with white wine and, unfolding, spread skin down on a greased baking dish. Brush the pike perch with butter and sprinkle with white wine, salt, sprinkle with pepper and cook in the oven until tender. Then remove it to a metal dish, on which the pike perch will be served, and fill the cavity of the fish with side dishes, that is, put in it: caps of pickled porcini mushrooms sautéed in butter, crayfish necks, sautéed olives and gherkins, ready-made boiled quenelles from pike perch. After preparing a thick tomato sauce on fish broth, add chopped and sautéed porcini mushroom roots to it, cover the fish with this sauce, sprinkle with grated cheese, brush with butter and put in the oven 15-20 minutes before serving. When the pike perch is ready, i.e. a golden crust forms on the surface of the sauce, take it out and garnish with pre-cooked white bread croutons, crayfish necks and a portioned fish quenelles made with a tablespoon. Quenelles can be coloured with crayfish butter, prepared from the shells of those crayfish, the necks of which are used for garnishing pike perch. To prevent the butter from becoming grainy, you need to rub it and gradually add the quenelle mass to it, and then combine it with the rest of the mass.

Horseradish Sauce

Cooking rules

After preparing a hot roux from French flour, dilute it with actively boiling broth; reducing the sauce to the texture of liquid sour cream, add grated horseradish, pre-stewed separately in butter, so that it loses its raw taste; bring to a boil, add sour cream and boil again. Then add table vinegar boiled separately or lemon juice, salt and sugar to taste. Usually this sauce is served with boiled meat (beef boules), tongue and corned beef.