Petersburg Cuisine
MARI VANNA Restaurant Menu
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Dish Recipes
Guryev Porridge from Buckwheat
1 ½ Russian pound of buckwheat.
¾ Russian pound of marrow.
⅛ Russian pound of dried mushrooms.
A spoonful of butter and salt.
Cooking rules
Cook thick buckwheat porridge, brew it in a pot in boiling mushroom broth, adding also salt and butter. When it is almost ready, take it out of the pot. Wash the pot so that the walls are clean and wiped dry, then put a layer of porridge in it, a layer of pieces of marrow from bovine bones, again a layer of porridge, and so on to the top. The top layer should be the marrow. After closing the pot, put it in the oven so that the porridge cooks well over low heat and becomes crumbly, take care that it does not burn.
Finely chop the remaining mushrooms, the next day use them for minced meat, for pies, etc. Pelageya Aleksandrova Ignatieva Prakticheskiye osnovy kulinarnogo iskusstva (Practical foundations of culinary art). Moscow, Eksmo, 2020.
Pozharsky Cutlets
Cooking rules
Without singeing a chicken, cut through the skin along the breastbone, separate the meat from the bones and chop finely; then add to the crushed mass the pulp of white bread soaked in milk or cream and a piece of butter or good table butter. Crush everything well in a mortar and rub through a rare sieve in order to remove all the veins, or grind everything together in a meat grinder. In addition, add salt, pepper to taste, and if the mass is not tender enough, then add low-fat cream as needed so that the mass is tender. Stir it well with a spoon, moisten the table with cold water and divide the whole mass into portions, counting two cutlets per person. When forming cutlets, a chicken bone is inserted into each of them, in the wide part. For the rest, it is done the same as when cooking beef cutlets, i.e., the cutlets are coated with eggs and breadcrumbs and fried in butter in a copper saucepan, over low heat.
Pozharsky cutlets are served with a side dish of various vegetables.
Explanations and notes
Bird age. Pozharsky cutlets can also be cooked from an older chicken, as the meat is finely chopped and, therefore, all tendons and films are removed. An older chicken yields more meat than young chicken (instead of ¾ to 1/4 pounds). If the knives in the meat grinder are sharp enough and they separates the veins well, then you don’t need to rub the meat through a sieve, but finely grind the chicken flesh along with white bread, and then add rubbed butter to the minced meat and mix everything well.
White bread. As you know, white bread is added to the mince to keep chicken’s juices in cutlets, otherwise those juices will leak out during frying, because the connection of meat fibers is broken in minced meat.
Butter. Butter in chicken cutlets replaces the kidney fat added to beef cutlets. Just as one pound of beef takes ¼ pound of kidney fat, so one pound of chicken meat takes ¼ pound of butter. This replacement/ substitution is because the kidney fat is too coarse for tender chicken meat. Add solid butter, because melted butter dilutes the mince too much and does not combine well with it. Do not increase the indicated proportion of butter, as too fatty cutlets may break out during frying. Как на 1 ф. мякоти говядины идет ¼ ф. почечного жира, так на 1 ф. мякоти курицы кладется ¼ ф. масла. Эта замена вызывается тем, что почечный жир слишком груб для нежного куриного мяса. Масло кладется в твердом виде, потому что в растопленном оно слишком разжижает измельченную массу и плохо соединяется с нею. Не следует увеличивать указанной пропорции масла, так как слишком жирные котлеты могут при жарении развалиться.
Eggs. Eggs are not added to chicken cutlets for the same reason as to beef cutlets (they will be hard).
Rubbing meat. Chopped meat is rubbed through a sieve in order to remove all the veins.
Cream or milk. Chopped meat after passing through a meat grinder is always sticky, so you need to add cream or milk, otherwise the cutlets will not be juicy and tender. You can also add finely crushed ice. The older the bird, the stickier its meat, so you need to add more cream and ice to the mince from an older bird than to the mince prepared from young poultry.
Cookware. Chicken cutlets should be fried in a thick-walled copper saucepan; in an iron pan, the butter quickly browns, as a result of which the crust on the cutlets becomes dark. The color of fried chicken cutlets should be lighter than beef cutlets.