Barley was used for cooking the "kutya" dish. You had to soak grains and shell them out in the wet mortar to make it. A boiled mixture of barley and peas called "kutya" was the ancient Slavic food used during Pagan rituals.
Ground barley flour was used for baking pies with an amazingly least a taste and smell.
In the autumn, the dough was usually put on large cabbage leaves, and the bottom of baked pies had a pattern imprinted with each of the cabbage veins. If the cakes were baked from a mixture of ground barley flour with the other grain (wheat, oats or pea), they were called "two-grain" pies. There were so-called "three-grain" flour pies.
During the great festivals, and thus relatively rarely, was baked wheat-only bread with only wheat flour. The grain trough for baking pies was not used in savvy families; a large earthenware pitcher or pot was used.
The pies were baked the same way as the bread, only dough for pies was salted, and it was leavened not with leaven but with "chalk" (dried wort). It is not easy to bake good pies, especially during the holidays. The hostesses started having uneasy feelings a few days before the holidays.
But how much there is contentment and joy when, after "resting" on the bench under the linen cover, pies are put on the table, and the whole family sits around the samovar.
Of course, the most famous and loved pie was "fishnik" when folded a fresh bream, pickerel, pike in the dough. (Dace and perch also given to the tasty pie juice, soaked with it, pie is no less delicious.) After that, pies were staffed with mutton, salted lard and chopped eggs. But when it comes to stuffing, fresh saffron milk cap mushrooms stuffing is the most original. "The lips" or saffron cap pies cannot be confused with any other cakes, but at the feast, they were unpopular; it was thought that this was a trite filling.
Often crashed fresh blueberries were baked in the dough; you can call it the berry pie.
If there is nothing at hand, the hostess baked onion pies and sometimes made a simple pie with salted dough. "Sprinkled" were called pies, drenched with sour cream, sprinkled with cereals, and abundantly anointed with butter after the oven. The pies were called "drenched" when covered with potatoes mixed with milk and sour cream.
The pies, baked before the departure of somebody from home, called the on-road pies, and they still have a sad reputation. How many were baked in Russia for soldiers, students and others... The wheat rolls were baked for the road, and for the children were prepared pretzels, that is, those same rolls, only small.
Sometimes several dozen "larks" were planted in the oven on the vernal equinox, tiny creatures of wheat dough. The most unpopular pie was baked from pea's flour, but the jelly from the same meal was loved by many; people ate them in fasting days hot and cold. Cold pea jelly was cut with a knife and abundantly sprinkled with linseed oil.
During the Fast, a thick peas dish was often cooked, seasoned with onions. Still, after the rye, the most common cereal was not barley or wheat with peas but oats.
Oat dishes are generally considered to be curative. For women in childbirth, for example, was cooked a special oatmeal broth. Oatmeal, grits and flour made from oats are not milled but pounded in a mortar mill. To do this, a unique system was built: water or windmill without the millstones called ponders.
To prepare grits, kernels were steamed in a large cast-iron, then dried in the oven hearth and shell-stripped. Next, sifted oat kernels roughly crushed in the hand-mill. The result is grits, cereals, cooked oatmeal, and oat, so-called no-meat, soup. Oats, crushed with a pestle, turned into flour, and it should have been double-sifted. Bran is used for cooking oatmeal; flour is usually gone for pancakes.
Oatmeal jelly is a favourite Russian food. There is a saying: "The king and the oatmeal jelly will always find space."
On ordinary days it was cooked in cast iron pots. The lady of the house fermented the oat bran overnight, and in the morning, she filtered and boiled it on fire.
On holidays, cooked oatmeal in select barrels, dropping hot stones into it. The porridge was eaten so much that anecdotal rumours about Tighina people existed.
The hot oatmeal thickets in front of your eyes; it should be eaten - not to yawn. People gulped it with rye bread, dressed with sour cream or vegetable oil. Cooled oatmeal jellied, and it can be cut with a knife. Out of the wide-mouth pitcher, it tumbled down into a large dish and poured over milk or wort. This dish was served at the end of the meal, as they said, for those who were still hungry. Even the most satiated must have at least a sip ...
Oat flour pancakes were prepared between Fasts, in the morning, in great abundance, especially during the Shrovetide. Preparation started in the evening; they were baked with good grease in large frying pans on good heat. Oatmeal pancake came out large and thin as paper. It even shone through. It was rolled in a twist folded in two to four or eight layers. It was eaten piping hot, with melted butter, sour cream, salted mushrooms, with crushed blueberries or cranberries. The remaining pancakes were doused with butter, sprinkled with "grits," and placed inside the cleaned oven. Inch-high stack fits thirty pieces, and even more thin pancakes, depending on the cook's skill, who with flushed face, rushes like a bird from the oven to the table.
