Why Russia used to have bread?
Aephi answers popular questions from readers.
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Bread in Russia — a mandatory product to any table. It seems that not only eat desserts. The rest of the food, and the first and the second to this day it is customary to eat with the bread. The culinary historian Pavel Syutkin told Aify where did this tradition and why it is so firmly established in our country.
Bread in Russia — not just food. Perhaps nowhere in the world is such a sacred relation to him, as we have. The first thing that comes to mind is the respect for bread as a product that saves in the dead of famine, in times of need. Only these difficult times were almost all Nations. Descriptions of the famine and the pestilence full European Chronicles of the early middle Ages, so what? The bread is quite ordinary product.Paul Sudirectory cooking
According to experts, the popularity of bread in Russia is not due to hunger, tradition and everyday meals. “Then, as often happens in history, there has been some substitution of concepts. The fact that bread, corn (in old Slavic language) is a dish made from various ingredients: rye, wheat, oats, spelt, barley, etc. these grains was products-the saviors in any situation. First of all a daily food. They were the basis of the diet, where the meat was just a table decoration, a rare visitor to a peasant feast. Unlike, say, the same in Europe, where the diet of non-grain crops was richer in virtue at least of a milder climate. Not to mention the much more developed meat and dairy cattle breeding (even in the early Middle ages, when a large part of Russia located among thick forests along river banks),” — says the expert.
According to Syutkina, bread in Russia was consumed a lot, and ate liquid foods for the best digestion.
“On the status of 1891, the bottom rank of the Russian army in peacetime was given 3 pounds of bread (1230 g) per day — in addition to the meat, cabbage, potatoes, peas, etc. the Norm of bread for working in the early twentieth century — about a kilogram of bread a day. That is why in many peasant families was then made to eat soup (stew) not only for lunch but also for dinner and often for Breakfast. Because this bread had somehow digested with liquid. In many ways, this pre-revolutionary tradition in relation to the bread is passed and the next generation,” — said the expert.
Modern traditions of everyday meals, in essence, not much different from the pre-revolutionary, says Syutkin. “Russian cuisine in its democratic “worker-peasant” form has changed little over the last century. As in the middle Ages it is rather a way of satiety, not pleasure.
And the bread is indispensable, and cheap, and satisfying.
Noble kitchen, restrained in the consumption of bread, after the revolution of 1917 was almost eliminated. And bread for many decades, has become a “social” product of first necessity”, — said the expert.
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