Hospitable grandmother
The poet’s grandmother Elizaveta Alekseevna was a hospitable landowner. Lunch at home always consisted of several dishes. For the first course – fish soup or cabbage soup, to which, in addition to cabbage, Tarkhanov cooks could add sorrel, spinach or nettle. In the summer they usually prepared botvinya. Various sauces were served as hot dishes. At that time, this was the name not only for seasoning, but also for main dishes made from meat, fish, poultry or vegetables. In addition to sauces, roast goose with apples, turkey with lemon, pheasants with pistachios and even partridge with truffles could appear on the table.
The tea table was set between lunch and dinner. Lermontov described the evening tea party, inspired by Tarkhanov’s gatherings, in his unfinished novel “Vadim”:
“It was getting dark, they served candles, put various snacks and a copper samovar on the table… The table in the living room was filled with preserves, dried and fresh berries. Gennady Vasilich Gorinkin, a wealthy neighbor, sat in a place of honor, and the hostess constantly brought him plates of sweets, he He took a little from each and importantly wiped his lips…”
Mikhail Yuryevich loved sweets very much. And even being far from his relatives, Tarkhan, in Pyatigorsk, a few days before the fatal duel with Nikolai Martynov, received a parcel with sweet gifts from his dear grandmother.
It is no secret that Lermontov grew up as a sickly child. And the grandmother, on the instructions of the family doctor Anselm Lewis, periodically kept her grandson on a rather specific diet. Lermontov was not given meat in the spring, and for breakfast they made meager sandwiches of black bread, butter and watercress.
Ice cream is a mandatory dish at Lermontov’s dessert table.
Perhaps the omnivorous nature of the already adult Lermontov and his excellent appetite are associated with the restrictions that he was forced to endure as a child. It’s not for nothing that in one of his first poems, “Bulevar” (1830), the poet exclaimed: “The fool who lived to be on a diet.”
Unpoetic pranks
Lermontov’s acquaintance, writer, public figure, actual state councilor, Prince Alexander Illarionovich Vasilchikov, left memories of the poet’s culinary “exploits”:
“He was a naughty boy in the full childish sense of the word… when a dish he loved was served for dinner, he would throw himself at the dish with a loud cry and laugh, plunge his fork into the best pieces, empty the entire dish and often leave us all without dinner …”
Not the most flattering characteristic.
Still from the film “The Hussar Ballad”.
However, Lermontov also had a low opinion of the prince, judging by his impromptu words:
- Great Prince Xander, and he is thin and flexible,
- Like a young ear,
- Brightly illuminated by the silver moon,
- But without grain – empty.
Vasilchikov also left one more touch to the “culinary” portrait of the poet. Once, during his stay in the Caucasus, a poet came to Lermontov with the intention of reading his works to Mikhail Yuryevich and casually mentioned a “barrel of freshly salted cucumbers” in his apartment. Lermontov had a weakness for this snack, and besides, pickled cucumbers were very rare in the Caucasus at that time.
It’s not hard to guess that the visiting amateur drinker read poetry in his apartment while Mikhail Yuryevich was devouring pickles. And he distributed everything that he couldn’t finish into his pockets and “fled without goodbye from the inexorable reader-poet.”
M. Zichy. Hussar feast. 1873
Mayoshka’s party
While serving in the Life Guards Hussar Regiment, Majoshka (the poet’s cadet nickname) gladly took part in friendly feasts and was a hospitable host himself. The writer Vladimir Burnashev recalled one of the feasts “at Mayoshka’s”:
“In Tsarskoye we found a feast in full swing and, of course, were received by everyone with open arms, and we were forced, although, of course, without making much effort for this coercion, to take part in Balthazar’s feast…”
But Lermontov was not a pampered gentleman, as it might seem. When, during the Caucasian War, he commanded a detachment of one hundred Cossacks, he earned their loyalty and respect, among other things, by completely adopting their way of life: he slept on bare ground, ate with them from the same cauldron, and shared with the Cossacks all the difficulties of the campaign.
Menu for Mikhail Yuryevich’s festive dinner
Barrel pickles from a visiting poet
Usually those who have their own farm and a large country house have the luxury of pickling cucumbers in a barrel. A city dweller will most likely go to the vegetable market to buy barrel pickles. But this will not diminish the joy of tasting it.
Ingredients: cucumbers – 20-30 kg, water – 10 l, garlic 2-3 heads, salt – 800-900 g (per 10 l of water), dill umbrellas – 500-600 g, horseradish leaf – 150 g, peppercorns – 30 g, currant leaf, cherry – 100 g, horseradish root – 30 g, hot red pepper – 1 pc.
Recipe: Sort the cucumbers and soak in water for 5 hours. Peel the horseradish root. Chop the dill and peel the garlic. Boil brine from water and salt, cool and strain. Rub the walls of the barrel with garlic, place some of the greens on the bottom, then tightly cucumbers, again greens and cucumbers. Pour in brine, close the lid and put under pressure. The cucumbers will ferment for several days at 18-20 degrees, and then they must be placed in a cold basement.
Soup “Potofe” from grandmother Elizaveta Alekseevna
Mikhail Yuryevich’s grandmother tried to feed her grandson deliciously with what grew in the Tarkhanov garden, but she also had to pay tribute to gastronomic fashion.
Ingredients: beef (shoulder or brisket) – 500 g, water – 4 l, finely chopped carrots – 100 g, finely chopped turnips – 100 g, leek (white part) – 2 pcs., celery – 1 root, parsley – 1 sprig, garlic – 1 clove, finely chopped onion – 100 g, cloves – 2 pcs., black pepper – 2-3 peas, potatoes – 600 g, salt – 2 tsp.
Recipe: Pour cold water over the meat and bones and place on the stove. Add spices. After boiling, remove the foam and increase the heat. Stew the roots (turnips, carrots, celery, parsley and chopped garlic cloves) in their own juice until tender. Stew the leek whole. At the same time, fry the onion in butter. Cook the meat for 5-6 hours, remove excess fat from the broth, strain through a wet napkin and add cooked stewed vegetables and fried onions. Add salt. Place the meat cut into portions into the soup. Add potatoes and cook for another 1 hour. Before serving, add finely chopped parsley to the soup.
Fried pheasant from staff captain Maxim Maksimych
Today fried pheasant is exotic for us. In Lermontov’s time, this was a common dish, including during travel. And if you roast a pheasant deliciously, as Staff Captain Maxim Maksimych did in the novel “A Hero of Our Time,” then even a modest dinner turned into a feast: “Maksim Maksimych had deep knowledge in the art of cooking: he fried the pheasant surprisingly well, successfully poured it with cucumber brine, and I must admit that without it I would have had to remain on dry food…”
Ingredients: pheasant – 1 pc., lard – 200 g, melted butter – 200 g, ground black pepper – to taste, cucumber pickle, rye crackers 3-4 pcs.
Recipe: if the pheasant is fresh, then it must be kept in a cool place, without plucking, for 5 – 8 days. Then pluck the feathers. Sear the carcass and, while it is still hot, rub well with a piece of lard or margarine. Wrap in a thin cotton cloth to remove the roots of fluff and small feathers from the pheasant. Remove entrails. (If the pheasant is gutted and ready to eat, skip the first steps.) Stuff the breast of the carcass with lard. Place the pheasant in the duckling pan, add half a glass of water and place in a preheated oven. A slightly browned carcass should be constantly poured with hot oil mixed with 2 – 3 tablespoons of cucumber brine. When the pheasant is fried after about an hour, pour oil over it again, sprinkle with grated breadcrumbs and leave in the oven for a little while so that the breadcrumbs bake.
Ice cream is the poet’s favorite dessert
An obligatory dish on the dessert table for Lermontov was ice cream. And this was noted by many contemporaries. Including Vasily Ivanovich Chilyaev, the owner of the house in Pyatigorsk, where Mikhail Yuryevich lived: “Lermontov loved to eat well, he had his own cook and dined most of the time at home. Four or five dishes were prepared for lunch, and ice cream was prepared daily.”
And we won’t split hairs and offer you a classic recipe for vanilla ice cream. Mikhail Yurievich would appreciate it!
Ingredients: cream 33% (cold) – 300 g, milk – 500 ml, yolks – 5 pcs., sugar – 150 g, vanillin – 1 g or vanilla sugar – 10 g.
Recipe: Lightly heat the milk with vanilla. In a separate container, rub the yolks with sugar with a spatula. Add part of the milk (about a glass) to the pureed yolks, stir until smooth. Pour the mixture into the remaining milk and simmer until slightly thickened over low heat, stirring constantly, for about 10 minutes. As soon as the custard base begins to envelop the spatula, it must be removed from the heat and cooled completely.
Whip the cream to soft peaks at first on low speed and gradually increase to high. Then add the completely cooled milk-egg mixture to them. Mix everything until smooth. Place the ice cream in the freezer for 30 minutes. Then puree the mixture with a blender for two to three minutes to get rid of ice crystals. Repeat the procedure three times. After this, pour the ice cream into a mold and send it to be completely frozen.
Source: rodina-history.ru
