The food of war and isolation - International influences on Russian sausage cuisine

There's some delicious culinary history here (with recipes!). It's going to be interesting to see the influences of the Ukrainian and Russian diasporas in cuisine in the future.

Today it is ingenuous to deny the French influence on the development of Russian cuisine. But we should not forget that Finno-Ugric, Tatar and Polish cuisines had just as much influence on it. This has been forgotten only because it happened so long ago. And now the recent defeat of the Russian Foreign Ministry in the battle for Ukrainian borscht has only strengthened official anger towards everything foreign.

In our writings we have sometimes compared the development of cuisine with other parts of our culture. For example, linguists say that the Russian language might consist of up to 60 percent borrowed words. Why would the situation with cuisine be different? There is no cause for indignation. The same linguists say that English consists of 80 percent borrowed words, and it doesn’t bother English speakers at all. They continue speaking and writing English, and no one complains about a vast world conspiracy.

Here's a particularly vivid illustration of how useful foreign culinary “borrowings” have been: the ordinary frankfurter or weiner, what Americans and now much of the world calls hotdogs. In the Soviet Union they were the food of bachelors and students, taken on weekend camping trips, fried in dough, sold in cafeterias. In the USSR, there were even special cafes for them with an explanatory name something like “Hotdogeries.” Hotdogs were universal. And there probably isn’t a soul in the country who wasn’t saved from hunger in rough times by the ubiquitous hotdog.

Our compatriots have known some kind of wiener or frankfurter for quite a long time. The first dishes similar to it probably arrived in the Petrine era from Holland and Germany. Wieners and beer were served for foreign sailors and skippers in the first inn opened in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 18th century. Then the former cook of Peter the Great, German Felten, founded an establishment in the city called "Osteria of Four Frigates." The menu hasn’t come down to us, but we can be sure that some analog of modern sausages and franks were served there.

But as time went on, the Russian sausage developed differently. It is clear that most recipes were unpretentious products made of pork, bacon and spices. They could be found 100 years later in sausage makers' establishments in St. Petersburg and Moscow. For example, "The newest and most comprehensive index of Moscow" published in 1829 notes that Mattern's establishment on Mokhovaya Street sold "English sausages made to order." And Bezozzi's "near Kuznetsky Most" offered "truffle sausages."

Why did we adopt the French name of the dish — sosiska (сосиска) from the French saucisse? Simple: sosiska was mass-produced in the middle-class cuisine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This was when connections with French cuisine and culture were at their peak. And after tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and officers were in France during the Napoleonic Wars, the cuisine of this country turned from an aristocratic court delicacy into the favorite dishes of more common people.

But at the same time, in Russia sausages were evolving to be more elegant. For example, the cookbook of Ignaty Radetsky, the great master of Russian gastronomy of the 19th century, includes "hare sausages." The sausages were "fried in oil, and when ready, removed to a plate, deglazed, cooled on ice, then covered with cubes of meat aspic.”

And in Yekaterina Avdeyeva’s “Handbook for the Experienced Housewife,” published in St. Petersburg in 1842, here are sausages that are the apotheosis of imagination and indulgence:

Goose liver sausages: Grate goose livers, add a few handfuls of grated white bread, half a cup of heavy cream, soy, nutmeg, a quarter of a pound of melted crawfish butter, a cup of red wine and mix everything together well. Then chop a few shallots, cook them a little in the crawfish butter, add four egg yolks, and stir. Fill sausage casings with this mixture and boil in broth.