Fashion for peasant food: What is a "poor kitchen" and how it is served
Not so long ago, going to dinner at a restaurant, I found in the menu dumplings with hare and hazelnut on a Jerusalem artichoke pillow, and it didn’t hit me at all about the composition of the dish, but that it was announced as a variation on the theme of peasant cuisine. Under the same program, the waiter recommended eating chocolate candies with buckwheat and freeze-dried garlic, but this is another story. In another institution the other day offered more understandable dishes of European cuisine: calf brains, roast bread in a loaf of bread, soup with chicken giblets, soup with scorched beef. Food with a "folklore" spirit - and cunning fusion, and classics of national cuisines, adjusted for modernity - is finally undergoing restoration: it is increasingly being taken up by serious chefs and amateur culinary specialists. True, in the process of eating (and paying for) such a dinner, a natural question may arise: what is really the food of the poor and what is the modern gastronomic fantasy.
When immersed in the trend, it immediately became clear that not everyone sees it: they say, peasant cuisine has always been there. This is true, but, firstly, now it is cooked in gourmet restaurants, and secondly, the dishes that are now called peasant are not always such. The observations have been confirmed by Technomic, a research and consulting agency in the field of nutrition: it examines gastronomic trends, talking with restaurateurs, chefs and visitors to establishments around the world. Technomic called the “peasant” vector in gastronomy, or peasant cuisine, one of the main culinary trends of 2016: “Peasant dishes - traditional or renewed, in different forms and combinations - are experiencing an upswing. All kinds of meatballs and sausages, Russian and English pies, Spanish empanadas, French toast, cheese bread, vegetables on charcoal. "
It may seem that any national cuisine - this is the "poor" kitchen, because the nourishing and fatty are used to be considered peasant. But much of what is now held under the name of European peasant cuisine in gastronomic reviews - meat stuffed with meat, rich snacks of giblets, and the like - is more about the Gargantua and Pantagruel feast than the poor man’s dinner. Such dishes have always been the traditional food of more or less wealthy citizens, nobles or monks (in many monasteries, austerity was extremely conditional). This becomes clear, say, from the book “Famine and Abundance” by Massimo Montanari, where the cultural and economic life of Europe is revealed through the history of the nutrition of various eras and peoples - from the ancient Romans and Vikings to the French bourgeois. In general, all historians agree on one thing: in good times, peasant cuisine was relatively decent, but good times did not happen often.
Up until the advent of the potato, European peasant food consisted mainly of bread: because of it, bread riots happened every now and then, and he was far from what they were selling to us at gastronomic shops under the guise of a peasant whole grain baguette. The bread of the villagers consisted not only of flour, but also of stalks, chaff, and sometimes of grass and even sawdust. The rest of the daily ration was filled with oil, cheese, diluted wine and beer, sometimes with eggs and a small amount of vegetables, less often with meat blanks, and on holidays with meat chowder. European peasants did not know the spices and, if they did not live in the coastal villages, they did not see the fish either.
In Italy, the art of creating decent dishes from almost nothing reached perfection and was called cucina povera ("poor cuisine"). From there came the expression "good food in difficult times." On the culinary side of the struggle for survival, in particular, during the Second World War, they say dishes that are still popular in Italy today: in the north - pappa al pomodoro (hard bread and tomato mashed potatoes), ribollita (vegetable soup-assorted beans, roots and leaves), pasta alle briciole (pasta with bread crumbs, "poor parmesan"); frittata di maccheroni alla napoletana (Neapolitan pasta casserole) in the south, riso e patate (rice and potatoes). One of the brightest samples of such a kitchen is trippa alla romana, tripe stewed in tomato sauce. At one time, meat went to the table of wealthy citizens, and offal was almost the only source of animal protein for many ordinary people.
Today, the villagers of many European regions are doing somewhat better, but the modern variations of the chefs on a rural theme are completely different, exquisite taste and difficult presentation. Calling the peasant new creative cuisine inspired by traditional dishes of all times and classes, we slightly mislead ourselves, not to mention that in modern conditions not every working citizen can afford to buy ingredients for the "poor man's dinner" from culinary guides. By the way, in many countries - mainly in the former colonies - for obvious reasons, almost the entire national cuisine is poor by default. For example, the secret of rasp Vieja beef rasped to beef, a popular Canarian and Cuban cuisine with Sephardic roots, is extremely simple: very old, poor-quality meat requires cooking or cooking for a few hours (that's all slow cooking).
The real Russian version of the "poor cuisine", namely the Soviet - the real test of scarcity. From the gastronomic point of view, this is a rootless phenomenon, but of course there was real peasant cuisine in Russia. Maxim Syrnikov is engaged in enlightenment in this area, among other things, he describes real peasant cuisine: in Russian, as in Western European, there was a lot of bread and fat was very much appreciated. In his books on food, Syrnikov presents recipes for cucumber soup and botvini, mushroom noodles and Siberian buns - shaneg. Today, you will often meet culinary adherents in the spirit of Helen Molokhovets, but this, of course, is not the food of the peasants, but rather the Russian equivalent of the cuisine bourgeoise, which appeared in France in the 19th century. On the influence of peasant cuisine on the chefs of Russia and the world, we asked Anna Maslovskaya, a restaurant critic and the editor-in-chief of the Food section in the Daily Billboard.
I can not say that the tendency to rethink the peasant cuisine in Russia is developing actively. In most cities in the restaurant menu you will rather meet chebureks, dumplings, dumplings, Olivier, herring under a fur coat, pickle. This, of course, does not fit into the phenomenon of peasant cuisine. If you can try a real one, then in Boris Zarkov’s restaurants, where chef Vladimir Mukhin tries to get the most out of Russian national cuisine: she glorifies him, he modernizes it. Just Mukhin borrows the details of the peasant food: from here in the menu, for example, the commissaries are small meatball pies. At the same time, he rethinks tradition and makes "peasant" dishes not only edible, but also very tasty, but this, of course, is far from the peasant cuisine in the literal sense.
In the modern view of traditional cuisine there are two vectors. Talented "free artists" among cooks can make the flow very decorative - you get, relatively speaking, jelly from Jerusalem artichoke with horseradish powder. Another story is when food is invented no less interesting and cunning, with humor and great intelligence, when it contains the experience of many gastronomic journeys, but the presentation is simple and even deliberately brutal. Each of the chefs at festivals of creative cuisine is unique and does everything in its own way, but these two parallel trends can be noted. “Simple” food pretends that there is nothing in it, but, having tasted such a dish, you realize that this cannot be compared with the usual village soup or barley porridge. Mind and good taste come through through this meal, served simply and carelessly. I like this variant of the modern kitchen more - it's like a minimalistic intellectual fashion in clothes, where there is nothing to show off, but the whole thing is in cut, materials, and things look very smart. Although this may be even more show off.
The subtle "show off" of gourmet makes the village gastronomy into something fresh, more accessible to perception and, most importantly, very tasty. Indeed, in the original recipe, the dish of a poor kitchen is not always desirable or even possible to eat. Modern restaurants and food festivals provide an opportunity to discover new foods - from cereals to game, to note interesting combinations of vegetables or cooking methods. Let such delights sometimes look ridiculous, in general, the trend is pleasant.
Against the background of Jerusalem artichoke jelly and horseradish powder, chicken liver with marjoram and pea gourmet noodle puree is a curious innovation, and for the culinary fans, the long-awaited opportunity to eat in a home-like restaurant. True, the direction of the kitchen in the footsteps of peasants and hunters is developing along with a dubious boom in everything that is farmer and organic. Despite the arguments of science and common sense, many consumers have already made up a radically negative opinion about GMOs and, according to Technomic polls, will increasingly demand in restaurants restaurants dishes from farm products without GMOs or labeling genetically modified ingredients on the menu.
Someone may be disturbed by the far from the peasant value of the new national fusion, but, fortunately, it is necessary to pay for ideas and labor in modern society. In general, obviously, such a game in the old farmers - a kind of fun for fantasy. Marie Antoinette changed into a shepherdess and played in the pastoral at Versailles, depicting a simple village girl. And now the peasant world for a day for chefs and gourmets who are looking for a new one can be any farmer's market, food festival or their own kitchen.
Photo: WikiArt (1, 2, 3)