I didn’t wait for tomorrow, I decided to continue today - I think it’s better that way.
We continue to plan the New Year's table in accordance with the Russian traditions of the Christmas feast - fish, meat, poultry and sweets.
Fish and meat (pork) dishes were in the previous publication, and now - poultry and sweets. Frankly, initially I was drawn to hazel grouse porridge, but to get a hazel grouse - it's not always rewarding business. That is, it can end in complete failure. At least, here in Moscow, within walking distance, now I found only quails, and quails are not hazel grouses.
Therefore, let's go the simple way - we'll take chickens, not broilers, but gherkins. We cook, again, according to the recipes of Katerina Avdeeva (who does not know, a famous cook, author of books-guides for housewives, very popular before the revolution).
So we roast the chicken until tender, and then we take them apart. Further, according to the rules, you need to sit down to peel the peas, but now we have peas that are already peas, so either we take green frozen peas, or - pre-well soaked dry whole peas. With sweet green ice cream, peas will turn out much tastier, if anything.
Cook the peas until cooked in a small amount of broth (yeah, frozen broth will come in handy here, do you have one?). You don't need a lot of broth - covered the peas, and good.
Then we take two good egg yolks (better bright, saturated), beat them with two tablespoons of heavy cream, salting - for the sauce.
Put the peas in the sauce, and the chickens on the peas.
Not very sophisticated, but who's talking about sophistication? French chefs were not available to everyone in Russia. So we strive for simplicity!
And then the time for sweets arrived.
I confess I had an ambush with sweets. Because the sweet is gingerbread or, say, Kaluga dough, the recipe for which (such a recipe to believe it was Kaluga dough, not a fantasy) I did not find.
And a cake with coffee bechamel, "Swedish waffles", almond or apple meringue - it still refers more to foreign cuisine, and was hardly known everywhere in Russia, not like in Russia.
But at Katerina's I found a recipe for a real Russian apple pie.
It is called that - real Russian and further in the text. I think it will be more interesting than the coliva that I originally wanted to offer (although coliva can also be made, it's delicious).
So, we take 15 sour apples and bake them (since there is no stove, just in the oven until tender). We wipe the baked apples through a sieve, adding one and a half cups of sugar (it is better to break it to the state of powder, I suspect the refined sugar was then turned into it when cooking sweet).
If you want to get into the spirit of the Russian Christmas feast right up to the top, you can beat the apples with sugar for half an hour - until they turn white. But it's better to take a mixer and turn the mass into something airy quickly.
Then we take 12 proteins and beat separately until steep peaks.
Gently mix the proteins and the apple mass, put them on a dish at Avdeeva's, and then put them in the oven.
And here is what comes out: on the edge of the dish you need to put a silver spoon, sticking it with a handle into the pie - this is done so that it does not fall off. Since I did not have a silver spoon, I experimented with wood chips.
But, probably, you just need a spoon (I have this opal pie), or it was necessary to stick the peg in a cunning way, after cooking.
Avdeeva recommends putting the pie in the oven when the guests have sat down at the table, and not keeping it in the oven for a long time (so as not to fall out, again).
But from me a little advice: preheat the oven to 80-100 degrees, and do not bake, but dry the pie. You get a very interesting apple meringue with a reference to some varieties of marshmallow.
You can plant it with cakes and do not push in any peg-spoons.
Bon appetit for the New Year!