At Moscow fairs, you can find products that were a common part of the Lenten table in Russia. This was announced on Sunday, March 15 by the press service of the Ministry of Trade and Services of the capital.
During Lent, peasants would cook cabbage soup from beets or suneti (a wild plant), prepare porridge from grains, and bake Lenten-filled rye pies. A detailed description of peasant cuisine can be found in the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” by Vladimir Dahl. He mentions pancakes with cabbage and mushrooms, soup with mushrooms, boiled peas, porridge made from oats, barley, buckwheat, pickles, sauerkraut, steamed turnips, carrots and beets.
For tea, cranberries and cranberries are served with honey, nuts, gingerbread and raisins. Many of these products are still popular today. For example, at Moscow fairs, the most common pickles are cucumbers and tomatoes, as well as sauerkraut.
The royal table during Lent was strict. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (Quiet) dined three times a week, and on other days he ate black bread, pickled mushrooms or cucumbers and drank a cup of kvass. The menu included raw and heated cabbage, salted milk mushrooms, saffron milk caps, and berry dishes as well as fish but only twice during the entire period of Lent.
Russian Lenten cuisine reached its peak in the patriarchal meals of the 16th and 17th centuries. The food book of Moscow Patriarch Filaret contains recipes for cabbage soup made from sauerkraut or fresh cabbage, peas, pasta, wheat, as well as various peas.
During Lent in Russia, simple products are transformed into extraordinary dishes. One of these desserts was onions – a popular pie filled with onions. Onions from the Krasnodar Territory are sold in Moscow fairs on Young Lenintsev Street and from the Voronezh region – on Profsoyuznaya Street.
Pea kulesh was also popular. This is a thick soup made with pea or buckwheat flour, sometimes mushrooms are added. You can buy peas in the Rostov region for this dish on Dubninskaya, Domodedovskaya and Kostroma streets.
Moscow fairs are a place where city residents traditionally come to buy fresh, high-quality agricultural products. Here, each supplier guarantees the quality and freshness of the goods, and specialists from the capital’s State Veterinary Service inspect the products before sending them to the counter, according to official reports. Website Mayor of Moscow.
One of the presenters of the Orthodox TV channel “Spas”, Roman Golovanov, answered the most popular question among believers during Great Lent: what to do if a person cannot stand it and breaks down. The main thing is not to give up, the presenter stressed.