From Russia with love

The most important festival in the Russian Orthodox Church is Easter, a movable feast based on the Julian calendar, unlike the Catholic and Protestant Easter which is determined by the Gregorian calendar. So in some years their Easter coincides with ours, and some years it doesn’t.

Great Lent is the 40-day period before Easter, culminating in Holy Week. Maundy Thursday is also known as Pure Thursday, and is the day when people clean their houses and prepare Easter dishes like kulich, paskha and painted eggs, because it is forbidden to work during the last three days of Holy Week (what a good idea).

All this information is available on the internet and it makes fascinating reading if you’re interested, but it’s got little to do with cooking, so here endeth the lecture for today.

I have an unusual recipe for lamb, which I found in the in-flight magazine of Air Astana, Kazakhstan’s national airline. No, I haven’t flown with them, but we have a good friend who, before he retired from the oil industry, often did. He gave me the magazine ages ago and I knew it would come in useful one day. The recipe is called toy oshi or wedding pilaf and is made with mutton, tail lard, rice, chick peas, vegetables and a special Uzbek spice mix.

The picture looked good, but the instructions were rather vague, so as I had neither mutton nor tail lard and hadn’t a clue what Uzbek spice mix contained, I made it up as I went along, and used boned lamb (available from freezer shops), olive oil and my own spice mix. It was really quite special and would make a perfect and impressive dish for Easter.

Kazakhstan, once part of the Soviet Union, is now an independent state of course, but I expect there are lots of Russian recipes still in use.

Paskha is a traditional Russian Easter dessert made with curd cheese. It is shaped in a special mould lined with cheesecloth and left to drain in the fridge for about 12 hours, then decorated with the letters XB, meaning Christ has risen (Christos Voskresse). For my recipe, I used cottage cheese and fresh ricotta.

In the absence of the special mould, a lot of recipes recommend using a cheesecloth-lined flower pot, but I simply drained the cheeses first, divided the mixture between individual glasses which I chilled, then decorated with candied peel. It’s quite rich, so best served in small portions.

Some time ago, I gave a recipe for kulich, a fruit loaf cooked in a cylindrical tin so that when it rises up over the top, it looks like the onion dome of an Orthodox church.

This year, however, I have something closer to home, a hot cross bun loaf – much the same but just a different shape. This fruity, lightly spiced loaf is easy to make, although it does need a fair bit of ‘proving’ time. It’s delicious sliced and buttered or toasted.

As Easter is approaching, there has to be something chocolaty, so I made some chocolate cupcakes, piped them with nests and filled them with Cadburys mini eggs, something that the little people (and a few big ones) will surely enjoy.