Home For Christmas: Some Favourite European Cheeses

Instead of a globe-trotting recipe this week, I had wanted to write a simple guide to buying and serving good cheese. Cheese is a simple and powerful link with the past. Rich and poor alike, Europeans ate cheese for hundreds, even thousands of years. But cheese, like wine, is a very complicated matter [...]

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Belarusian Cranberry Pudding

Kisiel (or kissel) is a pan-Slavic dessert, served either warm or chilled, the texture of which typically falls between a soup and a pudding. A traditional kisiel is made of a sour fruit, and Belarusians have a well-developed appreciation for the sour (eg. rye bread, soured cream, saurkraut). For the holidays, here is the [...]

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Belarusian Pork and Potato Pie

The indigenous name of this one is a bit confusing. Before researching Belarusian food I thought that a babka was always a bread-type dessert, but in Belarus it also refers to a meat pie with a potato crust, remarkably similar in taste to the Quebecois tourtière. In fact, if I needed to [...]

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Belarusian Buckwheat Mushroom Pilaf (or Stuffing)

Traditional Belarusian cookery makes much of buckwheat, a plant that grows better than wheat (no relation) under Belarus’ climatic and soil conditions. This example of a buckwheat pilaf is made with hulled wholegrain buckwheat seeds, whole seeds not yet cracked into the groats used for kasha. The seasonings are classic Belarus: bay leaf [...]

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