Herring under a fur coat variation

Probably the strangest gift we got at our recent baby shower was a package of herring from Belarus. The strangest, but as it happens, the very first one we enjoyed. It was from a Russian-American friend with whom I'd discussed the joys of herring and beets, and although she couldn't have known that I had an open can of sliced beets in the fridge awaiting their fate, it almost seemed meant to be that this delicious herring would be used for my take on the Russian salad, Herring under a fur coat.

I actually first had this layered salad at a Russian restaurant-cum-sauna in the distant suburbs of Dallas. It was a gorgeous creation, with shaved bits of boiled egg white making up the fluffy "fur coat" on top. But it also seemed very work-intensive. I thought I would make a version that would combine the right tastes, but skimp on the looks. I also wanted to make it a tiny bit lighter than the original version.

I started, as I always do, by looking through my cookbooks. I looked in Anya von Bremzen's Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook, in Darra Goldstein's A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality, in Russian Regional Recipes and in Russian, Polish & German Cooking. Zip. Zilch. While these books had plenty of recipes for herring and for beets, I couldn't find the one I was looking for. So after some googling, I fell upon (of course!) a recipe for it on Yulinka Cooks, one of my favourite food blogs. This version is inspired by her recipe, but takes a few shortcuts, and for the quantities I went by feel. Use this as a guideline, and adjust as you please.

Herring under a fur coat variation

Ingredients

• 3 small potatoes, boiled, peeled, and diced
• 1 can sliced beets, roughly chopped
• 3 hard-boiled eggs, roughly chopped
• 1 package herring, cut into little pieces
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 3 pickles, diced
• tablespoon fresh dill, more if dried
• 1 tablespoon mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons sour cream
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 2 tablespoons Bulgarian yoghurt
• to taste Salt and pepper

Cooking Directions

1. Mix all the ingredients together.
2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
3. Eat immediately with dark bread, or marinate overnight.

Now, this was good for dinner when I made it, and to be honest, I ate it for breakfast the next day too (pictured). But it was really after a full day in the fridge, once all the flavours got to merge and marinate, it was ridiculously delicious. It was nowhere near as beautiful as a painstakingly constructed herring under a fur coat, but the taste is, if anything, better.

Russian Beet Salad

I wish I were a better updater of this blog. It has, as far as I can tell, twelve whole readers -- why can't I think of them, and of their need for Romanian food?

Well, several factors stand in my way:

1. Most of the time, I don't cook Romanian food. I have a huge collection of cookbooks, and love to experiment either with a variety of world cuisines, with recipes I find online, or with dishes made-up of leftovers and whatever's in the fridge.

2. I do almost all of my cooking in the evening -- after all, I work during the day. And since I don't have some kind of complicated photo setup, the pictures are bound to look pretty shoddy -- food shots taken by flash are never all that appetizing. Does anyone want recipes without the food porn?

3. When I follow cookbook recipes pretty closely, I'm uncomfortable reproducing them on the blog. I know people do this -- some pretty much fill their blogs with published recipes -- and I know one can acknowledge their sources and stay on the generally right side of blogger ethics. I don't mind doing this with Romanian cookbooks, as their instructions tend to be pretty vague anyway, and I figure most of them will not be available this side of the ocean.

Well, today is the day of exceptions to all three, and this is because I've discovered a Russian beet salad recipe so delicious, I've made it twice in less than a week and a half. Then I saw this recipe for Romanian beet salad on Romanian Food Blog, and it seems the stars had aligned. We need more beets!

The recipe is from literature prof and cookbook author (and general well-known foodie) Darra Goldstein's A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality. It's super-simple, and the first time I did it I used a shortcut that was just fine. Here's what you do, with some small variations from Goldstein's version:

Clean a pound of beets and roast them at 375 F for an hour or more. Let them cool, peel, and chop them into little cubes. (Goldstein has you shred them, but I love how jewel-like they are cubed.)

Then mix in three chopped cloves of garlic, three tablespoons of mayo, 1/4 cup chopped walnuts, and 1/4 chopped prunes. Plus salt to taste, of course.

Let the salad cool, then serve. I like the result on crackers, as in the picture here. It's quite sweet and rich, unlike the beet salads I usually make, and you can't eat a lot of it -- this is basically beet-based candy.

My shortcut? Well, roasting and peeling beets is a painstaking and messy job. And yes, the result is tasty, but you can also make this recipe as part of a weeknight dinner by just using canned beets and chopping them small. Now, that takes less than half an hour. I've prepared this salad once the "proper" way and once the shortcut way, and both are satisfying. I suspect I'll make it again before too long, though next time I'll add a bit of Bulgarian yoghurt to balance the sweetness.