More recently, Botvini was considered the pearl of Russian cuisine. Every housewife knew how to cook it. It was because of her ability to cook botvini that was used to judge the culinary abilities of the hostess, which was reflected in oral folklore - the proverb “What Ustinha is like, so is Botvina” is known.
The word botvinya comes from the word botva. In the old days in Russia, sorrel, young nettles, leaves of carrots and beets were used to prepare various dishes, in particular, from them a botany was prepared, the recipe of which was forgotten over time. Now this wonderful dish is appearing less and less on our tables and has almost completely disappeared due to the high cost, and more because the cooking technology of this dish is quite laborious.
Botvini was served as the first cold dish, or after the first hot one. For botvigny, all the greens were boiled, and then finely chopped with a knife and poured with kvass. If you wipe the boiled leaves through a sieve or pass through a meat grinder, you get mashed soup, not botvina.
The full botvini recipe which will be described below is an expensive and difficult to prepare dish, which consists of three parts: botvini, red or white boiled fish (salmon, stellate sturgeon) and chopped into small pieces of ice, which are periodically added to the botvini so that it is cold all the time. Therefore, a full botvini is served to one person in three cups with two spoons - for the botvini and for ice, and one fork, which they take fish. Only rye bread is served for botvigne.
The fish part of the botvigny consisted of several varieties of red or white fish and meat of crayfish or crab, as well as shrimp. However, few could afford such an expensive fish, so sometimes they prepared the so-called incomplete botvin without fish. In some recipes, the composition of the botvigny is simplified.
But such an incomplete botany recipe that contains the replacement of some products with others or is prepared without fish, is devoid of attractiveness, as the true taste of the dish is distorted and it turns into an ordinary cold summer soup, such as cold beetroot soup. Botvigna is simple and steaming. Both types of botvigny are prepared on the basis of kvass, which should be neither sour nor sweet. To add spice to the botvini, lemon juice and grated horseradish are added to the kvass.
For a simple full botvigny you need a liter of bread kvass, a glass of white okvass kvass, two glasses of boiled sorrel, a glass of boiled nettle, three young beets with tops, fresh cucumber, two large spoons of grated horseradish, half a lemon, a teaspoon of mustard, half a glass of green onion , one teaspoon of salt and sugar, one and a half tablespoons of dill, a pound of fish and four cancers.
First you need to cook the green mass and add finely chopped green onions to it, previously grated with dill and salt and finely chopped beets. Cut the zest from a lemon, grind it in a cup with sugar, add horseradish, mustard and lemon juice to this cup, mix everything and pour into kvass obtained by combining both types of kvass. Now the kvass base obtained in this way needs to be combined with the tops of the mass, add the cucumber, cut into small cubes, and put everything in the cold for 20 minutes so that the acidic base is well absorbed into the tops.
While the botvina is infused, we will prepare its fish portion. To do this, small (50 grams) pieces of different fish of valuable varieties need to be boiled in boiling salted water with spices for 10 minutes.
Steamed botvini recipe which differs from simple botvini by the presence in it of steamed sourdough, prepared from leavened ground flour and flour. Zaparka is done in advance, a day before the preparation of the tops. To prepare it, rye flour is diluted with water in a small clay pot and put in a preheated oven for 30 minutes.
A well-rotted mixture is filtered through a sieve and finely chopped boiled beet tops are added , everything is placed in an enameled bowl and poured with leavened ground and set to acidify for a day. Then the park is diluted with kvass and other components are added.
By the name it seems that this is a simple dish, but how many subtleties! Some housewives probably cannot even imagine that recipes with beets can be so complicated and time-consuming. Apparently, the complexity of the preparation was the main reason that such a tasty and healthy dish as botvini was undeservedly forgotten.