A complete recipe for botty delicious and healthy

More recently, Botvina was considered the pearl of Russian cuisine. Each housewife knew how to cook it. It was her ability to cook botvina, judging about the culinary abilities of the hostess, which was reflected in oral folklore - the saying "What is Ustinya, such is her botvina" is known.

The word botvina was derived from the word tops. In olden times in Russia, sorrel, young nettles, carrot and beet leaves were used for cooking various dishes, in particular, they prepared a botvina recipe that eventually was forgotten. Now this wonderful dish is less and less often appearing on our tables and almost completely disappeared due to high prices, and more because the technology of cooking this dish is laborious enough.

Botvina was served as the first cold dish, or after the first hot dish. For botvigny all the greens were boiled, and then finely-finely cut with a knife and poured with kvass. If the boiled leaves are wiped through a sieve or passed through a meat grinder, you will get a soup-puree, not a botvine.

The full recipe of which will be described below is an expensive and difficult to prepare dish, consisting of three parts: botvigny, red or white boiled fish (salmon, stellate sturgeon, sturgeon) and chopped into small pieces of ice, which are periodically added to the botvine so that it is cold all the time. Therefore, a full botvine is served to one person in three cups with two spoonfuls - for botvigny and ice, and one fork, which is taken by the fish. To the botvine, only rye bread is served.

The fish part of the botvinya consisted of several varieties of red or white fish and meat of crayfish or crab, as well as shrimp. However, such expensive fish could afford a few, so sometimes they prepared a so-called incomplete botvine without fish. In some recipes, the composition of the botvinia was simplified.

But such an incomplete bottony recipe which contains the replacement of some products by others or prepared without fish is devoid of attraction, as the true taste of the dish is distorted and it turns into an ordinary cold summer soup, such as a beet soup recipe for cold. Botvinya is simple and tidy. Both types of botvinis are prepared on the basis of kvass, which should be neither sour nor sweet. To give Botvina acuteness, lemon juice and grated horseradish are added to kvass.

For a simple complete botvigny, a liter of bread kvass, a glass of white okroshechny kvass, two cups of boiled sorrel, a glass of boiled nettle, three young beets together with the tops, fresh cucumber, two large spoons of grated horseradish, half a lemon, a teaspoon of mustard, half a cup of green onions , One teaspoon of salt and sugar, a half tablespoons of dill, a pound of fish and four cancers.

First you need to prepare a green mass and add to it finely chopped green onions, pre-ground with dill and salt and also finely chopped beets. With lemon cut the zest, grind it in a cup of 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 must be combined with the botanical mass, add cucumber, cut into small cubes, and put everything in the cold for 20 minutes, so that the acid base is well absorbed into the tops.

While Botvina is insisted, we will prepare a fish part of it. To do this, small (50 grams) pieces of different kinds of valuable fish should be boiled for 10 minutes in boiling salted water with spices.

Zaparnaya botvynya recipe of which from a simple botvinya is distinguished by the presence in it of a steaming starter, prepared from a leavened hazelnut and flour. The park is made in advance, one day before the cooking of the botvinja. For its preparation rye flour is diluted with water in a small clay pot and placed for 30 minutes in a preheated oven.

A well-tolerated mixture is filtered through a sieve and a finely chopped boiled beetroot is added , placed in enameled utensils and poured with a leavened hazel and put on for a day to sour. Then the parchment is bred with kvass and other ingredients are added.

By name it seems that this is a simple dish, but how many subtleties! Some housewives probably can not even imagine that the beetroot recipes can be so complicated and laborious. Apparently the complexity of cooking was the main reason that such a tasty and useful dish as botvina was undeservedly forgotten.