We are still working on the edits. I am a ball of hate at the moment.
Mod R: They want to know about pastilla.
Me: The what?
Mod R: Pastilla. Opinions, memories, recipes, do you eat it as a dessert or with tea as a snack, what is this magic etc? Do you make it? Do you think it would work with banana?
Me: What the heck is pastilla…
Russian wikipedia: Пастила́ — кондитерское изделие из подсушенного фруктово-ягодного пюре или сока. Блюдо русской кухни (известно с XIV в.). Следует[4] разделять белёвскую и коломенскую пастилы, так как приготовляются они по различным рецептам — первая скорее напоминает фруктовое суфле, а вторая близка зефиру и, как считается, является его прообразом.
I looked at the recipe. One is a fruit rollup. The other is whipped whites with agar in it. I don’t get it. I’ve never eaten this or seen it for sale. It looks kind of sus. I wouldn’t eat it.
The wikipedia mentions that it’s similar to zefir, which I have eaten. It’s was a cheap dessert.
But um, this is basically beaten egg white with some sugar and sometimes agar agar. It’s a marshmallow relative. It was considered inferior to a cookie or a muffin. I bought some one time and my grandma was genuinely offended that I would eat something like that.
I have watched the video for you.
Okay so it appears that they cook the apples into apple puree, whip up apple whites with sugar, and then add a buttton of agar agar to it. It’s jello with meringue and apple sauce in it.
I don’t get it.
Mod R, reading the draft: They mean this pastilla.
OMG, emmymade. Yeah. I’ve seen this channel before. I stopped following it because it just went into weird places. Desert of the czars. Yeah, sure, it is.
This is a viral fad recipe. If I served something like this at a family dinner, my Russian relatives would make fun of me for days. Not down with pastilla.
You are on your own.
If any of the other Russians want to take a stab at this silliness, I am all for it. Please comment.
Turkish Delight is also called Loukoumades; every decade or so I buy a box which usually goes stale before it’s all eaten. Try a Greek supermarket or an ethnic grocery store. It tastes ok but the powdered sugar makes it really messy to eat.
There is a Mexican dessert of guava paste, which looks like the first illustration for pastilla, is not sickeningly sweet, and is available in some ethnic grocery stores. It is fairly tasty and probably good enough to risk eating some if you don’t have any loose fillings.
I think the yellow candies from Germany that look like bananas are probably marzipan. They generally are too sweet, but maybe 1-2 pieces a year accompanying some strong tea?
I was once given a recipe for “Russian tea,” which involved lemonade mix, Tang mix, instant tea mix, cinnamon, cloves, and I think more sugar. I am hoping that this is not what House Andrews drinks. Orro would be disappointed in you if you did.
No, that is absolutely not what House Andrews or any Eastern European person drinks. It is entirely an American South invention. Here for the authentic stuff ???? https://ilona-andrews.com/2022/russian-tea/
I wanted — too late, the thread had closed — to ask about using candied cherries or sour cherries to sweeten Russian tea. I read it in several places within a week, and wanted to know if it was a legit tradition.
The “Russian Tea” recipe sounds like the recipe for “Friendship Tea” that was popular in the midwest when I was a kid in the 50’s. And of course I loved it for all the sugar.
That sounds like “Texas tea” that I drank when stationed at Carswell AFB in Ft. Worth in the 1970s (now gone).
This article very much reminds me of an incident from my childhood. My mother is from Germany. When I was in Kindergarten, some older kids found this out & called me “Nazi” & “Kraut.” I could tell that these were mean things, but I didn’t know what they meant.
She told me “Kraut” stood for “sauerkraut.”
I had never eaten, nor seen anyone eat sauerkraut in my life. My mom said that no one in her family ate it, unless there literally was nothing else. It also was a more regional dish. (My mom is from the Rhineland/Pfalz region of Germany- near the French boarder).
In all my visits to Germany to visit my relatives, I never once saw it served, nor saw any actual Germans order it in restaurants. It almost seemed to me to be a dish for tourists!
Sauerkraut is certainly not a tourist dish. But it’s more of a traditional winter dish and not something you would usually order in a restaurant (unless it is a country restaurant, that specialises in it) or serve to guests (unless they specifically requested it).
In the last years Sauerkraut has become more “fashionable”, being served in versions with cream and fish or scallops for example or even raw as a salad.
But traditionally it is a dish served with for examply liver and blood sausages (like black pudding, perhaps), smoked or cured and usually not exactly lean meat … so not a dish for the faint hearted.
But very traditional in many regions of Germany, Switzerland and the Alsace (where they call it chou croute)
At first I thought you meant you used that word in your book, and your readers were demanding you define it for them. As a 30-year educator, I was deeply offended that nobody taught these people how to use a dictionary.
Lol!
About Turkish delight. Many flavors can be found in middle eastern grocery stores. I like rose flavor. Try Applets and Cottlets. I have found at Walmart. Can be ordered. I love it.
https://www.libertyorchards.com
Ok I’m from New Mexico and when I read this I thought Pastillas, small date or meat filled pastry, I scavenged my memory and recipe box and found the origional recipe given to me from a friends abuela. In the directions it has large meat filled can be called empanadas and small fruit Pastilla’s. So I was very confused for a few moments of reading before I read and googled pastillas to learn different meanings in different languages. How some cultures take something and it morphs into something…. similar to it’s origional. Sometimes remotely similar.
Can Romans new GF try to make this for a family potluck and have hilarity ensue?
I was very confused. I thought that pastilla was the moroccan pigeon or chicken pie recipe with filo pastry, cinnamon, almonds and onions.
Me too!
The White and Pink things here in Italy are “meringhe” and they are goood!
We bought a cake-type thing this year at the Christmas markets from someone who said he was Russian and that said cake-thing was Russian. The box literature was certainly in Cyrillic, but…
It was cake made from apples and one other ingredient. But it was CAKE. If you got it flavored, it had another fruit in it — we got one plain, and one cherry.
And I don’t have the box or remember what it was called. Only that I couldn’t understand how they made cake that tasted like and was textured ALMOST like cake and it was made from only apples and one other thing (the other thing was something normal. Or that I would consider normal. Egg whites or water or sugar or something I would use in a recipe. I will ask the friends who were with me if they remember). That was, indeed, a miracle.
My heritage is Russian and this was a new one for me too. My relatives had never heard of it. I thought pastilla was a Moroccan pie with phyllo, eggs, cinnamon and pigeon or chicken meat.
About зефир, I make something like it whenever I make mayonnaise. I use the leftover egg whites. However, I make a traditional meringue cookie which is crispy and light and for increased delight I add chocolate chips.
Speaking of grandmothers, my grandmother was a great cook. She was French and her husband (grandfather) was German. Christmas goodies were fantastic! She taught me how to make mayonnaise.
Zefir sounds like something I loved as a child.We call it kisses.
It is made from beaten egg whites for a long time,then drop of vinegar and at the end sugar.If you mix the ingredients differently you~ve got meringue.But if you add the sugar at the end when the egg whites are almost hard is perfect.The secret is in the air.More air in the mix,more perfection.Then you make little dots(spoon sized) on a baking paper and bake at low temperature 50-100C(130 -200F).It is more of drying than baking.This desert is crunchy,very sweet and depending on the cook sometimes soft core.I loved it.Not good for teeth but…
No way! HAHA, what..? I made sugar-free pastilla last week after watching that exact video! There may of may not be footage of me baking it on TikTok to the tune of ‘Rasputin’ (both the Boney M. version and the remix) with pictures of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who supposedly loved pastilla. My husband distinctly remembered the mention of some sort of dessert in War and Peace that could very well have been pastilla. Naturally, this was all the confirmation I needed to run with it. Now I feel a little silly. (Me to me: ‘Really, *now* you feel silly?’)
Anyway, I liked the pastilla. I added cinnamon. But it’s basically candy and super sticky and A LOT of work, so I can’t really recommend it. Just make a pretty Pavlova instead and be done with it. 🙂
I made Pastilla with the apples from my sad apple tree… So.. ya.. family did not like it, I spent two days on it and it was slightly better than apple flavored cardboard. It was fun watching apple sauce and egg whites turn into this whip cream kind of thing.
Go Mi Nam – nice shout out to “You Are Beautiful” fans. In honor of Park Shin Hye’s wedding? Thanks for all of the awesome stories that fill our days with love, adventure, and excitement….to those who dream we love you guys!
Well, I don’t know about the Russian pastilla but let me tell you, a Moroccan pastilla is to die for. I am not brave enough to attempt to make it myself but I can’t resist it if I ever come across it! I can’t help but think of Rachel from Friends when I look at the recipe. And yet it works ????♀️
https://www.ahlanwasahlan.co.uk/traditional-moroccan-chicken-pastilla-bastilla-recipe-warka/
I’ve made pastilla with Granny Smith apples, and it was fecking delicious. I’d recommend doing it in a dehydrator rather than the oven, simply for the time & energy savings.