Peasant diet
The peasan's usual fare is extremely simple and monotonous: rye bread, cabbage soup, and gruel make up the meal they eat every day, at lunch and supper alike, with this difference only, that often they do not have supper. Both on fast days and ordinary days the cabbage soup is made from sour cabbage and nothing else, except that, on ordinary days, they sometimes add salt, soured cream, or just milk. Few of them have any notion of seasoning their cabbage soup.
Their gruel is made from buchwheat, wheat, or millet, with mild and vegetable oil, or, during fasts, crushed hemp seeds. To have gruel indicates a certain degree of prosperity. As for meat, that is great rarity on the peasant's table.
Vegetables are not much eaten, because the peasants lack good kitchen gardens. The potato is not yet in general use. Peas, beetroot, and cucumbers are even scarcer. Cabbage alone I widely eaten, together with onions and radishes on fast days. Their fruit thew take to the market, and in northern areas they don not even know it exists. Mushrooms are consumed in great quantity, but berries are gathered only for sale.
On major festival days, and especially before Lent, the amount of food consumed is, one can say, twice as much as usual, but there are times during the year when, on the other hand, even a good farmer goes hungry. The hungriest period for the people is undoubtedly midsummer, before St. Peter's Day: the vegetables are not yet ripe and the cabbage in store is nearng its end, so that the usual fare during that fast is KVAS, with a green onion and cucumbers, if these are ripe. And, to crown it all, at this time the peasant is often without even bread, so he resorts either to borrowing or else, for essential subsistence, he threshes rye that is not yet ripe.
From: Materials for the geography and statistics of Russia collected by offers of the General Staff. Ryzan province 1860
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30th March 2001, 19:24
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