Northwestern Russia Food & Traditional Cuisine

Northwestern Russian cooking is built on what the forest, lakes and short growing season provide, with an imperial French overlay in the city.

Fish is central: salmon and whitefish from Karelia and the White Sea, smelt from the Neva, herring, and freshwater species from the great lakes. Smoking, salting and pickling are the standard treatments.

The forest gives — wild mushrooms, cloudberries, lingonberries, bilberries — is gathered seriously and in quantity, then preserved. Mushroom picking is close to a national pastime.

Soup carries the everyday cooking: cabbage soup, beetroot borshch, fish soup and cold summer soups.

Rye bread, sour and dark, is the staple and is genuinely good.

Saint Petersburg also inherited a French-influenced restaurant tradition from the imperial court, and has a strong contemporary dining scene.

Karelian pies — kalitki — are the regional emblem: thin rye-flour cases with crimped edges, filled with potato, barley porridge or rice and brushed with melted butter. They are eaten warm at any hour and sold everywhere in Karelia.

Ukha, a clear fish soup made from freshwater fish with potato, onion and dill, and at its best made outdoors over a fire beside the lake the fish came from.

Korushka, the small smelt that run up the Neva in spring, fried whole; Petersburgers say they smell of fresh cucumber, and the city celebrates their arrival.

Pelmeni and pirozhki, dumplings and filled buns, eaten constantly.

Cured salmon and smoked whitefish from Karelia and the White Sea.

Also: solyanka, a sharp soup of salted meats and pickles; syrniki, curd-cheese pancakes with sour cream; and cloudberry preserve.

Kuznechny market in Saint Petersburg is the city’s best, with honey sellers, pickles, cured fish, cheese and Caucasian traders offering slices of everything to taste before you buy.

Mushroom and berry picking is a genuine part of the calendar. Families head into the forest with baskets from August, and the roadsides fill with people selling what they gathered that morning.

Stolovaya, the canteen, survives as an inexpensive self-service format serving soup, a main and a compote for very little — the cheapest good meal in any Russian city.

Tea is drunk constantly, black and strong, often with jam.

Toasting: at any shared table someone will make a toast before the first drink, and simply drinking without one is considered graceless.

No grapes grow this far north, and the region’s drinking traditions are built on grain, honey and berries.

Vodka is the default spirit and is drunk cold, neat, in small glasses, with food rather than before it — a bite of something salty or pickled between measures is the convention. Saint Petersburg has a vodka museum and several long-established distilleries.

Nastoyka and nalivka are the more interesting local category: spirits infused with berries, herbs, horseradish or honey, made commercially and also at home. Cloudberry, cranberry and lingonberry versions are regional and very good.

Medovukha, a honey drink related to mead, is made in Veliky Novgorod and Suzdal and sold at the monasteries.

Kvass, lightly fermented from rye bread and barely alcoholic, is a summer street drink and an ingredient in cold soups.

Saint Petersburg also has a large craft beer scene, which is genuinely good and very much a local phenomenon.