The permanent and main food of farmers is: rye bread, cabbage soup and buckwheat or millet porridge; their other food is more or less different, depending on the season. During the winter fast, they eat: sauerkraut with kvass, onions and pickles; grated radish with kvass or chopped into pieces - with salt; potatoes and boiled potatoes (boiled fresh beetroot) with cucumbers and kvass, and sometimes one potato with hemp oil or juice. Cabbage soup is prepared, from November to mid-April, from sauerkraut or sauerkraut, and during the rest of the year from various greens: young nettle, dream, quinoa, Chernobyl, colza, sorrel, young buckwheat and fresh cabbage, and rubbed with rye flour or millet millet. On fast days, cabbage soup is seasoned with hemp oil or juice, or they are cooked without any seasoning at all. Porridge is eaten with cabbage soup or with kvass,and more sufficient - with oil; some cook porridge with pumpkin, cut it into small pieces, boil in water, and then put millet there.
Sometimes they diversify their lean table with other dishes: they eat broth (dried pears and apples boiled in water); kulagu (straw dough), which is boiled with dried fruits: pears, thorns and viburnum; crackers with salted water; oatmeal from oatmeal, rubbed in water; tyuryu (crumbled bread with pickled kvass or water); boiled peas or boiled n crushed, with kvass or butter; potato soup (soup). For breakfast they boil: buckwheat dumplings; kulesh (liquid gruel) with butter; straw made from buckwheat and rye flour, which is eaten with hemp oil or juice, and sometimes with crushed hemp seeds; dumplings made from buckwheat flour stuffed with porridge, cabbage or yurda, made from oil cake remaining in the oil mill from hemp oil. When strawberries ripen (in the local way - grove), strawberries and cherries,then boil dumplings stuffed with these berries. Some people bake buckwheat pancakes for breakfast and eat them with hemp juice or butter.
But the most hungry fast for the people is Petrovka: by this time, as a rule, the reserves prepared for the future are exhausted, and many poor people, except empty cabbage soup and bread, eat nothing; green onions and botvinia from it then constitute a delicacy for them.
The Assumption Fast represents more variety in food: at that time, in addition to their usual cabbage soup and porridge, they eat fresh and lightly salted cucumbers with kvass, young potatoes, cobs or kiyushki (corn), sometimes melons and watermelons with bread. In some villages, different mushrooms are collected: morels, milk mushrooms, half-herb mushrooms, red mushrooms, whites, russula, pigs, talkers, honey mushrooms and some others, which they sell in the city and themselves eat salted and cooked in cabbage soup, in stew, or, scalded in water. eaten cold. Many mushrooms are dried in fruitful years for winter use. In some places where there are rivers, lean food is sometimes diversified also with fish and crayfish; however, very few afford this luxury on weekdays; the peasant would rather sell the caught fish or crayfish in the city than eat them. Some of the peasants do not eat crayfish, out of disgust for them, because crayfish sometimes feed on carrion thrown into the rivers; others consider it a sin to eat them.
On short days, on weekdays, peasants eat cabbage soup with lard or with one seasoning of eggs and milk, cottage cheese with milk, porridge with cabbage soup, lard and milk, and in the absence of porridge - crumbled bread with milk. In autumn and winter they eat potato stew with bacon, millet milk porridge with pumpkin; they buy beef and lamb giblets in the city during livestock strikes and prepare jellied meat from the offal, and soup with potatoes from the liver and lungs, or boil them in the same water and eat them with bread. For breakfast they cook: kulesh with bacon, salad, which is eaten with bacon or milk, and sometimes with butter and sour cream; dumplings with cottage cheese with popliushka (with baked and fermented milk) or with cottage cheese diluted in milk; baked from rye dough, in a frying pan crumpets (thin cakes) with bacon. But the peasants' most delicious breakfast is pancakes with butter and sour cream. There are, however,there are also many poor people who most of the year eat only cabbage soup and dry bread.
On short holidays, rye pies are baked with liver or meat, as well as with porridge and eggs or carrots and eggs; but more often they bake flat cakes, which, as a rule, are smeared on top with cottage cheese with eggs or one bacon. In summer and autumn, some cut sheep, chickens and piglets. Pigs, bulls, rams and various birds are slaughtered for annual holidays, especially for Christmas, Easter, for the temple holiday, as well as for funerals and weddings; then cabbage soup, soup and noodles are boiled with meat, and roast and jelly are prepared from it.
Of the vegetables, the usual supply for the winter is: sauerkraut, sauerkraut, potatoes, cucumbers, radish, horseradish, carrots, onions and pumpkin. In the villages located near the forests, pears are wetted, viburnum and blackthorn are stored.