A few days before New Year's Eve, people are worried about the question, what to cook for the New Year of the Pig 2019... This can be seen not only in the crowds in stores that demolish everything on the shelves, but also by queries in search engines. Yandex reports that starting from 29 to 31 the number of requests for culinary topics almost triples.
Surprisingly, in the cold winter month, the overwhelming majority is not interested in dense and hearty hot dishes, but in what is usually associated with summer - salads. The top 10 most popular dishes of the New Year's menu in 2019, according to requests on Yandex, filled the vegetable kingdom, where lonely tartlets miraculously got in.
10. Garnet bracelet
Opens the list of the most popular dishes for the New Year 2019, certainly one of the brightest and most spectacular salads. Plus, thanks to the name, it is immediately clear that it is served on the table of intelligent people who value classical literature. It got its name primarily due to the top layer covered with bright and beautiful pomegranate grains. But what is hidden inside and which layers will be contained in it, we will leave it to the discretion of the hostess herself, her tastes and material capabilities.
To the quaternary traditional for Russian winter salads:
- potatoes;
- beets;
- carrots;
- and eggs
Chicken breast, thin strips of bacon, or pastroma can be added as a "hearty" addition.
Walnuts, or thyme, or dill with red onions pre-scalded with boiling water give additional flavors.
The main thing is to lay out the layers on a dish, in the center of which there is a glass, so that the salad takes the shape of a ring, and how to coat them with a dressing - mayonnaise or a mixture of mayonnaise and sour cream. Then put the salad in the refrigerator and wait a while for the layers to set well.
9. Chicken and pineapple salad
Such a salad entered the holiday menu in the early 90s, when canned corn and pineapple slices appeared on the shelves. The simplest version of the recipe includes a can of canned pineapple, a slightly larger amount of chicken fillet, cheese, garlic, and traditional canned corn (you can do without it). The originals could add a little walnut.
Since perestroika times, the composition of the salad has become more complicated. The chicken can be smoked, added to it, in addition to canned pineapples, also olives, red bell peppers, cucumber and seasoned with a mixture of olive oil and white wine bite. Or make a hearty option - add small boiled pasta, vegetables (pepper, tomato, cucumber), a little lemon zest to the chicken and pineapple and season with yogurt.
There is a Thai version of the salad, where, in addition to chicken, shrimps appear in a frame of lettuce as a source of protein, and all this is dressed with lemon juice, vegetable oil and soy sauce.
8. Tartlets - with caviar, with salad, with mushrooms
The only non-salad place on the list of things to cook for the Yellow Pig year deserves special attention. Tartlets are good because with a minimum of ingredients they create the maximum result, and they also look festive. This name comes from the French word "small cake" - they seem to represent an open cake in miniature: dough walls and filling, which can be added before the dough is prepared, or after.
And so that the hostess does not get very tired on the eve of New Year's Eve, ready-made dough molds can be bought in the store and quickly filled with what is at hand - capelin caviar (it is just yellow in color), ready-made salad or mushroom mixture.
7. Squid salad
The main secret of a delicious salad is the heat treatment of carcasses. First of all, it is recommended to choose small squid, unpeeled. Why? For cleaning, carcasses are brought already frozen, they are thawed and after the procedures are frozen again. This negatively affects the taste of the product. A little fuss with the removal of chitinous plates and skins is more than redeemed by the best taste of the dish.
To cook squid, defrost, peel, and prepare water for cooking - boil, add spices to it (usually bay leaves and black pepper).
- As soon as the water boils, the pan is removed from the heat, the carcasses are put into it, covered with a lid and forgotten for 10 minutes.
- As a matter of fact, this is where the cooking process ends - ten minutes is more than enough for the tender and quickly curdling shellfish protein.
- Then the carcasses are removed, cooled, cut and used in salads.
And there are a great many options for salads with squid. They are best combined with foods that will enhance the natural flavor of the shellfish, such as rice, green salad, beets, bell peppers. However, if you wish, you can add something brighter, such as a mixture of pomegranates and green apples (seasoned with unsweetened yogurt), or tomatoes plus green salad and generously season with a mixture of minced garlic and olive oil. There is even a squid salad with potatoes and smoked sausages topped with white wine!
6. Crab salad
Alas, only the name remains of the crabs in the salad. This salad is prepared on the basis of crab sticks, an imitation of crab meat invented by the Japanese. In theory, they should be made on the basis of chopped white fish fillets. However, most often, Chinese imitation of imitation is supplied to the markets of the post-Soviet space - pressed ribbons of soy protein with the addition of starch and dyes. The Japanese invention came to Western barbarians at the very end of the USSR and came in handy in the hungry nineties as a source of inexpensive protein. As a result, crab salad was born, the basis of which is a mixture of these two products. To them are added boiled eggs, fresh cucumber and mayonnaise dressing, traditional for Russian "Soviet" salads.
However, in our time, no one bothers to replace crab sticks with real crab meat and slightly diversify the composition of the salad. Now you can add to it:
- celery;
- avocado;
- sour apples;
- leaf salad;
- small cherry tomatoes;
- cheese (hard and mozzarella).
And they dress, in addition to mayonnaise, with olive oil, wine vinegar, or even just pour over with orange juice.
5. Aspic
There are many options for cooking this ancient type of dish - almost every national cuisine can boast of its own version. It is based on a dense and thick broth boiled from bones and cartilage, which hardens easily when cooled.
For jellied meat, unlike other dishes, parts of the body of an elderly animal are excellent - they have more gelling substances. It's very simple to do it:
- bones with pieces of meat are poured with cold water;
- add seasonings and boil;
- pour the broth;
- boiled meat is cut from the bones;
- sorted and chopped by hand (only with manual processing can you notice small fragments of bones that can spoil all the pleasure of eating).
Shredded meat is laid out in a mold, poured with pre-strained broth, allowed to stand for half an hour and put in the refrigerator.
The main secret of an aesthetic and tasty dish is a beautiful, amber-colored broth. To do this, the vegetables used for seasoning are scorched in a dry, oil-free frying pan. Or simply and without tricks do not remove the husk from the bulb (of course, after washing it) - the dye in the peel will give the necessary shade.
4. Mimosa
The main secret of the popularity of the salad is its versatility and ease of preparation. It could be made from literally everything, if there were the main ingredients - potatoes, fish and grated boiled yolks, thanks to the color and texture of which "Mimosa" actually got its name.
The Soviet version of Mimosa was simple.
- It was based on boiled potatoes, which were grated for "tenderness" and "airiness"; some added boiled carrots to potatoes, also grated.
- Then they laid out a layer of finely chopped and scalded with boiling water to get rid of the pungency, onions, then there was a layer of cheese, apples, egg whites, and canned fish.
- The number of layers was limited only by the number of products, their order - by the hostess's imagination, but at the same time each layer was necessarily coated with mayonnaise.
- Topped off with all the crumbled yolks.
- It is important that all products, again for greater "airiness", were rubbed on a grater - large or small to the best of the hostess's efforts. Some even rubbed cold butter for the same notorious "tenderness" and decorated the salad with curls; Fortunately, this fat redundancy has been abandoned in our time.
In our time, there are more options for preparing salad. Canned fish was replaced by smoked fish - mackerel, halibut, noble red fish or even cod liver (or a mixture of these). Instead of “just cheese”, they began to use cheddar, parmesan, or the classic processed cheese “Druzhba”.
Fried champignons, lettuce, capers added flavors, and unsweetened cream, soy sauce and lemon juice were used for dressing, in addition to mayonnaise. Only one thing remains unchanged - the flaky structure and tender and delicate crumbs of yolks on the top of the dish.
3. Caesar
The creator of the famous salad is not the same Roman emperor, but the eponymous American restaurateur of Italian origin. The salad was born in the hot summer of 1924, when all of America was celebrating Independence Day and visiting restaurants. As the cook's daughter said, the salad was invented out of despair - the institution was so popular that the visitors ate almost everything in the kitchen and had to improvise. The chef hastily mixed everything that remained, and the result was so successful that he won worldwide fame.
The salad was initially very light.
- It was based on romaine lettuce (a variety of lettuce), croutons (diced and fried white bread croutons) and Parmesan cheese, dressed with a mixture of lemon sauce, egg and olive oil.
- The condiments used were Dijon mustard, black pepper and Worcestershire sauce, which was made industrially from fermented fish, sugar, vinegar and spices.
- According to another version, the Worcester sauce was replaced with red wine vinegar, boiled eggs were added to the salad, and there was not just a lot of garlic in it, but a lot.
A little later, the brother of the very same Caesar decided to modernize the invention of a relative and brought a marine flavor to the salad - he began to cook it with anchovies. As such, the salad entered the menus of restaurants around the world, from where it entered home cooking and became extremely popular.
2. Olivier
One of the most beloved New Year's dishes by Russians was invented by a Belgian-born chef, Lucien Olivier.This adherent of French haute cuisine kept a restaurant on Trubnaya Street in a share with a Moscow merchant. It was there that the famous salad was born and very quickly became popular. Even now, he tops the list of what to cook for the New Year 2019, according to the statistics of queries on Yandex.
The very first salad recipe documented in print was published in 1894 in the magazine Our Food. According to the author of the recipe, a professional culinary specialist, he himself repeatedly tasted it at the Olivier restaurant in the 1880s.
The recipe for the most original and authentic Olivier includes the following products:
- Fried hazel grouse cut into slices (it was sometimes replaced with other varieties of game, for example, black grouse or partridge, or they got by with ordinary chicken, however, as the cook said, the taste of the appetizer will no longer be so thin).
- Boiled potatoes.
- Fresh cucumbers (in winter they could be replaced with pickled ones, but the cook recommended using cucumber herb because of its strong and fresh smell).
- Capers.
- Olives.
- For beauty and an original taste, the salad was decorated on top with crayfish tails, lettuce leaves and chopped jelly broth - lanspeck.
- The dish was served very cold in a crystal salad bowl.
As we can see, the main components of the salad have been greatly simplified - the hazel grouse has turned into an ordinary boiled sausage, green peas have replaced capers and olives, and the beautiful decor has been lost somewhere in the whirlwind of the turbulent twentieth century. But simple and common products were added - carrots, onions and apples.
However, the most important secret of that very salad is the sauce. According to the culinary specialist, cold Provencal sauce mixed with Kabul soy was used to dress the authentic salad. Soy is used here not in the sense of "leguminous plant", but, as once in Dahl's dictionary, in the sense of "seasoning." The original Kabul sauce was made by the English company Crosse and Blackwell, and it is no longer possible to find out its exact content.
1. Herring under a fur coat
And the most important place among the 10 most popular New Year's dishes for 2019 is occupied by a herring under a fur coat, dearly loved by residents of the post-Soviet space. This dish began to be massively cooked in the USSR, starting in the 60s of the last century. This tradition was maintained both orally and was replicated on TV in culinary programs and numerous "Ogonyok". The secret of the popularity of herring under a fur coat lies in the prevalence of ingredients and ease of preparation; even a novice hostess can easily cope with it.
In the CIS countries, “herring under a fur coat” is prepared in about the same way - the only differences are in the method of preparing the components of the salad.
- Traditionally, potatoes, carrots and beets are boiled, but they can be baked in a sleeve or foil, or steamed.
- Cucumbers and onions can be either pickled or fresh.
- Originals can add boiled beef or tongue, as well as unsweetened apple.
- The main thing is to lay out the dish in layers (potatoes are the basis) and properly coat with mayonnaise, purchased or homemade, and also let the dish settle in the refrigerator for at least a day.
Hot dishes for the New Year 2019