Pirog with Vizigá, Rice, Egg and Fish

History

Molokhovets sets this fish pie within the large closed-pie section of her 1901 household manual; as the great codifier of nineteenth-century Russian gentry cooking, she standardizes an established festive form rather than inventing it. The pirog is the broad Russian family of closed pies, of which the tall, multi-layered fish version — the kulebiaka — is the grand relative. Its defining luxury filling is вязига (vyaziga), the dried spinal cord, or notochord, of the sturgeon. Dried whole, it formed an opaque, gelatinous white ribbon prized in upper-class Russian kitchens and costly to buy; Molokhovets' recipe boils it, then chops it fine with hard eggs, rice, and thin slices of fish (pike, pike-perch, whitefish, salmon, sturgeon). Sturgeon spine was already a nobleman's dish by the seventeenth century — a 1656 boyar menu lists fried sturgeon spine — and Gogol's Dead Souls immortalizes a kulebiaka layered with sturgeon cheeks and vyaziga. The delicacy leaned on Russia's sturgeon fisheries, later thinned by caviar overfishing, and Escoffier carried the pie to France as coulibiac.

Ingredients

• batch dough (yeast)
• funt vizigá (dried sturgeon spinal cord)
• funt fish (pike, pike-perch, whitefish, salmon, sturgeon, or Atlantic salmon)
• stakan rice
• hard-boiled eggs
• funt butter
• onion
• parsley root
• dill and green parsley
• peppercorns black pepper
• spoon fat broth

Instructions

1. Boil and finely chop the vizigá; mix with salt, pepper, chopped eggs, boiled rice, dill, parsley and a spoon of fat broth.
2. Spread 3/4 of the filling on rolled dough, lay on thin boned salted fish slices, dust with ground allspice.
3. Cover with remaining filling then dough; let rise, glaze with egg, and bake 1 hour.