Old-Fashioned Kurnik with Chicken and Rice

History

Kurnik is the tall, dome-shaped festive pirog of Russian cooking: a multi-layered pie of chicken, eggs, and grain (kasha or rice) that stands apart from every other savory pie by its rounded, domed silhouette. Its prestige earned it the title 'tsar pirog' or king of pies — its shape is likened to the Crown of Monomakh, and it rose above the other dishes as the centerpiece of the festive table, in special cases served to the tsar himself. It is traced to southern Russia and its Cossack communities, and appears in old records: a 1699 account of a foreign envoy's table lists several round kurniks, and the historian Nikolai Kostomarov described it as a chicken-and-egg pastry. Above all it was a wedding pie. By tradition two were baked — one in the bride's house for the groom's family and one in the groom's for the bride's — the groom's crowned with human dough figures for a strong, growing family and the bride's with flowers for beauty and fertility. Eggs baked in their shells read as children in the womb, and grain wished prosperity on the couple. Molokhovets records this heritage dish rather than inventing it: she names hers a 'starinny' (old-fashioned) kurnik and shapes it into the customary cone, finished with a cockade of dough on top.

Ingredients

• chicken
• stakan rice (royal)
• funt fresh white mushrooms
• hard-boiled eggs
• stakan chicken broth (for sauce)
• stakan thick cream
• champignon essence or nutmeg
• lemon juice and green parsley
• batch dough

Instructions

1. Boil the chicken; reserve broth, slice the breast, take remaining meat off the bones.
2. Make a reduced cream sauce with chicken broth, cream, champignon essence/nutmeg, parsley, lemon and the chicken meat.
3. Cook rice in chicken broth until just soft; chop eggs; fry mushrooms in butter and smetana.
4. On rolled dough, heap alternating layers of rice, eggs, chicken and mushrooms; draw up the edges into a cone with a lid and central vent.
5. Brush with egg and bake in a hot oven ~3/4 hour until the filling boils and it lifts freely.