Tsar's Blini

History

Molokhovets records these "Tsar's blini" (царские блины) not as folk fare but as a gentry showpiece dessert — the great codifier of nineteenth-century Russian bourgeois cooking systematizing an aristocratic-table dish rather than inventing it. Despite the folk name блины, the preparation belongs to the enriched, unleavened blinchik (crepe) family rather than the yeast-raised buckwheat blin of Maslenitsa: a batter of clarified butter, egg yolks, sugar and a cream béchamel, perfumed with orange-flower water and lightened with whipped cream, baked thin and stacked with sugar and lemon juice between the layers, then crowned with jam or jelly. In Russian usage a blin is the ancient yeast-leavened pancake bound to Butter Week and its sun-symbol folklore, while blinchiki are the thinner, unyeasted French-style crepes taken into Russian kitchens. The regal name follows a wider convention: Russian cooks were often serfs without social standing, so prestige dishes carried the names of grand households or the tsar's own kitchen rather than their creators — Guryev kasha, Beef Stroganov, Pozharsky cutlets. Calling a rich, French-inflected crepe stack "царские" advertised the luxury of the aristocratic table, where French technique and costly butter and cream marked a dish fit for grand company.

Ingredients

• funt butter
• egg yolks
• cup sugar
• funt flour (for bechamel)
• glasses cream (thin)
• spoon orange-flower water
• glass thick whipped cream
• lemon juice
• jam or jelly

Instructions

1. Melt 1/2 funt butter, strain, cool slightly, add 6 yolks; stir one direction, add 1 cup sugar, stir on ice until foaming.
2. Make bechamel: thin 1/4 funt flour with 1 1/2 glasses cream, boil to batter thickness; stir on ice until cold.
3. Combine bechamel into the butter-yolk mix, add 1/2 spoon orange-flower water, fold in 1/2 glass whipped cream.
4. Bake on medium pans over low heat; tip out (not with a knife), sprinkling each row with sugar and lemon juice.
5. Even out the stack and garnish with jam or jelly.