Kulebiaka with Fish

History

The kulebiaka is the grand, oblong showpiece of Russian pie-making — a tall closed pirog built from several distinct fillings stacked in layers, among the most labor-intensive and elaborate pies a cook could attempt and a byword for a lavish table. Molokhovets records rather than invents this festive dish: her version stacks a pike-perch-and-Smolensk-groat filling with sliced sturgeon and salmon inside a rich yeast dough, and she closes the recipe by calling the result 'a true Russian kulebiaka.' The name attaches to this grand multi-filling pie by the 17th century, and the form reached its peak in the 19th-century flowering of Russian pie-making. Its most storied luxury ingredient was vesiga, the dried spinal marrow of the sturgeon, reserved for the grandest versions. Cooks kept the fillings from merging by separating them with thin pancakes. In the 19th century the dish passed into French haute cuisine as coulibiac: Auguste Escoffier is said to have learned it to serve homesick Russian naval officers at his uncle's restaurant in Nice, and he set it down in his Guide Culinaire, where its refinement with finer dough, game, and salmon made it a classic still taught in French cooking schools.

Ingredients

• funt wheat flour
• funt fresh Finnish butter
• egg yolks
• stakan milk
• spoon thick yeast
• tsp salt
• funt pike-perch (sudak)
• funt sturgeon (osetrina)
• funt Atlantic salmon (semga)
• stakan Smolensk groats
• funt butter (for kasha)
• eggs (for kasha)
• onion
• dill

Instructions

1. Make a rich yeast dough: sponge of milk and yeast, then work in butter, yolks, salt and flour; let rise twice.
2. Prepare fish forcemeat: fry boned pike-perch with onion and dill and chop; make Smolensk-groat kasha (rubbed with egg, dried, browned) and mix into the forcemeat.
3. Layer half the kasha-forcemeat, then sliced sturgeon and salmon, then the rest of the kasha-forcemeat.
4. Pinch the long or round kulebiaka closed, let rise 1/2 hour, glaze with egg, and bake. 'A true Russian kulebiaka.'