A few days before New Year's Eve, people are concerned about the question, what to cook for the New Year of the Pig 2019. This can be seen not only in crowds in stores that demolish everything on the shelves, but also on requests from search engines. Yandex reports that starting from 29 and 31 the number of requests for culinary topics has increased almost threefold.
Surprisingly, in the cold winter month, the vast majority are not interested in dense and satisfying 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, at the request of Yandex, was flooded with the vegetable kingdom, where lonely tartlets were miraculously crammed into.
10. Garnet bracelet
Opens a list of the most popular dishes for the New Year 2019, of course, 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 appreciate classical literature. It got its name primarily due to the top layer covered with bright and beautiful pomegranate seeds. But what is hidden inside and which particular layers will be contained in it, we leave at the discretion of the hostess herself, her tastes and material capabilities.
To the quartet, traditional for Russian winter salads:
- potatoes
- beets;
- carrots;
- and eggs
chicken breast, thin strips of bacon or pastrami can be added as a “satisfying” supplement.
Walnuts, or thyme, or dill with red onion, scalded with boiling water, give additional flavoring shades.
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 form of a ring, and how to coat them with dressing - mayonnaise or a mixture of mayonnaise and sour cream. Then put the salad in the refrigerator and wait a while, so that the layers are well set.
9. Salad with chicken and pineapple
Such a salad entered the festive menu from the beginning of the 90s, when canned corn and pineapple slices appeared on the shelves. The simplest version of the recipe includes a can of canned pineapples, a slightly larger amount of chicken, cheese, garlic and traditional canned corn (you can do without it). The originals could add a bit of walnut.
Since perestroika times, the composition of the salad has become more complicated. Chicken can be smoked, add to it, in addition to canned pineapples, olives, red bell pepper, cucumber and season with a mixture of olive oil and a white wine bite. Or make a satisfying option - add small boiled pasta, vegetables (pepper, tomato, cucumber) to chicken and pineapple, a little lemon zest and season with yogurt.
There is a Thai version of the salad, where in addition to chicken, shrimp appear in the frame of lettuce, and it is seasoned with lemon juice, vegetable oil and soy sauce.
8. Tartlets - with caviar, with salad, with mushrooms
The only non-salad place in the list of what can be prepared for the year of the Yellow Pig deserves special attention. Tartlets are good in that with a minimum of ingredients they create the maximum result, and they look festive. This name comes from the French word “little cake” - they seem to be an open cake in miniature: walls of dough and filling, which can be added before making the dough, or after.
And so that the hostess does not get tired very much on the eve of New Year's Eve, ready-made pastry molds can be bought in the store and quickly filled with what is at hand - capelin caviar (it is just yellow in color), a ready-made salad or mushroom mixture.
7. Salad with squid
The main secret of a delicious salad is the thermal treatment of carcasses. First of all, it is recommended to choose small squid, unpeeled. Why? For cleaning, the carcasses are brought already frozen, they are thawed and after the procedures are frozen again. This adversely affects the taste of the product. A little fuss with the removal of chitin plates and peels more than bathe in the best taste of the dish.
To prepare the squid, you should defrost, peel, and cook the water for boiling - boil it, add spices to it (usually a bay leaf and black pepper).
- As soon as the water boils, remove the pan from the fire, put the carcasses in it, cover it and forget for 10 minutes.
- As a matter of fact, this is the end of the cooking process - ten minutes is more than enough for a gentle and rapidly folding mollusk protein.
- Then the carcasses are taken out, cooled, cut and used in salads.
And there are a lot of options for salads with squid. They are best combined with products that will emphasize the natural taste of the mollusk - for example, rice, green salad, beetroot, sweet pepper. However, those who wish can add something brighter, such as a mixture of pomegranates and green apples (seasoning with unsweetened yogurt), or tomatoes plus green salad and generously season with a mixture of chopped garlic and olive oil. There is even a squid salad with potatoes and smoked sausages, seasoned with white wine!
6. Crab salad
Alas, only the name is left of the crabs in the salad. Such a salad is prepared on the basis of crab sticks - an imitation of crab meat invented by the Japanese. According to the theory, they should be made on the basis of crushed white fish fillet. However, most often, Chinese imitation imitation is delivered to the markets of the post-Soviet space - compressed soy protein ribbons with the addition of starch and dyes. The Japanese invention came to the 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. Boiled eggs, fresh cucumber and mayonnaise dressing are traditional for Russian “Soviet” salads.
However, in our time, no one bothers to replace crab sticks with real crab meat and slightly vary the composition of the salad. Now you can add to it:
- celery;
- avocado;
- sour apples;
- leaf salad;
- small cherry tomatoes;
- cheese (hard and mozzarella).
In addition to mayonnaise, they are also seasoned with olive oil, wine vinegar, or even just watered with orange juice.
5. Jellied meat
There are many cooking options for this ancient variety of dish - almost every national cuisine boasts its own option. Its basis is a dense and dense broth boiled from bones and cartilage, which easily hardens when cooled.
For jellied meat, unlike other dishes, parts of the body of a middle-aged animal are great — they have more gelling substances. Making it very simple:
- bones with pieces of meat are poured with cold water;
- add seasoning and boil;
- drain the broth;
- boiled meat is cut from the bones;
- sorted and crushed by hand (only with manual processing can you notice small fragments of bones that can ruin all the pleasure of eating).
The chopped meat is laid out in a mold, poured with pre-filtered 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 shade, broth. To do this, vegetables used for seasoning are scorched in a dry, oil-free pan. Or they simply do not peel the bulb from the onion (and, of course, having washed it beforehand) without any fancies - the dye in the peel will give the necessary shade.
4. Mimosa
The main secret of the salad's popularity is its versatility and ease of preparation. You could make it literally from everything, would be the main ingredients - potatoes, fish and grated boiled yolks, due to the color and texture of which "Mimosa" actually got its name.
The Soviet version of Mimosa was simple.
- Its basis was created by boiled potatoes, which were rubbed on a grater for "tenderness" and "airiness"; some added boiled carrots, also grated, to the potatoes.
- Then a layer of finely chopped and scalded with boiling water was laid out to get rid of the burning, onions, then a layer of cheese, apples, egg whites, canned fish.
- The number of layers was limited only by the number of products; their order was limited to the hostess’s imagination, but each layer was necessarily coated with mayonnaise.
- Crowned all crushed yolks.
- It is important that all products, again for the most “airiness", were rubbed on a grater - large or small to the best of the hostess's efforts. Some for the same notorious "tenderness" even rubbed cold oil and decorated the salad on top with its curls; fortunately, this oily redundancy has been abandoned in our time.
Nowadays, there are more options for making salad. Canned fish was replaced by smoked fish - mackerel, halibut, red noble fish or even cod liver (or a mixture of them). Instead of “just cheese,” cheddar, parmesan, or the classic Druzhba cream cheese were used.
Flavored shades were added by fried champignons, lettuce, capers, and for dressing, in addition to mayonnaise, unsweetened cream, soy sauce and lemon juice were used. Only one thing remains unchanged - the puff design and the delicate and delicate crumb of yolks on the top of the dish.
3. Caesar
The creator of the famous salad is not the same Roman emperor, but the American restaurateur of the same name of Italian origin. The salad was born in the hot summer of 1924, when all of America celebrated Independence Day and visited restaurants. As the cook’s daughter said, the salad was invented from despair - the establishment was so popular that visitors ate almost everything in the kitchen and had to improvise. The cook mixed everything that was left in haste, and the result was so successful that he won worldwide fame.
Initially, the salad was very light.
- It was based on romaine lettuce (a head of lettuce), croutons (diced and fried croutons of white bread) and Parmesan cheese seasoned with a mixture of lemon sauce, eggs and olive oil.
- Dijon mustard, black pepper and Worcester sauce, which was made industrially from fermented fish, sugar, vinegar and spices, were used as seasonings.
- According to another version, Worcester sauce was replaced with red wine vinegar, boiled eggs were added to the salad, and there was not only a lot of garlic in it, but a lot.
A little later, the brother of that same Caesar decided to modernize the invention of a relative and brought a touch of sea to the salad - he began to cook it with anchovies. In this form, the salad entered the menu of restaurants around the world, from where it penetrated into home cooking and became extremely popular.
2. Olivier
One of the most beloved New Year's dishes by Russians was invented by a cook of Belgian origin Lucien Olivier. This follower of French haute cuisine kept a restaurant on Trubnaya Street in common 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 requests on Yandex.
The very first documented printed recipe for salad was published in 1894 in the journal Our Food. According to the author of the recipe, a professional culinary specialist, he himself repeatedly tasted it at the Olivier restaurant in the 80s of the XIX century.
The following products are included in the recipe of the original and authentic "Olivier" itself:
- Fried hazel grouse cut into slices (it was sometimes replaced with other game varieties, for example, black grouse or partridge, or dispensed with ordinary chicken, however, as the cook said, the taste of the snack will not be so delicate).
- Boiled potatoes.
- Fresh cucumbers (in winter they could be replaced with pickles, however, the culinary specialist recommended using cucumber grass because of its strong and fresh smell).
- Capers.
- Olives.
- For beauty and original taste, the salad was decorated with crayfish necks, lettuce leaves and chopped gelled broth - lanspeak.
- The dish was served very cold in a crystal salad bowl.
As we can see, the main components of the salad were greatly simplified - the hazel grouse turned into a regular cooked sausage, green peas replaced the capers and olives, and the beautiful decor was lost somewhere in a whirlwind of a stormy twentieth century. But simple and common products were added - carrots, onions and apples.
However, the main secret of that salad is in the sauce. According to the culinary specialist, a provencal cold sauce mixed with Kabul soy was used to refuel an authentic salad. Soybean is not used in the sense of a "bean plant", but, as it used to be in the Dahl dictionary, in the sense of "seasoning." The original Kabul sauce was made by the English company Crosse and Blackwell, and now it is not 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 beloved by the inhabitants of the post-Soviet space. Massively, this dish began to be prepared in the USSR, starting in the 60s of the last century. This tradition was supported both verbally and replicated on TV in culinary programs and numerous “Lights”. The secret to the popularity of herring under a fur coat is in the abundance of ingredients and the simplicity of preparation; even a novice hostess can easily cope with it.
In the CIS countries, “herring under a fur coat” is cooked in approximately the same way - the differences are only in the way the salad components are prepared.
- 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 apples.
- The main thing is to lay the dish in layers (the base is potatoes) and properly coat with mayonnaise, purchased or homemade, as well as let the dish stand in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours.
