Central Russian

A Central Russian kitchen smells like browned butter, dill, and a long-simmered beef stock. There is always a covered pot of borscht on the stove that gets richer through the week, a glass jar of pickled cucumbers in the door of the fridge, and a bag of buckwheat in the pantry that becomes Tuesday breakfast. On a Sunday, the table grows: an Olivier salad in the center, herring under fur coat to its left, blini with sour cream to its right, and the obligatory medovik honey cake at the end with tea poured from a samovar that still works.

Within Russia's regional kitchens, Moscow and the Volga heartland produce what foreigners think of as 'Russian food' — the canonical layered salads, the dough-wrapped fillings of pirozhki, the beef stroganoff invented in a 19th-century Petersburg kitchen. The proportions hold: butter generous, sour cream finishing every plate, fermented sour notes (zakvas, pickled cucumber, sauerkraut) as the secret backbone of half the dishes. Sweetness is restrained except in dessert, where it then takes over completely with honey, condensed milk, and farmer's cheese.