Xmas table favours

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we set the Christmas table on Christmas Eve and Holy evening correctly

Each of the 12 dishes on Christmas Eve - this is the name of the Christmas dinner is more familiar to our parents - has its own meaning. And although almost all modern families have their own way of preparing a festive feast, many continue to follow the traditions that have been passed down to them from generation to generation. Perhaps listing 12 Christmas dishes that our ancestors prepared can inspire you to decide what dishes to cook on Holy evening.

Before serving 12 Christmas dishes, the hostess put garlic cloves under the tablecloth. He had to drive away evil spirits. All family members should be at home on Christmas Eve. It was obligatory for everyone to try all 12 dishes on the table (although in some territories there were 7, 9 or 17).

The wife served dishes on the table, and everyone else during dinner was not allowed to talk, get up and drink water or Christmas utensils, so that during the harvest time one would not want to drink. If anyone sneezed, it was fortunate. Everyone ate from the same bowl and drank from the same cup - it was believed that as long as they did this, there would be love and unity in the house. In some villages, after dinner, spoons were tied together so that the whole family would stick together for the next year.

No money could be borrowed to cook Christmas dinner. The hostess proceeded from the stocks that were at home. The family thanked the past year and asked all the forces of nature for help and productivity next year. Holy evening was not a demonstration of a fat wallet, on this day the main wealth of the family was manifested in the coherence of work in preparation for Christmas and respect for each other.

Kutia

Kutia is the main of the 12 Christmas dishes of the Holy Evening. The age of the kutya recipe can be measured in centuries. Our ancestors believed that starting a meal with kutia, people thus took care of the souls of the dead. It was believed that at the moment when a person eats wheat grains with honey water, souls in the other world also experience sweetness and joy.

Whole grains of wheat in kutya at Christmas symbolized life that passes and is reborn again. Poppy (one of its meanings was sleep and death) personified the souls of the dead, and honey was a symbol of sweetness and joy from the good news of the birth of Christ. Therefore, kutya heads the Christmas dishes on the table every year. Get the best 5 traditional kutya recipes for Christmas.

Bread

The hostess paid special attention to bread, rolls and pies - they are also included in the 12 Christmas dishes. A separate day was dedicated to baking Christmas bread. Bread was a symbol of harvest and life. There was a tradition to bake symbols in bread that would bring good luck, wealth and protect against bad luck: garlic, peas, small coins, etc. Now you can make this dish for Holy evening using a modern bread machine. See the recipe for lean bread for Christmas below on this page.

Vinaigrette

Among the 12 Christmas dishes should be cold salads that can be an alternative to a side dish. Therefore, many people prefer to prepare vinaigrette from boiled beets, potatoes, beans, carrots, as well as sauerkraut or pickles. And, of course, add green onions or onions there. Most recently, HOCHU.ua published a recipe for a classic vinaigrette salad - perhaps the most versatile dish, especially for a Lenten table.

Uzvar

If you want to take into account all the dishes that are prepared for Christmas, we recommend that you do not skip the uzvar - no carbonated or other ready-made drinks can replace it. And there is simply no drink that would suit a festive kutya better than uzvar. In order to prepare uzvar, housewives always used dried apples and pears, and wild fruits were especially valued. Our ancestors believed that these fruits contain solar energy.

To ripen an apple or pear and then dry it in the sun, they needed warm sunshine. Perhaps in December and January, when the days are the shortest of the year, this drink served as an invocation to the Sun. With the help of it, our ancestors asked the luminary for additional strength and sunlight in their lives. Therefore, you should definitely know what are the simple recipes for delicious uzvar for Christmas 2020.

Borscht with ears

Borscht is also among the Christmas dishes that you can cook at home. Previously, the taste of borscht was sour, as its main component was kvass. And although the recipe for borsch has changed over the course of several centuries - beans were added to cabbage, carrots and parsley, and in the 19th century, tomatoes. Traditional Christmas borscht consists of beetroot kvass, red beets, water and mushroom broth for taste. By the way, borsch can be among the Lenten Christmas dishes, because it is often cooked without meat. And we have a popular material, which contains the 5 best recipes for Ukrainian borscht - for every taste and "fast".

Pickles

When wondering what dishes are prepared for Christmas, do not forget to put pickles on the festive table. We can say that these are light Christmas Lenten dishes that complement any meal. If you've been preserving and stocking up since the summer, pickles for Christmas shouldn't be a problem.

Cabbage rolls

Cabbage rolls are one of the most favorite 12 Christmas dishes for many Ukrainians. Wheat, buckwheat or rice porridge, as well as grated potatoes with all kinds of additives, were wrapped in cabbage leaves. Cabbage leaves symbolize the continuation of the family (no wonder children were "found" in cabbage). Cabbage rolls were also considered a wedding dish, as their appearance remotely resembled pigeons. See on this page a wonderful recipe for Transcarpathian cabbage rolls from HOTCHU.ua

Fish

Many people associate Christmas dishes not with red meat, but with fish. It is rarely bought for the New Year, but on Christmas Eve it is often offered for family and guests. Fish for Christmas is prepared in different ways - fried, baked with vegetables, and in some houses it is customary to make jellied fish in advance.

Dumplings

Dumplings or boiled pies can be found in Italian, Chinese, Lithuanian and Slavic cuisine. Who came up with the idea of making them first? It is unlikely that we will ever know about it. In Ukrainian cuisine, varenyky were considered a festive dish and were prepared for big holidays, such as Christmas, and on Sundays.

Puffy dumplings filled with stuffing also symbolized procreation. And the dishes for the Holy evening were also always replenished with dumplings with a variety of fillings. The most difficult thing in making dumplings is the dough, but in this article, see the simplest dough recipes that you won’t have to mess around with for a long time.

Cabbage with peas

Cabbage with peas is not often seen among the 12 dishes on Holy Evening among modern Ukrainians, although 2-3 generations ago more than one holiday of the autumn-winter period could not do without it. Cabbage with peas for Christmas is a cross between yushka and lean porridge, which is very healthy.

Cabbage

Interestingly, among the 12 dishes on Holy Evening there is cabbage. Cabbage has always been prepared differently in each family, so the composition of its ingredients may vary slightly. Cabbage is made as a lean homemade dish or boiled in mushroom broth. Options for broths made from fatty pork or fish are also possible.

Baked apples

Christmas Lenten dishes are always delicious baked apples. To prepare this fruit as a dessert, apples are baked with honey and raisins. Now modern cuisine offers new options for preparing baked apples for Holy evening, complementing them with special fragrant spices - cinnamon and cloves.

In our gallery, we publish several recipes for Christmas Eve that will help you prepare the most important treats from 12 Christmas dishes. Merry Christmas 2021 from all our editors.

recipes. Dishes according to old recipes that you can cook yourself.

Publications of the Traditions section

Dishes according to old recipes that you can cook yourself.

You can’t reach the first star

40 days before Christmas, the Advent (or Philippov) fast begins. It is quite strict, and its ending, when even the fish is not blessed, coincides in time with the celebration of the New Year. So the Orthodox are not allowed to drink wine on the night of 31 to 1. And the sixth of January is not supposed to be and there is nothing but juicy. It is believed that it was this dish that gave the name to Christmas Eve - the last day before Christmas. It was eaten in the evening, when the first star appeared in the sky - a dish of cereals, nuts and dried fruits was supposed to give strength to endure a long Christmas service.

Sochivo. Photo: Vladimir Litvinov / photo bank "Lori"

SOCHIVO, Maxim Syrnikov's recipe
Take a glass of wheat grains. Rinse well, put in a cast-iron pot, pour three glasses of water, salt. Close the lid and place in a preheated oven for two to three hours. At the end of cooking, the wheat should be completely boiled, the grains should become soft and even partially burst. Cool them right in the pot, avoiding drying out. Sochivo should be just juicy, soft, but at the same time crumbly.
Mix grains with prepared raisins, finely chopped dried apricots, prunes, steamed and crushed poppy seeds, any nuts to taste. And then put it on a dish and pour over honey satiation - honey diluted with water in a ratio of one to one and brought to a boil.

There are quite a lot of similar recipes for sochi, perhaps the only correct one does not exist. The choice of cereals, cereals and their additives depended on the region, family income and personal preferences of the hostess. Somewhere they put kolivo on the table, somewhere - kutya, in fact, this is the same thing, only the names are different. It is important to remember that in the Russian ritual cuisine, kutya can be both modest and lenten, and on Christmas Eve it is lenten that is served. The Orthodox will be able to break the fast (that is, eat non-lenten food) only the next day, on Christmas Day.

He doesn’t turn his head, he crunches on his teeth

On Christmas Eve, they began to prepare for the Christmas feast - according to custom, at least 12 different dishes had to be prepared, according to the number of the holy apostles. Of course, it was difficult to maintain such a tradition - for such a rich menu, one had to have a certain income. In order to lure him just for Christmas, whole herds of roes were baked - gingerbread in the form of animals. They were both a delicacy and a talisman for the home.

On Christmas Eve the whole family sits down at the table and makes cows from yeast-free dough mixed with milk. Milk, wheat flour, salt are all ingredients. Then they will be taken out into the yard in the frost for the whole night, and on Christmas morning they will be sent to the oven. In memory of the holiday, several skillfully made figurines will be kept for the whole year.

In northern villages, roe deer were either cut out of rolled out dough in a special shape (which was cherished and passed down by inheritance) or molded like a clay toy. They were first baked from rye flour, later from wheat flour, then burnt sugar was added to it, and in the 18th century, various spices became available to northerners, and roes became even tastier. The dough for them was prepared much in advance, kept in the cold - it was believed that this improved its quality. Ready-made gingerbreads were covered with white sugar or pink icing, which was obtained using cranberry or lingonberry juice.

Roe deer. Photo: Natalya Belyaeva / Lori photobank

KOZULI, recipe from the Arkhangelsk region
Burn 1 glass of sugar, dissolve in a glass of hot water. Add 2 more cups of sugar (until completely dissolved), 150 g butter, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, cloves and soda, 1 egg and 2 yolks. Pour about 0.5 kg of flour, knead the dough so that it does not stick to your hands. Keep the dough in a saucepan and cellophane in a cool place for a week. After that, add another 0.5 kg of granulated sugar to the dough and roll it out to a thickness of 0.5 cm. Cut the rolled dough into shapes from tin or thick paper and put it on a baking sheet greased with oil. Lubricate the gingerbread cookies with a beaten egg and water in a ratio of 1: 1 and put in the oven. Bake 5 - 7 minutes. Let the finished gingerbread cookies dry, then remove them from the baking sheet and decorate with icing.

Goose to the pig comrade

For a long time in Russia, the custom was to put hay on the table at Christmas - in memory of the manger in which the baby Jesus was born. It was placed either under the tablecloth or in the middle of the table. Meat dishes were arranged around: the more, the better, in several rows. There was pork, and mutton, and every kind of bird; everything was suitable for a feast. But the Christmas menu was crowned, of course, with a goose - roasted whole, topped with pickled apples and sauerkraut. Good goose cooks were chosen carefully, in trusted shops from familiar sellers. Often on holidays, goose sellers, taking advantage of the rush demand, went on a swindle - that is, as explained in old cookbooks, "they introduced air into it through the back hole and sewed up the hole with some art and a little trickery" . Such an inflated goose was in no way suitable for the role of a signature dish, except perhaps for broth.

Roast goose. Photo: Marina Volodko / Lori photo bank

GESE OR DUCK, recipe 1834
with a hairpin, fry on a spit or in the oven, greasing more often with oil and salt; be careful not to burn out.

PIG, recipe 1902
Take offal from a well-cleaned pig, boil in water, which should be slightly salted for taste; when the offal is cooked, chop them finely with five or more, depending on the size of the piglet, hard-boiled eggs, dilute it with raw eggs and then, having stuffed the piglet, sew up the cut, coat with oil and put in the oven to fry, when it is well browned, then pour piglet with juice that he will give from himself.

Fuck everything

The abundance of meat on the tables was explained by the fact that by Christmas the last cattle was always slaughtered in the villages so as not to feed them all winter. Such a way of managing existed and still exists in many countries, so that a baked suckling pig or a goose under a golden crust cannot be considered a purely Russian Christmas dish. And yet, there are still national differences. They concern mainly used seasonings and side dishes. If in Greece, for example, a piglet is served with celery, and in Germany with stewed cabbage, then horseradish has been considered the best supplement for us from time immemorial. It is absolutely universal, it was served with almost all dishes of Russian cuisine: meat, fish, cold and hot. The burning taste was often softened with sour cream, and for many years such a condiment was much more popular than the current mayonnaise.

A piece of bacon with black bread. Photo: Oksana Aleshina / photobank "Lori"

BREAD HORSEHORT, monastic recipe
Cut off the crust from a loaf of rye bread, chop the crumb and brown in the oven until golden brown. Peel one radish, grind in a meat grinder or in a combine. Squeeze the juice and drain, only the pulp is used. Peel the horseradish root, chop and grind in the same way. Mix all the ingredients, add vinegar and grind until the sauce becomes thick. Add honey, salt, fragrant mint or ground cloves.

Don't hit the wedge under the oatmeal pancake

No Christmas table was complete without baking. Pies, pies, pies, kulebyaki, wickets or carols, which were presented to carolers - which was not there. Oatmeal, pancakes made from oatmeal stand apart in this row. The tradition of cooking them these days obviously goes back to pre-Christian times. The period itself from Christmas to Epiphany, Svyatka, in many places was called Avsenki or Ovsenitsy. They baked pancakes in ghee and generously experimented with various pies (fillings that are baked right in the dough). Yarn was good for oatmeal - from the word "spin", that is, fry on a thick layer of overheated oil. This method of culinary processing is very ancient, the researchers unearthed its roots almost in the 15th century. However, now it is actually out of use. But the dish remained, it is especially popular in Polish and Belarusian cuisine.

Pryazhina. Photo: Yakov Filimonov / photobank "Lori"

PRYAZHENINA, recipe from Belarus tablespoons of flour, bay leaf, 1-2 cloves of garlic, salt.
Finely chop the bacon, melt the fat, remove the greaves. Fry pork ribs and sliced sausage in fat. Place everything in a clay pot and pour over the flour sauce. Darken the pot in the oven for about an hour. Before serving, grate garlic into it.
For flour gravy, fry the onion in melted lard and gradually add 2 tbsp. tablespoons of flour, pour hot water in a thin stream and bring to the consistency of sour cream.

Drink, but understand the matter

What did they drink for Christmas? If on Christmas Eve the menu was strictly regulated by a church rite, then after that everyone celebrated in accordance with their own taste and budget. This also applied to drinks - and liqueurs, and tinctures, and homemade wines and other intoxicating drinks, which in our time seem quite exotic.

However, traditional Russian drinks have always had options without degrees - for children or those who are strict even on holidays.

Sbiten. Photo: Olga Tkacheva / photobank "Lori"

ALCOHOL-FREE Sbiten, recipe by Maxim Syrnikov
1 glass of honey, 6 glasses of water, 2 tsp dry mint, freshly grated ginger, cinnamon, cloves.
Dilute honey in heated water, put on a small fire, add mint. Ginger and spices. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a minimum and cook for 15 minutes, carefully removing the foam. Strain the finished sbiten and serve hot.
At the end of cooking, you can make a drink for adults from children's sbiten by pouring a glass of red wine into it. Or in a ready-made glass of cognac.

CASING 18+, recipe 1902
Pour 8 bottles of alcohol into a large bottle and add 12 spools of cinnamon, 5 spools of cardamom, 4 sprouts of cloves, 5 stalks of star anise, 1 nutmeg. Wrap the bottle with washcloths and smear around with dough, three fingers thick. Put the bottle in a row for four nights in the free spirit of the oven, and take it out and shake it in the morning. After 4 days, drain and sweeten with syrup, using 1 1/2 pounds of sugar for every 2 bottles of casserole. The longer the casserole is stored, the better it gets. But when you need to treat it to a friend or a guest who has arrived from afar, feed him in advance as satisfyingly as possible and the fattest dishes, and at the end of the dinner offer him a glass of casserole: it will seem like nectar to him.
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