Mouthwatering Recipes... from Russia with Love!"Tastes and Tales from Russia" Traces an Immigrants Journey Through a Childhood Filled with Fabulous Food and Folklore

NEW YORK June 18, 2004 -– Russian immigrant Alla Danishevsky loves cookbooks, but when she couldn't find a single Russian recipe collection in New York City bookstores, she vowed to write her own.

"Tastes and Tales from Russia" (America House, $19.95, ISBN 1-4137-2320-9) travels back in time to Czarist Russia, when such epicurean favorites as Chicken Kiev and Beef Stroganoff (after the Count of the same name) helped put Russia on the world culinary map.

To enhance her cookbook's cultural flair, Danishevsky translated her favorite childhood folk tales, including several by Pushkin, and sprinkles them among the mouthwatering recipes. Each tale is lovingly illustrated with reproductions of Palekh, the distinctive native folk art from the same period, taken from an heirloom book her parents brought with them when the family immigrated to the United States from Moldavia (now Moldova) in 1979.

"I went to a lot of New York bookstores and looked in the cookbook sections and they were full of French and Italian, but no Russian cookbooks," she says. "These are traditional Russian recipes that everyone in a Russian household would know how to make."

"Tastes and Tales from Russia," like a typical Russian meal, is separated into three courses. Appetizers include such Russian staples as herring and beet salad (diced beets, dill pickle, potatoes and peas). Soups include borscht, a Ukrainian specialty that was originally a hearty beef-based dish, and kharcho a spicy lamb soup from the Republic of Georgia seasoned with paprika, garlic and cilantro. Classic entrees are included with such exotic side dishes as buckwheat with mushrooms and sebirskii pelmeni, a poached meat-stuffed pastry from Siberia similar to a wonton, served topped with butter, sour cream or a vinegar-mustard sauce.

Although Russian households typically reserve dessert for visitors, Danishevsky includes such signature sweets as pryaniki, a cookie made from honey, almonds and cardamom, and ponchiki, a fried donut similar to a beignet.

"Russian food is very rich with a lot of spices and very diverse," she says. "People generalize it as Russian food, but some of it is Middle Eastern, some of it German, some of it Romanian or Hungarian. There is a huge variety."





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