Pancakes Week or Maslenitsa!

The beginning of the year is full of holidays: starting with a 10-day New Year/Christmas break, the Old New Year on January 14 and Maslenitsa from February 12 - 18. WHOLE week of pancakes , what can be better? And don't think we eat the same simple pancakes everyday. There is a countless variety of dishes: sweet, savory and cakes. I'll post some recipes in the next post.

You can eat pancakes a day before Maslenitsa and it won't mean anything. But then, any other day of the following week it's the "tradition". Why we love so much this Pancakes Week?

Maslenitsa is an Eastern Slavic religious and folk holiday, one of the few that we still celebrate. It is believed that it's the oldest surviving Slavic holiday. It would correspond to the Western Christian Carnival or Mardi Gras.

Maslenitsa has pagan origins: it is a sun-festival or celebration of the end of the winter (even though winter wouldn't end for next month and a half). Traditionally, on the last day of the week people would burn an effigy made of straw. It would symbolically mean that the winter is over.

Today we mostly just eat pancakes, but some cities can still have this celebration. For example, in Moscow this year a special celebration has been organised - Moscow Seasons. Check out their website, you'll get the idea of the "traditional" celebration of Maslenitsa.

As I mentioned earlier, there are different dishes with pancakes that you could even try to cook by yourself. Russian cuisine is simple, but creative. In Russian pancakes are called "blini". If you speak French, you'd probably think about those tiny pancakes that are called 'blini' in French, but our blini are your "crêpes": thin and large pancakes.

They can be sweet: served with sour cream + sugar, condensed milk (Russians loove it), confiture or jam, with honey, cottage cheese. Or savory: with caviar, cooked ground beaf + onions, mushrooms. It can be a cake: about 15-20 pancakes + anything mentioned before. More often it is sweet: the cream is usually made of condensed milk, custard. You can add nuts on top and it would look like a real cake. Pancakes are usually served with tea.

Here are some pictures of the dishes and the celebration.