Here is the menu of the dinner at tsar coronation May, 20-23, 1883 when the czar of the Rus Alexander the Third came to the throne:

1. Pearl-barley soup. Pechony pirozhki (baked pies)
2. Sterlets with pickles
3. Crayfish in aspic (holodets)
4. Ruffs in aspic (zalivnoe)
5. Quails with mashed peas. Boiled beef.
6. Hazel-hens with sour cream.
7. Appetizers with roast – pickled cucumbers, pickled mushrooms, pickled cranberries and cowberries. Pickled apples.
8. Sweets: peas in the pod. “Tsaregradskie” pods. Babashki with poppy seeds, pryaniki vyazemskie, and gorodetskie
9. Tea
And wines were served to all tastes – French, Spanish, Italian, German and Hungarian (Tokay) ones.

To begin the tsar dinner with perlovka (pearl barley soup) can seem high-risk even to a staunch nationalist-monarchist. Didn’t the organizers go too far? No, they didn’t.

They together with the minister of Imperial Court, count I.I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, being professional bootlickers, knew that pearl barley, or called at first “barley”, was considered “beloved Romanov kasha” since Peter The Great. And at the beginning of XIX century it was renamed into “pearl- barley”, “to ennoble the tsar favourite”.

So, could the tsar, at least once, taste pearl-barley kasha, to confirm the legend? Nothing happened to him, he wasn’t poisoned.

Thus, court cooks of the count were fine politicians and connoisseur of Russian folk soul. While people believed in perlovka, they lived rich and free at the tsar table.

Nobody hindered them to eat, instead of perlovka and peas in pods set as attractive props, starlets and quails, drinking fine Bordeaux and Burgundy wines after.

So, the first culinary-political tip for a new XX century sounded like this: “Don’t turn up your nose at served dishes, if you don’t like something, pretend not to notice it and go on eating things you like”. Just don’t argue, don’t show off, don’t oppose. Keep silence and devour.

V.V. Pokhlebkin “Culinary art of the century”