17 Bizarre Foods Every Russian Grew Up With

1. Blini with caviar and sour cream

Cruel prank idea: Tell your American friend it’s whipped cream and jam and watch them experience the most intense sensory bafflement of their lives.

 2. Herring Under Fur Coat

Imagine a cake layered with salted herring, cooked vegetables, and a coat of grated beets and mayo. It sounds gross but it’ll grow on you, just like an actual fuchsia fur coat might. 

3. Doktorskaya Bologna

It’s the spongy lovechild of bologna and sausage, and every Russian-American kid who brings this in a sandwich for lunch is gonna get asked a lot of questions.

4. Olivye salad

 It’ll probably freak non-Russians out a little, but really, it’s just potato salad if it was jacked up on more veggies, mayo, and the aforementioned bologna.

5. Pickled EVERYTHING

Pickled mushrooms, pickled tomatoes, pickled cabbage. All of this gets significantly tastier once you’re old enough to use it as a vodka chaser.

6. Kholodets

MEAT JELLO. The concept never feels completely normal, but it’s delish and fun to play around with! And look at all the shapes you can make!

7. Salo

It’s raw pig fat, and the more of it you have, the better!

8. Kvas

This rye-honey-berry concoction comes in the most badass bottles. And it’s slightly alcoholic! ;)

9. Herring, mayo and pickle sandwich

Basically, all the ingredients that complement vodka, plus mayo because WHY NOT. (Also popular in the Netherlands, sans the hard liquor component.)

10. Okroshka

It’s cold kefir with cucumbers, bologna, and dill — it’s like all the ingredients rejected from soup in the past got together and decided to puzzle us all.

11. Solyanka

 Every type of meat + every type of sour thing = soup? We’ll roll with it.

12. Kissel

 

“Fruit soup” made from fruit juice and starch and commonly served as a dessert. In case you weren’t sure yet, soup is kind of a big deal.

13. Kishka

Chicken skin/an intestine stuffed with more meat and covered in gravy. In Russia, no meat is left uneaten.

14. Kompot

This one’s basically Eastern Europe’s version of fruit punch, except that it’s made by boiling fruits in water, which just seems like a more complicated way of going about the whole thing, but is totally worth it.

15. Vinaigrette

(Not to be confused with salad dressing.) Beets, potatoes, pickles, and pickled cabbage are the vegetables used most frequently in Russian cuisine, so it’s no real surprise that they have a super healthy dish of their own.

16. Varenyky

You can fill them with anything, but fruit is common. Fruit dumpling!

17. And then there’s this:

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