The Unbearable Lightness of Blini

The Unbearable Lightness of Blini

The time has come once again for Maslenitsa, a curious mix of christianity and pagan rites that mark the supposed end of winter and be beginning of spring.  The closest western analogue is that of Mardi Gras, but in reality Maslenitsa is a different creature all together.

The holiday marks the last excesses prior to the fast of Greater lent for Russian Orthodoxy, a time of no meat (and if you are particularly devout no cheese or milk products as well).

My personal account of the past week has centered around one thing: blini.  Blini are the russian pancake, which is nestled in taste in between our fluffy, western, skillet-seared breakfast foods and paper-thin French crepes.  Blini are the food of the Shrovetide as by appearance they represent the sun and the promise that winter will soon depart.  The second half of that statement has not been the case this year, however.

The week began innocently, a breakfast hand-prepared with love (or at least without evident malice).

Apparently each household has its own particular method for how to properly eat the blini.  I was informed of the style I was to use very early.

First I tried to eat the blini sans sour cream.  This was unacceptable.  Then I had to learn the proper system.  First the blini is placed in the center a plate.  Then a dollop of sour cream is carefully spread outward from the center in order to engage as full coverage as is possible upon the face of our sun symbol.  After this, the side of the disc is gently lifted and rolled, much like a Clint Eastwoodian cigarello from so many spaghetti westerns, into a tube of sour cream and pancake bliss.  (Or so it would appear, but we'll come back to that later.)

Sour cream is, of course, one of the more traditional fillings for the blinchiki.  Other fillings include honey, various jams, cheese, meat (of curious parentage in the form of ground... something), salmon, and the bane of my American taste buds: caviar.   However, there is an adage in Russian that amounts succinctly to the idea that if it will fit in to a blini, then it should be in a blini.  So needless to say, there is a lot of room for variation on a theme.  But... this can only take one so far... (ominous music)

The first morning of these blinchiki was all sunshine and rainbows.  A tasty break from the typical 150 grams of bread, 100 grams of yoghurt, and banana of indeterminate size, which suffices the typical breakfast in my home.  The first morning that is.  But then the mornings just kept coming.  Mountains of blini falling about my hands and ears.  I began to dream of blini at night.  To awake in cold sweats to think to myself, it was only a dream that I had fallen in to a blini batter bath.  But then I realize that there were 10 more blini waiting for me in the morning when I emerge from my room.  The coils of my mind swirled up in the roll of blini, which brought me to the edge of some kind of Lovecraftian madness.  And then, just as it had begun, 67 blini in one week later, the pancake madness ceased.  The Maslenitsa scarecrow burned, the holiday concluded.  And the blini return in to their haunts, ruminating, and biding time until they can once again frisbee themselves into our nightmare hearts upon the next Maslenitsa.  Upon the next Week of Blin.