“These are mushrooms with thyme! These are with cloves and walnuts! A Turkish woman taught me how to pickle them, back when we still had Turkish prisoners. She was such a nice woman, it didn’t even show that she confessed the Turkish faith. She went about just as we do, only she didn’t eat pork, said it was somehow forbidden by their law. These are mushrooms with black currant leaves and nutmeg! And these are big gourds done in vinegar: it’s the first I’ve tried it, I don’t know how they came out, it’s Father Ivan’s secret. First you spread some oak leaves in a small barrel, then put in some pepper and saltpeter, and some hawkweed flowers, too — you just take the flowers and spread them stems up. And these are pirozhki! cheese pirozhki! with poppyseed juice! And these are the ones Afanasy Ivanovich likes best, with cabbage and buckwheat.”

“Yes,” added Afanasy Ivanovich, “I like them very much. They’re tender and slightly tart.”

Generally, Pulkeria Ivanovna was in exceptionally good spirits whenever they had guests. A kindly old woman! She belonged entirely to her guests. I loved visiting them, and though I overate terribly, as all their visitors did, and though it was very bad for me, nevertheless I was always glad to go there. However, I think that the very air of Little Russia may possess some special quality that aids digestion, because if anyone here tried to eat like that, he would undoubtedly wind up lying not in his bed but on the table.

- Nikolai Gogol, “Old World Landowners” (1835), The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol