Kulebyaka Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Kulebyaka is a Russian pie of long form: a filling of chicken or fish, buckwheat and the like is stacked in layers inside the dough and the whole is baked as one great parcel. Thin blini (crêpes) are laid between the layers as dividers, and the tiers are cooked through without being allowed to collapse. It is a dish for weddings and other celebrations, and it is baked at home as well.

Wheat flour, chicken, buckwheat and butter were all long available in the Russian land, part of the everyday kitchen. The Russian pie in general, the pirog, is itself an old dish: it is said to appear already in twelfth-century sources, and the sixteenth-century household manual Domostroi is said to record many kinds of baking. The name kulebyaka is said to come from kulebyachit', to knead by hand or to fold, which fits the way the dough is folded around its filling.

When this form and this name settled is not clear. One account says the long, many-layered pie was given the name kulebyaka in the seventeenth century, but no document from that time has yet surfaced. The earliest use of the word traced so far is in the first volume of Gogol's novel Dead Souls, published in 1842.

There is a story, told now and then, that Antonin Carême, the great French cook, devised "coulibiac" during his stay in Saint Petersburg, said to have been around 1819: a dish, so the story runs, brought into being by a great Western chef. Yet no record from the time has been found telling of Carême creating the pie.

The name coulibiac can be followed a little further. It is the French-language name, and the second edition of Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1907, includes a salmon coulibiac among others. An encyclopedia entry says the dish was already in the first edition of 1903, but the first edition itself has not yet been checked for it. Still, how the name travelled west and how the pie came into being in Russia are separate events, and tracing the first says nothing about the date of the second.

Is the pie, then, older than Carême? The best-known description of a kulebyaka is the "kulebyaka of four corners" in Gogol's Dead Souls, where in a scene with the character Petukh, a kulebyaka is ordered with a different filling in each of its four corners. That scene, however, belongs to the second volume, drafts Gogol left behind at his death in 1852, which were published in 1855. What appears in chapter four of the first volume, published in 1842, is a kulebyaka filled with the fin meat of catfish, eaten by country landowners of middling means at each posting station along the road, and it is written of not as a celebrated specialty but as an ordinary treat on a journey. Both dates fall more than twenty years after Carême's stay in Russia.

No use of the word from before Carême's stay has yet been found. The story that Carême devised the dish is, for now, neither supported nor overturned by the record. What can be said for certain is only that by 1842 kulebyaka was written of as a common treat on Russia's roads.