Belarusian national cuisine has a long history. Many dishes came to our time from the remote past. The most popular product and ingredient of the Belarusian cuisine is potato. It came to Belarus from Baltics and Poland in the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Potato is at the Belarusian table every season and in any state - fried, boiled, baked, stuffed. Potato is an ingredient for soups, and salads, and patties.
The secret of the Belarusian cuisine is that it is known, in combination with which products potato uncovers its taste the best - and it is pork and mushrooms. This very combination also can be considered as a peculiarity of the Belarusian traditional cuisine.
Dishes out of grated potato - pancakes, babki, draniki, kolduny and kletski - are also specialties of the cuisine.
It is specific, that the dishes of the Belarusian cuisine are rare hot and spicy - usually they lack pepper, parsley, garlic.
One of the favorite specialties among all the generations of the Belarusians is, for sure, draniki - potato thick pancakes.
Babka is a national Belarusian dish out of grated potato and dressed with fried bacon, onion and meat. The dish is baked in the oven and served with sour cream and milk.
However, certainly, potato is not the only one that the Belarusians eat. Carrot, cabbage, peas, sorrel, mushrooms, berries, river fish, as well as cultured milk foods are also widely used in the cuisine.
Meat is cooked with a number of peculiarities. What the Belarusians and Ukrainians have in common is lard (сало) as an ingredient for many dishes. Fried lard is an appetible relish for different farinaceous and potato dishes. Also the Belarusians eat pork, beef and poultry.
Traditional meat dishes are vereshchaka (or machanka) - pieces of short ribs and sausage stewed with water or rye beer and brewed in flour, sour cream and onion and served with pancakes; kolduny - dish of various dough or potato, stuffed with meat or any other forcemeat with spices.
Soups of the Belarusian cuisine can be hot or cold. Hot soups are often mealy, with vegetables and grains. Condensed soups prevail - a specific Belarusian soup called zhur cooked on the oat sour liquor.
Kholodnik and okroshka are traditional cold soups.
The Belarusian cuisine cares not so much about some special ingredients, but the process of their cooking. Just one product (whether it is oatmeal, or rye flour, or potato) can be cooked, but then it is cooked complexly.
Oatmeal kissel is a vivid example of such an approach to cooking. It is got out of just one ingredient - oat, but it took a dozen of procedures for three days. Another example is, certainly, potato - the Belarusians make thousands of dishes out of it!
Natural and geographical conditions, surely, influenced the traditional dishes of Belarus. The Belarusians eat mushrooms, wild berries and plants. When speaking about drinks, the specialties of the cuisine are rye beer (called kvas), beresovik (kvas out of birch sap), medovukha (a drink out of honey, berries and herbs on the basis of fretting), sbiten (hot drink out of honey and spices).
