Veal pojarski, a super tasty cutlet made of veal steak partly chopped and partly minced. It was invented in Russia and the creation is subscribed either to 19th century prince Dmitri Pozharsky or his lowlier contemporary, an innkeeper Pozharsky from the Moscow locality.
What to do with a steak less lovely
What do you do if a piece of meat you aimed to turn into a lovely steak turns out not so good on closer inspection? Presumably the butcher pulled a fast one or the procurer took a cost cut. Maybe the picker was vegetarian not knowing or caring much about meat, or you sent your teenage son to town shopping.
Calamities happen, and we can always phone a pizza in at home or cross the dish off the restaurant menu explaining it was so popular it ran out.
Not so easy if you’re a chef in residence entertaining the most important visitor in 19th century Russia: the spectre of Siberia may replace takeaway pizza there.
What you can do is use the failure to your own advantage and invent a new dish, following (or preceding, my culinary chronology is wanting) in the footsteps of nachos, Waldorff and potato crisps. You create a wonderful meat dish which is partly steak, partly regurgitated (figuratively speaking) meat.
Pojarski origins (my theory)
Of course the above is another of my fantasy tales on the origin of a dish. But doesn’t it sound very plausible? You think you’re about to cook a lovely lean steak and then discover the reality is fatty and can’t be called marbling.
But bits of the steak are all right so you don’t want to let them go down the mincing machine and you end up with a win-win: new meat dish with interesting texture and a flavour to die for.
So what is pojarsky made from?
The only proper, authentic pojarski (sometimes spelt ‘pozharski’) is made with veal. Chicken pojarski is a fake, and so is pork. Even faker are the versions with all-minced meat – you get meatballs not pojarski that way.
Wikipedia spouts rubbish about the unique feature of the cutlet being the butter added to ground meat; if nothing else this has finally convinced me not to trust it.
I know what the correct version is like because it used to be popular in some Polish restaurants in the Cold War era. Frugal and Russian in origin, it figures.
You didn’t get many cordon bleus or schnitzels but steak pojarski – very much so. I guess in those days the minced part outweighed the lean bits but the dual texture was certainly observed.
Pojarsky is an impressive dish
It is a bit of an effort but then it lets you get away with less choice cut being proudly served as a showstopper, because it is so incredibly tasty it’s fit for the fanciest dinner party centrepiece.
Add to that the fact that it’s a lesser known cutlet and you get the ingenuity for dinner too. What’s not to like? Well – it’s calorific, with all the butter and breadcrumbs. Ah well, nothing’s perfect.