Pushkin, Lermontov, Dumas, Gogol, Krylov... Only Agatha Christie could figure out which of them ate 20 peaches at a time, who did not get enough of the royal dinner, who wrote a cookbook, who loved spaghetti, and who once ate pies with sawdust . By the way, Agatha Christie herself was a woman with a good appetite. Details are in this article.
Agatha Christie. Skinny glutton 
In her autobiography, the English writer recalls that since childhood she was prone to gluttony: “Taking into account the amount of food that I consumed in childhood and adolescence (because I was always hungry), I simply cannot understand how I managed to remain so skinny " As a 12-year-old girl, Agatha Christie even competed in “digestive prowess” with a 22-year-old young man: “He was ahead of me in terms of oyster soup, but otherwise we were “breathing down each other’s necks.” We both ate boiled turkey, then fried turkey, and four or five pieces of beef. Then we started on plum pudding, sweet pie and sponge cake. After this came biscuits, grapes, oranges, plums and candied fruit. And finally, for the rest of the day, chocolate was brought from the pantry by the handful. different varieties, who will like what.” The writer herself was not only surprised that after such dinners she did not have stomach problems, but also doubted that “people today are able to overcome such a meal.” And Agatha Christie considered cream to be her favorite dish, which she became addicted to as a child and continued to “stuff it all her life.”
Alexandre Dumas Sr. Between a book and a frying pan 
The famous French writer was known not only as the author of the legendary trilogy about the Three Musketeers, but also as a gourmet and glutton. Cooking and writing are two passions between which Dumas was torn all his life. Contemporaries recalled that he could part with a pen only “for the sake of a frying pan handle.” However, Dumas often combined two types of activities, which resulted in the “Great Culinary Dictionary”, which, however, the writer never had time to complete - Anatole France later did it instead. What’s nice: in the cookbook Dumas included five recipes for Russian jam (from roses, pumpkin, nuts, radishes and asparagus). However, in general, the writer did not really like Russian cuisine, and during two years of traveling around Russia he never managed to fall in love with it. The only dish that captivated the mind and belly of this gourmet was kurnik - a pie with eggs and chickens, prepared in the house of the Russian writer Avdotya Panayeva, with whom he was visiting. Later, she recalled the Frenchman’s incredible gluttony: “I think that Dumas’s stomach could digest fly agarics.” Dumas impressed her as a man with a great appetite and very brave, because he could eat “two plates of botvina, fried mushrooms, pies, pig with porridge - all at once!” This requires great courage, especially for a foreigner who has never tried such dishes in his life...”
Alexander Pushkin. Potatoes as bait 
“Don’t put off until dinner what you can eat at lunch” is one of the writer’s “Gastronomic maxims.” However, Pushkin was not a gourmet, he just loved to eat, and was unpretentious when it came to food. Pushkin’s friend, poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, wrote: “Pushkin was not at all a gourmet... but he was a terrible glutton for other things. I remember how on the road he ate 20 peaches bought at Torzhok in one breath. The soaked apples also took a fair beating.” Pushkin was also familiar with the popular in his time French cuisine, but, nevertheless, he loved simple, one might even say, rustic Russian cuisine. “The genius of pure beauty” Anna Kern recalls that Pushkin’s mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, even lured her son to dinner with baked potatoes, “which Pushkin was a big fan of.” Pushkin was very fond of apple pie, which was prepared in the house of his neighbors Osipov-Wulf. Well, all the dishes of Pushkin’s nanny were appreciated not only by himself, but also by his friends. For sweets, Alexander Sergeevich was very fond of gooseberry jam.
Mikhail Lermontov. Lover of sawdust pies 
Unlike Pushkin, this poet had no reverence for food, moreover, he did not understand it at all. As his first lover, Ekaterina Sushkova, recalls in her Notes, Lermontov never knew what he ate: veal or pork, game or lamb. However, this did not stop the poet from arguing with his friends, convincing them of the sophistication of his gastronomic taste. They listened, listened, and then took and fed Mikhail Yuryevich buns filled with... sawdust. Young Lermontov (at that time he was only 16 years old), not suspecting anything, managed to eat a whole such bun and start on the second, but he was stopped, pointing to the “indigestible filling for the stomach.”
Ivan Krylov. 30 pancakes for a snack 
Ivan Andreevich not only loved to eat, he was a real glutton. There were legends about the fabulist's overeating - based on real facts. Krylov could eat up to 30 pancakes with caviar in one sitting. And these pancakes were “the size of a plate and the thickness of a finger.” He ate at least 80 oysters. He loved both “substantial” dishes - fish soup with pies, fried turkey, veal chops, pig with sour cream, and edible “little things” - cucumbers, lingonberries, plums. My preferred drink was kvass. It is interesting that Krylov did not eat at all at the royal dinners, after which he went to dine at a restaurant, and dinner was immediately waiting for him at home. Of course, how could he get enough of five spoons of soup, pies the size of Walnut, a turkey wing and a half-orange dessert with jelly and jam inside?!
Nikolay Gogol. Pasta soul 
The writer’s favorite dish was... Italian pasta. He enjoyed making them himself, adding salt, pepper, butter and Parmesan cheese. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, no one “could eat as much pasta as he ate sometimes.” Nikolai Vasilyevich also absolutely could not live without sweets: his trouser pockets were always full of sweets and gingerbread cookies, which he “chewed incessantly.” Gogol loved not only to eat himself, but also to treat others. The writer’s friend, critic Mikhail Pogodin recalls: “The reserve great tea he never translated, but the main thing for him was to collect various cookies for tea. And where he found all sorts of pretzels, buns, crackers, only he knew, and no one else. Every day something new appeared, which he first let everyone try, and he was very happy if someone found it to their taste and approved the choice with some special phrase. Nothing more could be done to please him.”
Agree, it would be interesting to know what the favorite dishes of great people were. It turns out that Tolstoy had a terrible sweet tooth, and Pushkin slept and saw baked potatoes. What Stalin treated his guests to and how to prepare chocolate jelly according to Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy’s recipe.
Oddly enough, despite European reference points, Peter the Great has always remained one of the adherents of Russian cuisine.
According to the memoirs of his contemporary, mechanic Andrei Nartov, the emperor’s usual “foods” were jelly, pickles, sauerkraut, sour cabbage soup, porridge and roast with cucumbers and pickled lemons. Before eating, Peter drank aniseed vodka, and during the meal - kvass. The emperor preferred to give public dinners with European dishes for foreign guests at Menshikov's.
Potatoes for Pushkin
Most of all, Alexander Sergeevich loved simple village dishes: cabbage soup and green soup with boiled eggs, porridge, chopped cutlets with sorrel and spinach, etc. But, according to the recollections of contemporaries, the greatest pleasure was given to him by baked potatoes, which he could eat in huge quantities. It was prepared according to traditional recipe: They rolled the skins in coarse salt and baked them in the oven, burying them deeper in the ash. And for dessert, the poet loved to eat white gooseberry jam.
Sweet tooth Lev Nikolaevich
It is a well-known fact that Leo Tolstoy did not eat meat. All dishes prepared in his house were from plant products, milk and eggs. Every day for breakfast he ate oatmeal, sour milk and eggs. The writer did not think about the amount of food he ate and could easily drink up to three bottles of kefir, several cups of coffee, eat mashed rice, and pies in one day. The wife, Sofya Andreevna, was very worried about her husband’s stomach. “Today at lunch,” she wrote in her diaries, “I watched in horror as he ate: first salted milk mushrooms... then four large buckwheat croutons with soup, and sour kvass, and black bread. And all this in large quantities.”
Lev Nikolaevich also loved sweets very much. There were always nuts, dates and dried fruits in the house, as well as jam, including Yasnopolyanskoe. Rather, it was even an assortment of fruits and berries, since it included melon, cherries, apples, peaches, plums, gooseberries and apricots.
Sofya Andreevna herself kept a “Cookbook”, in which she eventually collected over 160 recipes. One of them is chocolate... jelly. So, you should take one “plank” of chocolate (two standard bars), two cups of potato flour, a cup of sugar and two bottles of milk (one bottle in those years was about 0.75 liters). The chocolate was grated, mixed with starch and sugar and a small amount of milk. The rest of the milk is boiled and the resulting mixture is poured into it. The drink should be stirred until thick.
Luisa Contreras, 2013
Stalin's buffet
Stalin had a rather strange attitude towards feasts: they began late in the evening, lasted a long time, and the tables were literally bursting with dishes, while the leader himself ate little, preferring to treat the invitees to his fullest. Usually boiled pork, lamb or poultry rolls, sturgeon, pies, fish and, naturally, real Georgian dishes - shish kebab, lobio, pkhali, etc. were placed on the tables.
Anastas Mikoyan once recalled that Stalin’s favorite dishes included fish (frozen nelma, Danube herring, boiled). “I loved birds: guinea fowl, ducks, chickens. Loved the thin skewered lamb ribs. Very tasty thing. Thin ribs, little meat, dry roasted. Everyone always liked this dish. And boiled quail. These were the most best dishes", he said.
Photo from Instagram account shvepa, 2016
And General S. M. Shtemenko, the head of the operational department of the General Staff, who more than once dined with Stalin at the Near Dacha, in the book “The General Staff during the War” said that “dinner at Stalin’s place, even a very large one, always took place without the services of waiters. They only brought everything they needed to the dining room and silently left. Cutlery, bread, cognac, vodka, dry wines, spices, vegetables and mushrooms were placed on the table in advance. As a rule, there were no sausages, hams and other snacks. He didn’t tolerate canned food.”
Hitler's Night Snacks
An interesting fact about Adolf Hitler: it is known that he had problems with the spleen, so the Fuhrer followed a strict diet, which was personally monitored by his cook. But a couple of years ago, Hitler's former maid Elisabeth Kalhammer told reporters that at night, when the servants went to bed, the Fuhrer would sneak into the kitchen and secretly eat cookies and cream pies. According to Kalhammer, the cooks prepared a “Führer pie” with raisins, apples and nuts especially for him and left it in the kitchen before going to bed.
Lenin's hearty exile
In the family of the future leader, the daily routine was quite strict: breakfast at eight in the morning (on holidays at noon). Lunch on ordinary days is at two o'clock in the afternoon, and on holidays - at four. Dinner was served every day at eight or nine o'clock in the evening. Vegetable, cereal and milk soups regularly appeared on the table, and less often - cabbage soup and fish soup. Meat was usually eaten boiled, fish was also boiled or smoked. In addition, milk and chicken eggs, which were eaten often and in any form (fried eggs, omelet, boiled, etc.). There was no cult of bread in the family: in weekdays For lunch they ate only black, and white was served for tea or dinner.
This diet generally had a beneficial effect on the children growing up in the family, but as soon as the future leader was deprived of his usual home-cooked food, having entered Kazan University, he almost instantly acquired gastritis, because of which he subsequently suffered throughout his life.
As a famous researcher says different types kitchen William Pokhlebkin, “at the end of 1895 the first arrest followed. In prison, Lenin's gastritis first worsens. But regular Russian prison food (cabbage soup, porridge) gradually stabilizes the situation. And even more favorable conditions are taking shape for Lenin in exile.
Once in Krasnoyarsk on private apartment with full board, that is, with plentiful Russian food four to five times a day and a real Siberian menu (mushroom cabbage soup, veal, boiled fish, pies, dumplings, shanezhki, lamb with porridge, etc.), Lenin writes enthusiastically to his relatives : “I live well, I’m quite happy with the table. I forgot to even think about mineral gastric water and, I hope, I will soon forget its name! “While in exile, I felt good.”
Laurel F, 2005
And among drinks, Lenin loved tea most of all, sometimes very strong. In exile, he sometimes drank beer, and upon returning to Russia, according to Vyacheslav Molotov, wine, but was not keen on it.
It is no secret that readers are interested not only in the life and work of writers, but also in everything connected with their personality: hobbies, habits, attachments...
Would you like to know about the gastronomic preferences of your favorite authors?
Agatha Christie
In her autobiography, the writer recalls that since childhood she was prone to gluttony: “Considering the amount of food I consumed as a child and teenager (because I was always hungry), I just can’t understand how I managed to stay so skinny.” As a 12-year-old girl, Agatha Christie even competed in “digestive prowess” with a 22-year-old young man: “He was ahead of me in terms of oyster soup, but otherwise we were “breathing down each other’s necks.” We both ate boiled turkey, then fried turkey, and four or five pieces of beef. Then we started on plum pudding, sweet pie and sponge cake. After this came biscuits, grapes, oranges, plums and candied fruit. And finally, for the rest of the day, handfuls of chocolate of different varieties were brought from the pantry, depending on who liked what.” The writer herself was not only surprised that after such dinners she did not have stomach problems, but also doubted that “people today are able to overcome such a meal.” And Agatha Christie considered cream to be her favorite dish, which she became addicted to as a child and continued to “stuff it all her life.”
Alexandr Duma
The famous French writer was known not only as the author of the legendary trilogy about the Three Musketeers, but also as a gourmet. Cooking and writing are two passions between which Dumas was torn all his life. Contemporaries recalled that he could part with a pen only “for the sake of a frying pan handle.” However, Dumas often combined two types of activities, which resulted in the “Great Culinary Dictionary”, which, however, the writer never had time to complete - Anatole France later did it instead.
By the way, the dish that captivated the mind and belly of this gourmet was kurnik - a pie with eggs and chickens, prepared in the house of the Russian writer Avdotya Panayeva, with whom he was visiting. Later she recalled the incredible gluttony of the Frenchman: “I think Dumas’s stomach could digest fly agarics.”. Dumas impressed her as a man with a great appetite and very brave, because he could eat “two plates of botvina, fried mushrooms, pies, suckling pig with porridge - all at once! This requires great courage, especially for a foreigner who has never tried such dishes in his life...”.
Dumas Sr. also had passionate feelings for chocolate. His favorite dessert was “erotic” chocolate, which the novelist prepared according to a special recipe using vanilla, cinnamon and liquid amber.
Guy de Maupassant
The whole flavor of French cuisine is reflected in two recipes for the famous writer Guy de Maupassant’s favorite delicacies - puree soups “Dear Friend” and “Ma choushu” from veal.
Soup-puree “Dear Friend”
Guy de Maupassant's favorite soup, which was prepared almost daily by his chef during the writer's voyage on the yacht "Dear Friend". Interestingly, the writer himself called this soup “Dear Friend Royal,” which means “Royal.”
The cooking recipe, recorded by chef Henri Douet, has survived to this day. His style of presentation is preserved in the following recipe:
For the soup, you need to select small stalks of young and tender cauliflower, lightly simmer them, without letting them become soft, in water with a teaspoon of wine vinegar. Do not add salt, it roughens the taste. Finely chop two thirds of this cabbage after cooking, cut one third of the cabbage into halves.
After sautéing the sweet onions in cow's butter, add them to the chopped cabbage and pour in the cream until it completely covers the cabbage and onions. Simmer over low heat until the vegetables are completely softened, then rub the entire mass through a sieve. Add salt to taste. Add some white pepper. Stir well.
Heat slightly and add the yolks, beaten with a small amount of broth. They need to be poured in a thin stream, and the soup should not be heated too much so that the yolks do not curdle. The husks, cut into halves, are introduced before serving, lightly fried in cow's butter.
Serve cauliflower puree soup with tender Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, placed in rolls on a separate plate.
The great writer preferred Sauternes, a white French wine of exquisite taste, to accompany this light dish.
Another favorite Maupassant puree soup was called “Ma shushu”, which means “My charming one”. It was prepared from veal and served with boiled asparagus and cheese sticks.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin
“Don’t put off until dinner what you can eat at lunch.” - one of the writer’s “Gastronomic maxims”. However, Pushkin was not a gourmet, he just loved to eat, and was unpretentious when it came to food. Pushkin's friend, poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, wrote : “Pushkin was not at all a gourmand... but he had a terrible glutton for other things. I remember how on the road he ate 20 peaches bought at Torzhok in one breath. The soaked apples also took a fair beating.” Pushkin was also familiar with French cuisine, which was popular in his time, but, nevertheless, he loved simple, one might even say, rustic Russian cuisine.
Anna Kern recalls that Pushkin’s mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, even lured her son to dinner with baked potatoes, “which Pushkin was a big fan of.” Pushkin was very fond of apple pie, which was prepared in the house of his neighbors Osipov-Wulf. Well, all the dishes of Pushkin’s nanny were appreciated not only by himself, but also by his friends. For sweets, Alexander Sergeevich was very fond of gooseberry jam.
Mikhail Yurjevich Lermontov
Unlike Pushkin, this poet had no reverence for food, moreover, he did not understand it at all. As his first lover, Ekaterina Sushkova, recalls in her Notes, Lermontov never knew what he ate: veal or pork, game or lamb. However, this did not stop the poet from arguing with his friends, convincing them of the sophistication of his gastronomic taste. They listened, listened, and then took and fed Mikhail Yuryevich buns filled with... sawdust. Young Lermontov (at that time he was only 16 years old), not suspecting anything, managed to eat a whole such bun and start on the second, but he was stopped, pointing to the “indigestible filling for the stomach.” Bearing in mind that in the future Lermontov took revenge on Sushkova for numerous ridicule of himself, we can confidently say that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
Ivan Andreevich Krylov
There were legends about the fabulist's overeating - based on real facts. Krylov could eat up to 30 pancakes with caviar in one sitting. And these pancakes were “the size of a plate and the thickness of a finger.” He ate at least 80 oysters. He loved both “substantial” dishes - fish soup with pies, fried turkey, veal chops, pig with sour cream, and edible “little things” - cucumbers, lingonberries, plums. My preferred drink was kvass. It is interesting that Krylov did not eat at all at the royal dinners, after which he went to dine at a restaurant, and dinner was immediately waiting for him at home.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol
The writer’s favorite dish was... Italian pasta. He enjoyed making them himself, adding salt, pepper, butter and Parmesan cheese. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, no one “could eat as much pasta as he dipped in sometimes.” Nikolai Vasilyevich also absolutely could not live without sweets: his trouser pockets were always full of sweets and gingerbread cookies, which he “chewed incessantly.” Gogol loved not only to eat himself, but also to treat others. The writer’s friend, critic Mikhail Pogodin recalls: “His supply of excellent tea was never short, but his main job was to collect various cookies for tea. And where he found all sorts of pretzels, buns, crackers, only he knew, and no one else. Every day something new appeared, which he first let everyone try, and he was very happy if someone found it to their taste and approved the choice with some special phrase. Nothing more could be done to please him.”
Contrary to popular belief that a genius must be hungry, great writers created only on a full stomach.
For a long time there was an opinion: a full stomach tends to sleep and laziness, while a hungry one stimulates action, forcing the brain convolutions to work at full speed. There was even a fashionable theory that claimed that works of genius were born exclusively on an empty stomach. But she quickly outlived her usefulness. The Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun was the first to have a hand in the disappearance of this harmful doctrine. In his novel “Hunger,” he writes: “I have long noticed that as soon as I go hungry for several days in a row, my brain begins to drain out and my head becomes empty.” But the writer eats bread and cheese and in the evening: “Like a man possessed, I write page after page, without lifting the pencil from the paper, and every word I write seems to pour out on its own.” Yes, and Aristotle once noted that after a delicious dinner, under the influence of a rush of blood to the head, “many individuals become poets, prophets or soothsayers.”
What did geniuses eat when creating their immortal works?
“Double” cabbage soup from Alexander Pushkin
According to the memoirs of Pushkin’s friend, maid of honor of the imperial court Alexandra Rosset-Smirnova, the poet loved to eat delicious food. Among his favorite dishes were baked potatoes, soaked apples, crumbly “pink” pancakes, which were baked with the addition of beets, “double” cabbage soup, green soup made from spinach leaves, sorrel or young nettles with hard-boiled eggs, chopped cutlets with spinach, botvinya - cold kvass stew with boiled vegetables, cucumbers, beets, onions and sturgeon. For dessert, he preferred jam with white gooseberries. And I ate cloudberries by the handful. By the way, the genius asked for this berry even before his death.
Pushkin's friend, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, recalled that Pushkin was a terrible glutton for some goodies. Once on the road, he ate 20 peaches in one sitting. Pushkin was familiar with French cuisine, popular in his times, but preferred simple country kitchen. Apple pie, baked potatoes and gooseberry jam are the famous writer’s favorite dishes.
How to cook “double” cabbage soup
First, cook regular cabbage soup from beef, fresh cabbage, two carrots, one turnip and two onions. Place the pan in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, heat it up, pass the slurry through a sieve, and rub the grounds, that is, vegetables and meat, through a fine sieve. And on this slurry, and not on plain water, cook new cabbage soup with new cabbage, roots, beef, as usual. Five minutes before it’s ready, pour the pureed grounds into the cabbage soup. In such real Russian cabbage soup, the spoon should stand.
Crucian carp from Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich elevated one dish to the rank of divine - fried crucian carp in sour cream. This is what he writes in the story “Siren”: “Of the silent fish, the best is fried crucian carp in sour cream; just so that it doesn’t smell like mud and is delicate, you need to keep it alive in milk for a whole day.”
How to fry fish in sour cream
The crucian carp is cleaned, rubbed with salt, sprinkled with pepper, breaded in flour, placed in a frying pan with melted butter and fried on both sides until golden brown. Then the fish is placed in a greased frying pan, surrounded by fried potatoes cut into circles, poured with sour cream, sprinkled with breadcrumbs, added butter and baked in the oven.
Beetroot soup from Tolstoy
Vegetarian Leo Tolstoy served cold beet soup or lean cabbage soup for lunch, and the traditional dinner consisted of pasta, vegetables and fruits. Bread was baked at the estate according to Tolstoy's recipe: two pounds of flour were mixed with two pounds of potatoes, which were previously steamed and mashed. The writer spread a thick layer of honey onto the rug baked from this mixture and washed it all down with oatmeal jelly. After which he sat down to write novels.
But perhaps his favorite product was fresh cucumber. Tolstoy ate them in incredible quantities, knowing, or perhaps guessing, that this vegetable consisted of the most useful - organic - water. But when he was out of sorts, for example, when he sat down to rewrite “War and Peace” for the hundredth time, the genius piled kilograms of asparagus - he ate it with or without any sauce, boiled with or without salt.
The wife of the genius, Sofya Andreevna, was very worried about her husband’s stomach. “Today at lunch,” she wrote in her diaries, “I watched in horror as he ate: first salted milk mushrooms... then four large buckwheat croutons with soup, and sour kvass, and black bread. And all this in large quantities.”
How to cook beetroot soup
Peel a pound of beets, cut into small cubes, add water in a saucepan (at the rate of 2 cups per serving), add a teaspoon of vinegar and cook for 30 minutes. Strain the prepared beet broth and cool. Place the beets in a saucepan, add 200 g of boiled potatoes and 2 diced cucumbers, two chopped eggs, 100 g of finely chopped green onions, add grated horseradish, salt, sugar and mustard to taste. Pour in the beetroot broth, add sour cream and stir. Before serving, sprinkle beetroot with chopped parsley or dill.
Escalope from Fyodor Dostoevsky
Hamsun's hero satisfied his hunger with bread and cheese. Maybe this is the “secret food of geniuses”? For example, Dostoevsky’s wife Anna Grigorievna writes in her diaries: “We joyfully ate cheese and bread, drank tea and ate fruit.” And such a meal was repeated often. However, Dostoevsky had others gastronomic preferences. For example, boiled chicken with warm milk. When the genius was in high spirits, he preferred cheese, nuts, oranges, lemon, saffron milk caps, caviar and French mustard for dinner. And on days of melancholy, his lunch usually consisted of a cup of broth, veal escalopes, tea and wine.
How to cook an escalope
Season the veal with salt and pepper, roll in flour and fry on butter. Fry quartered tomatoes in the resulting oil, add white wine, add finely chopped parsley, simmer for 3 - 5 minutes and pour this sauce over the meat.
"Erotic" chocolate
from Alexandre Dumas the father
For dessert, the famous novelist, erotomaniac and lover of women - he had hundreds of mistresses - preferred specially prepared chocolate.
How to make dessert. Take well-roasted and winnowed cocoa grains (120 g), grind them thoroughly, add 30 grams of vanilla, 30 grams of cinnamon powder, 2.5 grams of liquid amber and 30 grams of powdered sugar. Mix everything well and put the prepared pasta into a socket. This dish raised not only the creative, but also the sexual spirit of the writer.
In one sitting, Dumas could eat 2 plates of botvina, a pig with porridge, a pie and fried mushrooms.
Minestrone by Leonardo
The unforgettable genius of the Renaissance, Leonardo, was unpretentious in food, preferring vegetarian food. Therefore, his diet most often consisted of fresh tomatoes, zucchini, cabbage, carrots and parmesan - foods that stimulate brain function. Da Vinci's favorite dish was vegetable minestrone soup, which, oddly enough, he became addicted to in early childhood.
The classic Florentine minestrone is full of vegetables and yet thick and filling. First, boil 1.5 cups of dry white beans in salted water for two hours. Remove half the beans, rub them through a sieve and return to the pan. Pour into another pan sunflower oil and lightly fry the garlic-onion mixture in it. Then dilute 2 tbsp. l. tomato paste V small quantity Pour water into the pan. We also send chopped vegetables here one by one: a head of cabbage, carrots, a couple of zucchini and leeks. Lastly, add half a glass of rice or short durum wheat pasta. The finishing touch is a spicy mixture of basil, rosemary, mint and salt. Minestrone is cooked for no longer than half an hour over low heat, after which it is immediately served.
Poetic potato from Pushkin
The sun of Russian poetry devoted himself to gastronomic pleasures without reserve. However, Pushkin was in no hurry to sign up as a gourmet, preferring to dine for a long time and on a grand scale without false modesty. Many friends called the poet a terrible glutton. Once, getting hungry on the road, Alexander Sergeevich deigned to buy a couple of dozen peaches, which were immediately destroyed in one sitting. After which half a dozen soaked apples suffered the same fate.
Pushkin's taste preferences were entirely given to Russian country cuisine. His favorite dishes were thick cabbage soup and green soup with boiled eggs, chopped cutlets with sorrel and spinach, peasant porridge, botvinya with sturgeon, and crumbly pancakes made from mashed beets. But the poet’s soul especially froze at the sight of baked potatoes, which he could happily eat several times a day. They prepared it according to a special recipe: together with the peel, they rolled it in coarse salt and baked it in a Russian oven, hiding it deeper in the ash. For dessert, Alexander Sergeevich loved to indulge in white gooseberry jam.
Gogol's sweet inspiration
But Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, although he enthusiastically praised the irresistible Rus'-three, gravitated towards Italian cuisine. Having lived in Rome for several years, he was forever captivated by the tastes and aromas of local cuisine. Most of all, the writer loved traditional pasta. As usual, I prepared it myself, adding a fair amount of butter to the pasta and covering it with a mountain of grated Parmesan. Gogol also had a childish, sincere passion for various sweets. Therefore, his pockets were never full of sweets, gingerbread cookies and bagels, which he endlessly feasted on and treated to his friends. In the writer's house, no matter where he was, there was always tea. And as if by magic, buns, cookies and rolls always appeared from somewhere along with a cup of hot aromatic drink. Probably, sweets gave the writer inspiration for writing his immortal creations.
Dali's Garlic Madness
His Majesty the king of shocking Salvador Dali dreamed of becoming a chef since childhood, he told about this in his memoirs. And the fact that in his entire life he had never learned to cook did not bother him at all. The eccentric artist expressed his personal taste preferences in an abstract formula: “I only eat what keeps its shape. My mind rejects everything else.” Based on these considerations, spinach, “a grass like freedom, limp and boneless,” was included in the list of hated foods. But the restless genius’s favorite dish was garlic soup.
First, peel the head of garlic without breaking it into cloves. In this form, wrap it in foil, having previously greased it olive oil. Bake the garlic at 180 degrees for half an hour. Then we pass it through a garlic squeezer. Next, fry the onion rings in oil, add potatoes and fill everything with pre-prepared vegetable broth. When the potatoes become soft, add the garlic pulp, pour 100 ml of milk into the pan and beat with a blender. Now put the pan on the fire again and add 200 ml of cream, stirring constantly, but without bringing to a boil. The best addition to this soup would be garlic croutons.
Agatha, nicknamed Gargantua
The queen of the detective genre, Agatha Christie, was not only distinguished outstanding talent, but also an indomitable appetite. If she had a chance to participate in any gastronomic competition, she would undoubtedly win first prize. According to the writer, as a little girl, she competed in “digestive prowess” along with adults. Young Agatha, together with one of the guests, could deal with roast turkey, a couple of pieces of beef fillet, tamping them down with a complex dessert of plum pudding, sweet pie, cookies and a generous portion of fruit. The rest of the evening was devoted to chocolate and candies, with which they barely had time to fill the vases on the table in the living room. Christie’s favorite treat was cream, which she consumed in mind-boggling quantities, even in old age. It is surprising that despite all this, the writer never experienced stomach problems and remained invariably a slender and attractive woman.
Surely, some of the dishes offered will suit your taste, especially since preparing them will not be difficult. Who knows, maybe there really is a piece of genius hidden in them.
