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Coulibac
(Russia.) Make a paste as for baba pudding or Savarin, and roll it very thin. Cut into a large square, fill it with a forcemeat of veal, rice, eggs, herbs, butter, stock, and mushrooms, and roll it up like jelly cake. Dust the top with crumbs, and bake it 1 hour. Serve with hot wine sauce, in slices.
A compressed sketch of Russian kulebiaka, written for a cook who already knew how to build a forcemeat and handle yeast dough. The proportions are entirely left to you, so treat this as a method rather than a formula.
- Cook the filling firstThis is the hinge. Ground veal, rice and mushrooms bound with stock and egg will not reliably cook through inside a sealed dough case, and a wet raw filling steams the crumb into paste. Sweat the mushrooms and herbs in butter, cook the veal through, fold in cooked rice and hard-boiled egg, moisten sparingly with stock, then chill the mixture firm before it goes near the pastry.
- Baba or savarin pasteBoth are rich yeast doughs; savarin batter as usually made is far too slack to roll. Use the stiffer end of the family, closer to a brioche — flour, yeast, eggs, butter, a little milk — kneaded, risen once, then rolled. Chilling the risen dough makes it manageable.
- "Roll it very thin"Roll as thin as the dough will take without tearing; the book asks for a large square, though a rectangle gives the roll more turns. Leave a clear border, and set the finished roll seam side down.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 375F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then 350F for the rest of the hour. A loaf this size wants the filling at 165F at the centre.
- Steam ventsCut two or three slits along the top before baking. Enclosed yeast dough over a moist filling will otherwise split along the seam and empty itself onto the sheet.
- The crumbsDry fine breadcrumbs; they will hold better over an egg wash, though the book says only to dust the top. Crumbs scattered over the filling itself will absorb stray juices.
- Hot wine sauceIn books of this kind 'wine sauce' is often the sweet pudding sauce, but with a veal forcemeat a savoury version reads better: a reduced stock with white wine finished with butter, or a light velouté. The book leaves it to the cook.
- YieldThe book gives no quantities. At a working scale of roughly a pound of dough to a pound and a half of filling, the roll cuts into eight to ten thick slices. Let it rest 15 minutes before slicing or it collapses.
Coulibiac is the French spelling of the Russian kulebiaka, a long enclosed pie of yeast dough that appears in Russian cookery well before it reached Western tables, most often filled with salmon or sturgeon, buckwheat or rice, hard-boiled egg and mushrooms, and sometimes layered with thin pancakes to keep the crust dry. Its passage into French and then Anglo-American kitchens is usually credited to nineteenth-century professional cooks who worked for Russian patrons, Carême among them, though that line of descent is more often repeated than documented. What is clear is the abbreviated form seen here — a veal forcemeat standing in for the fish, and the dough described only by reference to another recipe in the same book.