For the foreign languages holiday celebration, I was planning on bringing these:
I don’t know what to call them in English but they are made of a mix of ground chicken and turkey meat, some cous cous boiled in milk, an egg, some garlic, etc. We call them “kotlety.” A colleague warned me, however, that people at these parties eschew anything that is not very familiar to them.
I wonder what the purpose of conducting a foreign languages party is if all people want to have is pizza. Of course, I will be happy to eat my own kotlety if they are not wanted by others.
Clarissa's Blog 
I would be happy to join in and eat all of them! I adore kotlety, and I pity those who prefers pizza and burgers to this delicious food!
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The cognate would seem to be ‘cutlet’ which is not a perfect translation, but not bad. I remember them from Poland I think.
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This is a false cognate because these are very different from cutlets. I didn’t know this when I moved to Canada and suffered a huge disappointment when I ordered a cutlet and was brought a North American type of cutlet. š
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I grew up eating these. Except for ours would normally be made from beef. My family also added green onions. (And my grandmother also made a version from white fish.) I loved them. I think they are a familiar enough flavor that most people will like them. They are sort of like meatballs…which everyone loves.
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How cool is this? š
I make them from a mixture of beef, pork and veal, and those are really great, too.
And I make the fish ones, which are sensational.
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How would that be in Russian or Ukrainian? ŠŗŠ¾ŃŠ»ŠµŃŃ ? ŠŗŠ¾ŃŠ»ŠµŃŠø ?
In Poland they’re called kotlety mielone (ground cutlets) though usually made out of pork or beef and pork together and bread soaked in milk rather than couscous.
I’m pretty sure they’re ultimately related to Turkish kƶfte (Bulgarian ŠŗŃŃŃŠµ, Romanian chifte) but adapted to more northern ingredients just as cabbage roles are mostly likely a northern version of dolma.
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Yes, ŠŗŠ¾ŃŠ»ŠµŃŃ.
I love Turkish food with a profound passion precisely because it feels somehow very familiar.
You are right that one is supposed to soak bread in milk for the original recipe but the bread we get here (and which seems made of rubber) doesn’t work for that purpose. So I came up with the idea to use cous cous.
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These definitely look far more delicious than chiftele. Possibly because they don’t seem fried to burnination, as the most popular chiftele-cooking method around here requires (the regionalism used for chiftele in my area, parjoale, is related to the world you’d use for burning a field to the ground, for example). Clarissa, if I may ask, how’d you cook these? Are they fried, baked or something else?
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These are fried but I don’t like them very dark so I take them off the fire when I know they are cooked inside. They remain big and plump when done this way.
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Never encountered (or heard of) these before, but I’d eat them! Are they baked or fried?
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…just found the “recipe” section of the blog. I’d love to have a recipe for these–and the Ho Chi Minh cake you mentioned in an earlier post.
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Done! š
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Thanks! And the cake?
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The problem with the cake is that it requires a very specific brand of Russian cookies and tvorog. Maybe I should post a recipe of how to make tvorog because it is delicious, very healthy, and can be used for many great recipes.
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