Pozharsky Cutlet

Pushkin wrote a verse letter to a friend in 1826 advising him to dine at Pozharsky's in Torzhok and try the fried cutlets, and the recommendation attached itself to the dish permanently. Darya Pozharskaya ran the coaching inn on the Moscow to St Petersburg road, and the cutlet made there is minced chicken with butter worked through it, shaped, coated in coarse cubed bread rather than fine crumbs, and fried, so the crust is spiky and the inside stays wet from the butter. The usual story is that the family switched from veal to chicken when a traveller demanded a veal cutlet and there was none in the house, which is the sort of story that attaches to dishes and is not documented. It became a standard of Russian restaurant cooking, appears in Soviet canteens in degraded form, and is still made properly in Torzhok, where the inn building survives.

What you actually see

• The cubed crust - coarse bread cubes rather than fine crumbs, giving a spiky coating.
• The butter - worked through the minced chicken so the inside stays wet.
• Pushkin's verse - the 1826 letter that recommended the dish and made its name.
• The inn building - Pozharsky's coaching house, still standing in Torzhok.

When to go

All year. A meal. Torzhok restaurants make it as a local speciality.

Honest expectations

The version served in most places nationally is an ordinary breaded chicken patty and bears little relation to the original. The Torzhok inn building is not a working restaurant of that name. Quality varies sharply even in the town. It is a rich dish.

Nearby

Torzhok's Lvov buildings and the Boris and Gleb monastery are in the same town.