Kurabye, Peanut Rings and the Cookies of a Soviet Bakery

A Soviet bakery window did not offer choice in the way a London bakery does. There were a handful of items, they were the same items everywhere, they were made to a written standard, and they cost a fixed price.

What is interesting about that in hindsight is how good some of them were. A system with no competition and no marketing produced several cookies that people still seek out forty years later, and the reason is that the specifications were written by people who knew what they were doing and then not changed for decades.

Kurabye

A piped butter cookie, pale, extremely short, with a spot of jam in the middle. The name comes from the Azerbaijani and Turkish qurabiya, which travelled north through the Caucasus and became a standard item across the whole union.

The texture is the point and it is difficult. A kurabye should collapse in the mouth almost immediately, with no chew at all, which requires a very high proportion of butter to flour and almost no liquid. That makes the dough stiff and hard to pipe, and a piped ridge that holds its shape through baking is the mark of one made properly rather than one slackened with egg to make the bag easier.

The jam is traditionally a sharp one, and the amount is small. It is there to interrupt the butter, not to sweeten it further.

Kurabye Cookies (200g)Kurabye cookies, 200 g. Crumbly piped butter cookies with a strawberry jam centre.£21Order this

Peanut rings

Shortcrust rings coated in roasted chopped peanuts, and the one that Soviet children were most likely to be bought on the way home from school.

They work on contrast. The ring underneath is plain, buttery and not very sweet. The outside is dense with roasted peanut, which is salty and toasty and does most of the flavour work. Bite through both together and it reads as far more complicated than the ingredient list suggests.

Peanuts were one of the few nuts reliably available across the union at a low price, which is why they show up in Soviet baking far more often than almonds or hazelnuts, and why a generation associates them with sweets rather than with savoury food.

Peanut Rings (12 pieces)Peanut rings, twelve pieces. Buttery shortcrust rings coated in roasted peanuts, a Soviet bakery classic.£36Order this

Goose feet, and the ones that did not survive

Not everything from that window deserves reviving.

Goose feet cookies, gusinye lapki, were a folded triangle of dough that looked vaguely like a webbed foot, and they were mostly a way of using scrap pastry. They are pleasant and unremarkable.

The rest of the standard list ran to oatmeal cookies, a sugar biscuit with a stamped pattern, and various things made from the same shortcrust in different shapes. What all of them had in common was that they were dry, keepable, and made to be eaten with tea rather than on their own, and that is the key to the whole category. None of these cookies is trying to be a treat by itself. They are the solid part of a drink.

Our cookies selection

Alongside the traditional ones, we make a selection of four handmade cookies in flavours that owe nothing to any of the above: chocolate, marshmallow, raspberry and pistachio, popcorn and caramel.

These are thick, soft centred, modern cookies, and they are there for a different customer and a different occasion. They are the ones that go into gift boxes for people who did not grow up with kurabye, and they are what a child will choose off a table.

Cookies SelectionHandmade cookies, four pieces to a selection, in the flavours you choose.£18Order this

Building a tea table

The Soviet way of receiving guests was not one cake. It was a table with several small things on it, all dry, all eaten with the hand, replenished as the afternoon went on.

A good version of that from our list: kurabye, peanut rings, oreshki, kartoshka and trubochki, with black tea. It looks generous, it costs less than a large cake, it needs no plates or forks, and nothing on it is ruined if people arrive an hour late.

That last point is worth more than it sounds. A cream cake has a window. A table of dry pastries does not.

Peanut Rings (12 pieces)£36Classic Oreshki with Dulce de Leche£46

Why the imported tins disappoint

Kurabye and peanut rings are both sold in tins and packets in Eastern European shops here, and both suffer in the same way for the same reason.

These are high butter cookies, and butter goes rancid. Not dramatically, and not in a way that makes anything unsafe, but a shortbread that has spent six months in a warm shop develops a faint stale note at the back of the flavour that is very hard to unnotice once you have noticed it.

The industry solution is to use vegetable shortening instead, which is far more stable and which produces a cookie that is technically fine and has almost no flavour of its own. In a kurabye, where butter is most of what you are tasting, that is the whole product gone.

The second problem is that a very short cookie is fragile, so packaged versions are made sturdier. That means more flour, less butter, and a cookie that breaks cleanly rather than collapsing.

A freshly made kurabye that falls apart in your fingers is what the recipe is actually for, and it is not something that can be put in a tin and shipped.

Common questions

What is kurabye?

A very short piped butter cookie with a spot of jam in the centre, common across the former Soviet Union and originally from the Caucasus and Turkey. Ours come as 200 g.

Do the peanut rings contain peanuts?

Yes, roasted peanuts on the outside, and they also contain gluten, eggs and milk. They come as twelve pieces.

Which of your cookies are nut free?

Kurabye is made without nuts, though it is baked in a kitchen that handles them. The cookies selection contains nuts. If there is a serious allergy, message us before ordering.

How long do these keep?

Several days in an airtight box at room temperature, and considerably longer than anything with cream in it. Do not refrigerate them.

Can I mix flavours in the cookies selection?

The selection is ordered by flavour on the product page, so you choose which one you want. Ordering more than one box gives you more than one flavour.

How much should I order for a tea table?

For eight people grazing over an afternoon, two or three boxes of dry pastries plus one more substantial thing is about right.

Ordering in London

All of these are made to order in Belgravia and delivered across London and Surrey. Forty eight hours notice, £12 delivery in central London, £15 elsewhere, and a £50 minimum order.