Nobody knows exactly when the Russian dish okroshka first appeared, though some experts claim that this dish is one of the oldest in Russian, and that it’s at least 1,000 years old! Kvas with black bread and onion was always a stable for the common folk in the summer and during religious fasts. It’s thought that the history of okroshka began with these ingredients as the base. Everything edible that the mistress of the house had stocks of went into the mix. Pickles, vegetables and spicy herbs. They began adding radish and potato in the 19th century. Back then, meat was another ingredient in the dish. This peasant dish went on to become popular among the aristocracy, and the upper classes put their own twist on the traditional variant, adding domesticated fowl, wild fowl and pork. There have been many changes to the dish over the centuries. Today, every family has its own recipe for okroshka. In this episode of the Geography of Taste, Igor Vukolov will be presenting his own version of this Russian classic.