Hot street drink served from samovars and winter stalls
Sbiten, hot honey drink for the St. Petersburg winters
DrinkReconstruction🍯 🌶️facile25 min
A piping hot infusion of honey and spices (ginger, cinnamon, clove), a popular Russian drink before tea, warming the icy streets of the imperial capital.
Why this dish? Fleeing the Revolution, Vigée Le Brun spent six years in Russia (1795–1801), showered with honors at the court of Catherine II and then Paul I. In the cold of St. Petersburg, *sbiten* — a hot drink of honey and spices sold by vendors in the frozen streets — warmed both high and low.
Never had I known winters like those of St. Petersburg, where the cold seizes you to the bone. In the very streets, one drank a hot liquor of honey and spices that vendors carried in great steaming copper vessels. I often took some to warm my fingers before taking up the brush again: it was sweet, burning, all perfumed with ginger and clove. This drink of the Russian people seemed to me more helpful, in that cold, than all the wines of France.
Ingredients
- •Honey — several spoonfuls (base sweetness)
- •Water — a large pot (infusion)
- •Ginger — a piece (warm spice)
- •Cinnamon — a stick (flavor)
- •Clove — a few (flavor)
- •Bay leaf — one (aromatic note (optional))
How it was made : Sbiten was the popular hot drink of Russia in the 18th century, before tea from the samovar supplanted it in the 19th. Sold by *sbitenshchiki* in copper containers, it blended honey and spices, sometimes with added herbs. It was the comforting drink of the snowy streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Sources : Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, *Souvenirs* (1835–1837) · 18th-century Russian culinary traditions (sbiten)