Boron Elgar > wrote:

> There is a Russian dish, koulebiaka, or the French coulibiac, that is
> a long sort of salmon pie. Quite a nice dish, actually.

Indeed, it can be... only it is not specifically a salmon or even just a
fish pie. It can have any filling, which is supposed to be complex,
with the layers sometimes separated by thin blinchiki/crêpes. In fact,
it is this complex filling that makes the pie a kulyebyaka. Sometimes,
a kulyebyaka is rectangular, with various fillings in each of its
corners. Gogol, unmatched in his food descriptions, has a character in
Dead Souls order such a kulyebyaka. Here is a not-so-good translation
by Darra Goldstein.

"And bake us a four-cornered fish pie," he said, sucking the air through
his teeth and inhaling deeply. "In one corner I want you to put the
sturgeon cheeks and the gristle cooked soft, in another throw in some
buckwheat, and then some mushrooms and onions, and some sweet milt, and
the brains, and whatever else, you know the sort of thing. And make
sure that on the one side it's - you know - a nice golden brown, but not
so much on the other side. And the pastry - make sure it's baked
through, till it just crumbles away, so that the juices soak right
through, do you see, so that you don't even feel it in your mouth - so
it just melts like snow." As he said all this, Petukh kept smacking and
sucking his lips.

The "fish-pie" is actually "kulyebyaka" in the original, and the
ridiculous "gristle" is "viziga", dried spinal chord of the sturgeon.

Victor