Traditional food of the Tomsk region Ukrainians: dynamics in time and space

The article analyzes one of the most stable components of ethnic culture - food. The research subject is the traditional cuisine of post-reform resettlers from Ukraine, who have settled in the territory of modern Tomsk region at the close of the 19th century. The field materials collected by the authors in 2009-2010 in the specified territory were sources for the article. The analysis is based on comparative-typological and system approaches. The first allows tracing the dynamics of the analyzed components - food sources, ways of obtaining and processing them, dishes (everyday, festal and ritual), meals, food bans. The second involves analyzing the components, considering their interrelationships and identifying the basic characteristics for the nutrition system. It is compared with the traditional food of the second half of the 18th-20th centuries, characteristic of the maternal culture in Ukraine. It is concluded that the main features of Ukrainian culture in the field of food turned out to be reproduced by post-reform resettlers in a new habitat - on the territory of the Tomsk region. This applies to basic components (flour and vegetable) and a set of products (grains of rye, millet, wheat, cabbage, potatoes, beets, carrots, poppy, pumpkin, beans, peas and other vegetables, pork and fat, milk, sour cream, cottage cheese, hempseed, linseed and sunflower oil), methods of processing (boiling, bratting, baking), and dishes (borsch with pampushkas, vareniki, vinaigrette, boiled potatoes, sprinkled with vegetable oil, salted bacon, sausages, kendyuh, jelly, buns, loaves, pies). The most significant changes in the traditional cuisine consisted in the disappearance from the nutrition of fruit, the strengthening of the role of the meat component and the reduction of ritual dishes due to the significant sequestration of the ritual sphere itself. Comparative analysis within the framework of the Siberian region at the local level allowed to talk about two variants of the nutrition system of post-reform Ukrainians of settlers - Tomsk and Omsk. Their differences are in the component composition (respectively flour-vegetable-meat and grain-meat-dairy), a greater variety of everyday and festal ritual dishes at the latter. The dynamics of the food traditions of the Ukrainians of the Tomsk region is shown in time, their practical disappearance by the middle of the 20th century, caused by socioeconomic cataclysms, and partial reconstruction in the 1960s-1970s was noted. The memorial character of the existence of Ukrainian cuisine in modern times and, at the same time, the preservation of the most important function of an ethnocultural marker for Ukrainians is underlined.

Keywords

Authors

References