сметана

Smetana is a cultured cream product made by fermenting cream with lactic acid bacteria until it thickens and develops a mild, tangy flavor. It differs from Western sour cream in fat content and texture: traditional smetana runs 20 to 30 percent fat and has a looser, more pourable consistency than the thicker American product. It is used as a condiment on borscht, as a sauce base for stroganoff, as a topping for blini, and as an ingredient in pastry doughs across Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

The word traces to Proto-Slavic sъmětana, built from the prefix sъ- meaning together or from above, and the verb mětati meaning to throw, to sweep, or to cast. The image at the core of the word is skimming: drawing a spoon across the surface of settled milk and sweeping the fat layer upward and off. This is still exactly how traditional smetana is begun, by letting raw milk stand until the cream rises, then collecting it before fermentation.

The first written record of smetana in a culinary sense appears in medieval Slavic manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where it is listed alongside other dairy products as a fasting food, permitted during Lent in the Orthodox calendar. The Russian Orthodox church's dietary rules distinguished between flesh, fish, and dairy; smetana fell in the permissible column on many fast days, which may have contributed to its centrality in Russian cooking. Monasteries were among the early producers, keeping dairy herds and trading cultured cream to nearby towns.

Commercial production of smetana in Russia began in the nineteenth century, when Moscow and St. Petersburg dairy cooperatives bottled and delivered it alongside milk. Soviet food authorities codified smetana into official grades by fat content in the 1930s, and the product became a standard line in every state grocery store. Post-Soviet Russia opened the market to Western sour cream imports, but the word smetana remains the standard term across all Slavic-speaking countries.