How to decorate the table for Shrovetide?

Many traditions of the wonderful and cheerful Cheese Week have already been forgotten, but a meager or generous, picturesque or simply decorated treat determines the mood of the whole holiday. This is prosperity and prosperity that awaits the hostess until the end of the current year. According to the old custom, they still pay great attention to this, decorate the table with imagination and love.

In different versions, you can find tips for decorating a table in the traditional Russian style - with wooden or ceramic painted dishes, with a white tablecloth and knitted napkins. However, this is not a prerequisite, especially if there is nothing similar at home. Any beautiful dinner service, rich dishes, tin trays, porcelain rusks, rosettes and sauce bowls will be useful for Shrovetide treats.

Since pancakes are an obligatory treat, a special setting is meant, in which there are several obligatory items.

1. Beautiful jugs or decanters for berry compotes, honey sbitn, lemonade, herbal tea, honey drinks and pair with them - glasses of the same style. If the jug is made of ceramics, mugs are served; the same glasses are appropriate for the crystal decanter. You can pour sbiten at the already set table - then a special device for pouring is required for it. If alcohol is supposed, then vodka is in a decanter, and the glasses are tiny - no meat is eaten during Cheese Week, and alcohol should also be in limited quantities.
2. Sockets with measuring spoons. They are served in sets and in different sizes. For ghee and caviar - less.Snacks that are used as pancake filling are placed on larger plates.
3. An indispensable decoration of the table is clay products, a well-polished samovar (in the old style or modern), a bouquet of flowers (you can real or connected, sewn with your own hands), in the evening - floating candles or one candle in a candlestick.
4. If there are no pancakes in the house, dishes with handles, trays or plates with rounded edges will also work.

If the house has neither special, nor Russian-style, or even just festive dishes (there are different things in life), take any. The main decoration will be pancakes - multi-colored, lacy, folded in a special way into beautiful figures, decorated with berries, powdered sugar, herbs. A bouquet of flowers or a beautiful candle is enough to create the appropriate mood. Additional accessories are also of great importance.

Social media users offer non-trivial and unique options on how to decorate the table for Shrovetide. This does not require special talents - only knowledge of folk traditions, the basic principles of festive decoration and vivid imagination. Pancake design assumes natural fabrics, but not necessarily purchased products.

The pancake decor will look especially beautiful on a white or flower-embroidered tablecloth, knitted from squares, linen with hemstitch. A festive table covered with homespun linen with earthenware, cotton or linen towels of a rough, unbleached texture is no worse.

Pancake decor is not just a separate kind of folk art. Rather, it is a special kind of art in which a lot depends on the skill of the hostess. It is not for nothing that on Maslenitsa it is customary to bake a huge number of pancakes and, according to the way they are baked, determine their future. On Mother-in-law's day, the well-being of a young family depends on the quality of baking, and on a narrow Maslenitsa (on Monday), the further well-being of the family depends on how the first pancakes are baked, which the hostess is forbidden to eat.

There are four traditional pancake layouts.

• Traditional - a slide, with a turned-back top edge, triangles on a beautiful dish or rolled into tubes, one on top of the other, in a pyramid.

• A more modern option is a pancake cakewhere the hostess's imagination is not limited, and the top decoration is dictated by the filling. You can bake colored pancakes - food colors or vegetables are used for coloring in different colors: beets, carrots, greens are put in the dough, pomegranate juice is added.

• The original version - pancakes, collected in bagsfilled with filling and tied with green onion feathers. You can make pancake sandwiches with cheese, salad and pickles, roll a donut with a sweet filling, cover with icing or powdered sugar, and sprinkle with whipped cream.

• Compositions are an indispensable master class before Maslenitsa begins. Here the scope for creativity is simply endless - pancakes are laid on plates in the form of flowers and butterflies, funny animals, a smiling sun, landscapes and bouquets. For such a fun process, you can use lace pancakes, which are made by pouring the dough into a pan from a plastic bottle with several medium-sized holes (or one in a cork).

A pancake doll can become a real masterpiece - a dressed up children's toy in a dress and a shawl made of pancakes. In the same way, you can dress up not Spring, which replaces Winter, but a stuffed Madame Shrovetide on the last day of Cheese Week and eat it instead of the traditional burning at the stake.

The original design of the festive table does not necessarily imply traditional Russian-style accessories, although this is a generally accepted option. You can do:

• plates in the form of bouquets;

• a table with ready-made rolls in the form of a barbecue;

• plates of ready-made sandwiches made from small round pancakes on skewers;

• buffet, where everyone takes a pancake, rolled up in an envelope, oyster;

• sliced ​​cake;

• use improvised items - textiles, dishes, toys, nesting dolls, souvenirs, etc.

A visiting fair is a traditional event, a kind of equivalent to the tables previously set on the street for guests and neighbors, where sbiten was served and hot pancakes were served. Since that time, a lot has changed - now for such a table, bagels on a string, nesting dolls, a samovar, cups of tea, caramelized apples, earthenware figurines, candy canes and chocolates have become mandatory attributes. Here are some ingenious examples of how you can make an endlessly attractive holiday table at a traditional fair.

At home, you can give yourself absolute freedom in choosing a festive decor. The main thing is to remember that on the table there should be a lot of pancakes and dishes that come with them, but in no case meat.

How to decorate the table for Shrovetide, see below.