We got a bit carried away at a cranberry festival a few weeks back. So I've been on the lookout for recipes that use them in new and interesting ways. But I was pretty surprised when, reading my favorite Russian cookbook for something else, I came upon recipes for not one, but two Russian cranberry desserts, kissel and klyukvenniy muss.

I had always thought of cranberries as being uniquely American, but it turns out that there are several different species of cranberries, and they can be found across almost the entire Northern Hemisphere, which, of course, includes Russia. (If you want to see pictures of cranberries being harvested in Russia, click here.)

Kissel and klyukvenniy muss have a lot in common. For both, you turn the whole cranberries into juice, sweeten them a bit and then thicken them to turn them into something with the consistency of pudding.

It's pretty easy to turn whole cranberries into juice. In fact, I wouldn't recommend trying to make either dessert with store-bought cranberry juice unless you know that it is 100% cranberry juice. All you do is put the berries into a saucepan with water (more for kissel, less for klyukvenniy muss) and let them cook over medium heat for a few minutes until the berries pop. You then need to mash and strain the berries, which is a lot easier if you have a device that Italians call a passatelli. Save the juice and toss the skins into the composter.

For kissel, the thickener of choice is generally potato flour or potato starch; klyukvenniy muss uses cream of wheat cereal (not the instant kind!). But the really interesting thing is what happens when you put the thickener in. To make kissel, you wisk in the potato flour. It thickens things up, but stays a bit soupy. With klyukvenniy muss, you wisk in the cream of wheat and then whip the whole thing with an electric beater until it's really fluffy and sets up just like a pudding. I liked it a lot.

There are a lot of kissel recipes floating around the Internet, including a nice recipe for an apple-cranberry kissel over on the Food Network site. Interestingly enough, the paragraph introducing the recipe says it was created for a "Food 911" episode in which Tyler Florence shows a family that adopted two children from Russia how to cook for them!

Alas, for klyukvenniy muss, you're going to improvise. I got my recipe from "Please To The Table" and there don't appear to be any recipes for it online. But from comparing that recipe to the kissel recipes, I can tell you that if you take a kissel recipe, use slightly less water to make the cranberries pop and then use the same amount of cream of wheat as the kissel recipe calls for in potato flour, you'll be well on your way.

Image, credit: Cranberry plant, Wikimedia Commons