Сок и пастила из урожая фермерских яблок

What does “пастила” mean in Russian?

Пастила looks like it might be the same thing as a French pastille — but it is not. A French pastille is a small hard lozenge. Russian пастила is a soft, airy block made by whipping cooked apple purée with egg whites and drying it slowly in layers. The result sits somewhere between a marshmallow and a fruit leather: naturally fruity, melt-in-your-mouth, and one of Russia’s oldest sweets.

The word shares a Latin root (pastillus, “small loaf”) with the French term, which explains the spelling overlap — but centuries of separate development produced completely different things. Russian пастила goes back centuries — references reach to the 15th–16th century, and it appears in the old Domostroi household manual — and was traditionally made from tart, pectin-rich Antonov apples; the town of Kolomna became especially famous for it. In the clip, a farmer explains the season’s apple harvest will go into juice and пастила — “из яблочного пюре делается” (“it’s made from apple purée”) — a neat one-sentence definition from the source.