The Soviet Diet Cookbook: exploring life, culture and history – one recipe at a time. Anna Kharzeeva
the layers. The top of the cake can be covered with glaze and decorated with more jam, berries, candied fruit or nuts. Cut into thin slices with a sharp knife.
Granny’s biskvit:
5—6 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup mix of flour and cocoa or ground coffee
Mix 5 big or 6 small eggs with a cup of sugar using an electric mixer. Slowly add 1 cup of flour and cocoa, ground coffee or anything else you’d like to add. You can make half a batch with cocoa, and half plain and combine them in a baking mold. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, first at 180C and then at 160. Leave until almost cool in the oven with a slightly open oven door.
15. The Caucasian answer to long winter nights. Bouzbash (lamb soup)
There are a lot of Soviet meals I’ve eaten but have never cooked, and there are a few Soviet meals I know well and have prepared, but this time I’m up against a meal I’ve not only never made or tried – I’ve barely even heard of it.
It’s bouzbash from the Caucasus country of Azerbaijan: lamb soup with apples, peas, potatoes and tomato sauce. Part of me wonders if perhaps there’s a good reason why I haven’t crossed paths with this Soviet delight. But another part of me has a lot of faith in the cuisine of the Caucasus, which is generally spicy and exciting.
The bouzbash turned out fine – not delicious, but edible – and it seems to me that the recipe could be somewhat improved. I found a recipe online that suggests adding chickpeas instead of green peas and tomatoes instead of tomato puree. They sound like worthy adjustments.
One of the problems with the bouzbash, as with all lamb-based meals, is that it’s hard to get decent lamb in Moscow.
As for the other ingredients, they are easily available, except for uncooked peas. I was excited about going old school and boiling the peas, but was hit by reality: you can’t find uncooked peas anymore – they just come in cans.
It was a very different situation in the days when my grandmother was young: “During World War II, we kids would heat up the peas on a hot frying pan on an oven so they would get easier to chew. We would carry them around in our pockets and snack on them as if they were sunflower seeds or nuts. This was on top of lots of peas we were getting in soups and porridges, too. We had peas during the war, and nothing else,” Granny said.
Granny’s friend Valentina Mikhailovna also remembered that her mother knew a pre-Revolutionary recipe for pea kissel (a kind of drink) served with hemp oil. They also made rye pirogi with a filling of onions and peas.
As for lamb, in those days, you could find it at the kind of markets we would call a farmer’s market today. Granny called them “an island of capitalism, where you could find almost anything and haggle over the price. You could also buy as much as you wanted, unlike in shops where there could be a ‘1 unit per person’ limit, like in the 1960s and 1970s, when food was in short supply.”
I’m glad I discovered this lamb meal, and, although we don’t have a huge amount of lamb to choose from, it will certainly go over well on a cold winter night, especially when everyone’s recovering from the New Year celebrations.
Recipe:
For 500 grams of lamb – one cup of split peas, 500 grams of potatoes, two apples, two onions, two tablespoons of tomato puree and butter.
Cut or chop up the washed lamb into 30-40-gram pieces. Place them into a pot, fill it with water so that the water covers the lamb, salt it and cover the pot with a lid. Simmer on a low heat, removing the froth.
In a separate pot, boil the washed and sorted out peas in 2—3 cups of cold water and simmer on a low heat. After about 1—1.5 hours, place the boiled pieces of lamb into the pot with the peas, removing the small bones.
Afterwards, add the strained broth, the finely chopped and fried onion, the sliced potatoes and apples, the tomato puree, salt, pepper and, covering the pot with a lid, stew for 20—25 minutes.
16. The tasty solution for leftover cottage cheese. Tvorozhniki/syrniki
This breakfast is dedicated to tvorog – a type of cottage cheese or curd that is very widely used in Russia. It is eaten for breakfast, used in desserts and stuffed into dumplings and pies.
Tvorog attracts a lot of respect in Russia. Being able to intelligently discuss the best ways of eating it, how to choose the best type and knowing how to prepare it will all get you a raise of the eyebrows and an approving nod of the head. Which is why I’m surprised that one of the most popular breakfast options made with tvorog is known as “syrniki” – literally, cheese things – as opposed to “tvorozhniki” – cottage-cheese things. I was pleased to find out that the Book calls them “tvorozhniki,” although it obviously didn’t catch on among the wider public.
Usually considered too good a product to be used in cooking, tvorog is often eaten by itself with sour cream and jam, so I suspect syrniki might have been invented as a means to use up tvorog that was already too old to be consumed uncooked. Nothing – let alone food – gets thrown out much in Russia. This cultural tendency definitely comes from the older generation who had to hold on to everything they had, whether it was old dairy products or candy wrappers.
Granny tells me that there was a joke in Soviet times referring to the “throwing out” of food – the verb used for “to throw out” and “to deliver to the shop in limited quantities to sell” was the same – vykinut’. In the joke, a foreigner and a Russian are standing by a store, and the Russian says: “look, they delivered some food!” to which the foreigner replies: “Yes, we throw out food of this sort, too.”
It seems like there was plenty of irony and general understanding that the way things were in the Soviet Union was far from perfect. For instance, all packaged foods had to have an official sticker known as a GOST sticker, which indicated that the food was made according to state standards. And the very best of each type of food would get an additional stamp shaped like a hexagon saying “znak kachestva” (assurance of quality). Factories would compete for this stamp, and considered it a big deal to have one of those on their cheese, tvorog, chocolate or tea.
The people, however, seemed far less excited about it. Among the general public, “znak kachestva” sarcastically became known as “we couldn’t do better if we tried.” I asked Granny if she would choose tvorog or other foods based on the hexagon stamp. She said she never did – she just bought whatever was available and affordable. If there was more than one type, then she’d choose by the region it came from. “Like now I choose dairy from New Zealand or France,” she said, before remembering about the ban on the import of many foreign foods that was issued in August 2014. “…Well, I did, when it was still there. Now I go for Belarusian products.”
I think I chose the wrong type of tvorog for my syrniki, as they turned out rubbery. The right type of cottage cheese should be quite wet and high in fat. My friend Vlad made some for me recently and he said about a pound of tvorog, 1 egg and 4 tablespoons flour is the right proportion. His tvorozhniki were perfect, so I’ll stick to his recipe from now on. See his recipe below.
The challenge now is to resist the temptation to throw my tvorozhniki out and maybe find a way to re-cook them (something Granny would certainly do), and not to blame my poor choice on the absence of a hexagon stamp!
Recipe:
500 grams tvorog (cottage cheese);
½ cup sour cream; 1 egg;
2 tbsp butter; 2 tbsp