The Soviet Diet Cookbook: exploring life, culture and history – one recipe at a time. Anna Kharzeeva
grandmother, however, couldn’t look less interested. She lives on the 5th floor of a building with no elevator, and I thought she might be happy to have food delivered so quickly and easily. But she says she prefers to pick out her groceries herself.
A lot has changed since she was young. When she was my age, she had to procure each and every ingredient and carry it up the same five flights of stairs. As a young woman, her two-room apartment was home to herself, her daughter, her husband and her mother. Granny lived with her mother and their other family members until her mother died at the age of almost 105. For about 30 of those years, they shared an apartment – and one kitchen – with six other families.
Like practically every Soviet woman, she had a copy of the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food, although teaching at a school and sourcing ingredients didn’t leave much time for cooking.
The same Book of Healthy and Tasty Food still occupies a proud place on my grandmother’s bookcase, although when I pulled it out in summer 2014 to start the project of cooking my way through it – with my grandmother’s advice – it was quite dusty. I was very curious to see how this famous book stood the test of time. Will the recipes be something I want to eat? WIll its instructions for young housewives of the past still make sense today? What will Granny have to say about it?
It was a fascinating read. I was born in the Soviet Union – albeit only five years before it ceased to exist – and all my life I heard about the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food from my mother and grandmother, but never had really looked into it. As I learned during the course of the project, it was the foundation for the cooking I grew up with.
My grandmother’s table always involved a lot of soups – ones using fresh ingredients rather than fried ones, as many Russians do – porridges, baked pies (pirozhki) and vegetables, with the occasional serving of fried potatoes and sour cream. And dill and parsley were always on the table. Dessert was sponge cake with apples or cherries. Growing up, I never noticed that dessert was always the same – my Australian husband had to point it out to me.
The Book, as it was popularly known, and as I called it during the project, features more than 1,000 recipes and includes not only classic Russian dishes, but also Uzbek, Georgian and Ukrainian meals – after all, it was a book for the entire Soviet Union! During the course of the project, I made over 80 of these meals, trying my hand at Russian meals, “ethnic foods” from the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as recipes from the sections “for children” and “for illness.”
The Book of Healthy and Tasty food is not just a cookbook, though, and during the project, I learned more than how to make Soviet meals. The goal of the Book was to explain to every Soviet woman everything she needed to know about food. It’s a guide to understanding nutritional values of food, working out a meal plan, cooking and setting a table. The book is, like any Soviet state-run project, is as much a propaganda piece as it is a cookbook.
It’s clear that the authors of the book saw food primarily as a source of nutrition – they explain how food is key to good health, increasing work productivity and a longer life. The authors also say that the aim of the new socialist assembly lines, which produced many of these new ingredients, was to liberate women from the “hard and thankless” work of preparing meals.The enjoyment of food or its preparation was not a priority and yet, as I came to discover, the sourcing and preparation of food still required a great deal of time and effort.
This matched up with my grandmother’s experience as well.
“There used to be no food in shops,” Granny said. “There were ready-made food departments in restaurants where you could buy something. Each workplace had a cafeteria where the employees had lunch, and some places had a fridge with food that would get distributed among the workers. Around the holidays, we could pre-order food, but there wasn’t always enough, and when there wasn’t, there would be a lottery – the lucky ones would end up with grains, red caviar, tea, cookies and salami. There were ‘distribution points’ in special establishments like KGB or the Central Committee – my husband’s friend worked in the Central Committee and he was able to get him vobla [sun-dried fish]. We would wander around shops trying to find anything during work hours – our boss didn’t mind, in fact she said: if you find anything, get some for me, too!”
Over the course of this book, you’ll find me cooking 80 different meals and getting my grandmother’s opinion about each of them – and boy, does the woman have opinions!
Some recipes work well, while others just don’t (at least for me). For every dish I failed at (or failed me) I added a (better) version of the dish provided by my grandmother and her friends.
Come along on this journey as I get out my herring plates, fill up my avos’ka and prepare an edible fur coat. Confused? I’ll try to explain along the way as we explore that mysterious, difficult, bizarre yet fun period of time known as the Soviet Union one recipe at a time.
If you do dare to prepare some of these, let me know by tagging @anna.kharzeeva, and I will send you a medal – or not, depending on how it goes.
Buckle up, comrades, it will be a fun ride!
1. The Soviet breakfast of champions. Fried meat, boiled eggs, bread and cheese
My first Soviet meal really did sound easy and not too time consuming – just like the party line said it should be. According to the instructions, all you need to do is get some meat or fish, fry it, boil a couple of eggs, slice off a piece of bread and cheese and make some tea, coffee or get a glass of milk.
Still less time-consuming is the instruction to “get yogurt out of the fridge,” which is the level of sophistication I’m ready for on a workday morning.
In reality, the fun begins with “just getting some meat” – even now, getting decent meat, especially beef, in Moscow, is not an easy task.
From what I understand, the problem with finding good meat began with Stalin. The Soviet leader got rid of all the beef cattle and decided that dairy cows could be used for both milk and meat. The result was very tough beef that almost always needs tenderizing. Sometimes even slow cooking it doesn’t help – let alone getting a cut decent enough to fry a steak.
There are seven grocery stores within a 10-minute walk from my house, and as far as I know, not one has decent, affordable meat.
But this is nothing compared to Granny’s memories of getting meat during the Soviet times.
“Butchers used to be the richest people in the country. Having the acquaintance of a butcher was priceless,” Granny said. “Butchers used to sell all the meat to ‘their people’ before it hit the shelves – in fact, it was just bones you could find in the shops. My colleague’s mother-in-law was a grocery shop manager, and we used to go to her shop to get meat. But even the shop manager couldn’t be guaranteed a good cut – her success depended on the butcher’s mood.”
This made the carbs-and-protein breakfast completely inaccessible for the average person. Going to the trouble of finding decent meat would have been worth it for a special occasion – much like me going to the best market in town for a leg of lamb – but certainly not for your everyday breakfast.
Fish was more readily available, and there was a selection of red and black caviar, but my great-grandmother, who we called Munka, a single mother who lost her husband in World War II and juggled two part-time jobs in addition to her primary one as a schoolteacher, couldn’t afford the expensive types of fish, and certainly not the caviar.
It sounds like making this “perfect Soviet breakfast” was about as realistic or accessible