The Soviet Diet Cookbook: exploring life, culture and history – one recipe at a time. Anna Kharzeeva
steak with tea first thing in the morning!
Granny says that in her house, breakfast was most often porridge – my grandfather loved semolina porridge with cherry jam – and lots of bread (again, with jam or salami) and sometimes eggs.
I think I prefer that over tough beef for breakfast, too.
2. A second breakfast.
Zapekanka (fruit & cottage cheese bake)
My second Soviet meal is an important one – the “second” breakfast. Everyone who went to a Soviet or Russian school or kindergarten will always remember it. It was often a zapekanka – anything grated and baked with an egg, accompanied by some bread and milk or tea. This is exactly how the Book describes second breakfast.
For this recipe, the advice in the Book was easy to follow.
The zapekanka I chose is called “zapekanka with fruit, vegetables and cottage cheese.” It sounded fascinatingly weird and not like any zapekanka I’ve ever had. It turns out that the vegetable part is just carrots. The other ingredients are apples, raisins, sugar, spinach and figs.
To me figs are an exotic ingredient and I was most surprised when Granny said: “Figs? Exotic? No… we had lots from Armenia and Azerbaijan – white, purple, whatever you wanted.”
I continued to be surprised when I made the meal and it turned out really nicely. All the ingredients work well together and make a “healthy and tasty” dish indeed.
The only thing I found confusing with this meal is the lack of specific instructions – for instance, after mixing the ingredients, you’re supposed to “bake.” At what temperature? For how long? How will you know it’s ready? This would not fly on any Internet cooking resource or blog, all of which have detailed instructions and often photos to show exactly what you should to do to get the dish to look right at every stage. The lack of instructions is especially confusing considering that the Book is meant to help ‘housewives’ who may not have any experience whatsoever in cooking.
I was also caught off-guard by the “35 grams of carrot” in the ingredient list. I held half a carrot in my hand trying to figure out if it was 15, 20 or 35 grams. If this was what was needed, I would have written “half a big carrot.” I figured that adding half a carrot would be the way to go anyway.
Adding “half an egg” was more challenging. I thought for a second, then went all radical and put in a whole egg. As for the baking itself – it took about 30 minutes on 200C, I kept checking for the zapekanka to cook through and stick together, and it worked out fine.
I do remember seeing kitchen scales in quite a few Soviet kitchens, so that might have been the way to go back in the day. Overall, I doubt the recipe would be called “user-friendly” by a modern marketing specialist.
The ingredient list could be a reflection of how zapekanka was made in early Soviet Russia, when there was “no food,” as Granny put it. You had to use and reuse all the ingredients on hand. Got some boiled rice from the day before and half an apple? Grate the apple, mix it with rice, add some sugar and an egg, and you’ve got yourself a zapekanka! At least, that’s what Munka used to do.
Potatoes, cabbage and pasta can all go into zapekanka. Almost no ingredient has managed to escape inclusion. I think that’s the reason I don’t get excited and starry-eyed when my grandmother invites me over to have zapekanka.
This is also why the recipe from the Book seems so far-fetched: not because the ingredients weren’t available, but because if they were good quality, they probably would have been used for something else.
Granny said that the Book’s zapekanka “looks pretty, tastes very good. It’s very light.” But, she added, “I wouldn’t make it for second breakfast every day – too much work with all the grating and frying!”
Recipe:
100g Apples (about 1);
20g Raisins (a handful);
20g Figs (about 2);
50g Cottage cheese (2 oz);
1 egg; 15g butter (1 Tbsp);
10g sugar (2 Tsp);
5g semolina (1 Tsp);
35g carrots (1/2 carrot);
25g spinach (1 bunch);
30g sour cream (1 oz).
1. Finely chop all vegetables and fruits.
2. Stew carrots with about 10 g water until cooked. Add chopped spinach and stew for 5 minutes, then add chopped apples and figs, 1/2 the egg and mix.
3. Strain cottage cheese, mix with semolina, sugar, the remaining egg and raisins.
4. Grease a baking dish.
5. Alternate layers of cottage cheese and fruit until all ingredients are gone.
6. Even out the top, spray with butter and bake
7. Serve sour cream.
3. After this lunch, who needs dinner. Stuffed eggplant, mushrooms in sour cream, creamed chicken soup and kompot
I remember when I took on this project hoping that all the meals I was going to make would be quick and easy. After all, one of the clearly stated reasons for creating the Book was to let women spend their time on self-education and family.
I guess the authors’ definition of “quick and easy” is different from mine – in part, no doubt, due to general laziness and the ease with which we are used to cooking these days.
The Book has recommended lists of lunch options for winter, spring, summer and fall. The Book’s introduction specifically notes that “you have to keep in mind the influence of the season.”
I chose an autumnal suggestion, as it was fall, and then a Sunday, since this was likely the only I would have time to make four – yes, four! – courses for lunch. I know that traditionally Sunday lunch in many countries was a big meal, but to me, it’s a sandwich, leftovers, or a brunch invitation from friends.
The Book instructs housewives: “before starting to make lunch, breakfast or dinner, one must estimate by what hour they should be ready, and count how long the meal will take to prepare.”
In contrast to my typical lunch, the Soviet lunch took just under two hours to make and included baked mushrooms with cheese, baked eggplant with vegetable stuffing, cream of chicken soup and the omnipresent apple kompot, which is a drink made out of fruit, berries or dried fruit, and served as juice, with some fruit at the bottom of the glass.
Here it also should be noted that my cooking time was no doubt helped by my well-equipped, enormous 9.5-square-meter kitchen. For comparison, Granny’s Soviet-era kitchen is about 4.5 square meters.
Nevertheless, in this space, she manages to cook for any number of people and also seat and feed three. The kitchen still feels palatial to her since until the 1960s she shared a kitchen with four other families in a communal apartment, a kommunalka.
“The house belonged to a merchant before the revolution,” Granny said, remembering the apartment where she lived for 27 years. “It had one-and-a-half floors, and each was turned into a separate kommunalka. There were five families in ours, including a former countess who lived in the entryway, sharing one kitchen, no fridge, one toilet and one sink. Before World War II, we used a primus stove [a kind of burner heated by compressed kerosene], and after the war we had gas stoves, which were fabulous. Our neighbor, an old lady from a village, would gasp each time she walked into the kitchen: ‘Thank you Comrade Stalin for providing us with gas!’