The Soviet Diet Cookbook: exploring life, culture and history – one recipe at a time. Anna Kharzeeva
cooked, you’re supposed to wrap it with blankets and leave it in a warm place for a few hours. My grandmother would often disappear into the bedroom before serving breakfast or lunch, where she would unwrap a pot of porridge that had been lovingly tucked in her bed. I remember as a child learning that it was important to check the bed for pots before settling in for a nap – it was a mistake you only made once.
In preparing my buckwheat porridge, I went for the simplest version: grechka with butter. It seems like all the ingredients for it should have easily been available in the Soviet era and yes, they were, but mainly in Moscow.
As a typical Muscovite, I tend to forget about the existence of the rest of Russia (of which I am not proud), but while my mother and grandmother are from Moscow, my dad is from Kursk, a city about 525 kilometers (325 miles) south of Moscow, reachable by overnight train.
His mother was born in Moscow, but was evacuated from the city during World War II and wasn’t able to move back, as it was very difficult to get permission to live in Moscow after the war.
The life of my dad’s parents in Kursk was quite different from that of my mom’s parents in Moscow. My Kursk grandparents couldn’t even get such basics as butter, sour cream or salami. So, my Moscow grandparents would go to the train station and bring a package of food to give to the train conductor, which the Kursk grandparents would collect on the other end.
Trains between Moscow and Kursk would leave around midnight and arrive early in the morning, so this transfer of goods naturally required quite an effort from both sides to put that piece of butter on their morning buckwheat porridge.
I can imagine my paternal grandfather on a dark winter morning taking the bus to the train station to pick up the food before going to the local university, where he taught medicine. He probably kept his butter in a fridge at work before he could take it home.
Overall, the distribution of food across the Soviet Union was appalling.
“There were tour buses full of people from other cities pretending to be interested in the Kremlin and Red Square,“Granny said. “They all came to Moscow to shop for food – salami, sausages, tea, everything. All the things they couldn’t get at home. We locals would always be annoyed at the out-of-towners snatching up the last piece of bone with a trace of meat on it in the shop.”
There was even a joke that U.S. President Jimmy Carter asked Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, “How do you distribute food in such a big country?” Brezhnev supposedly replied, “That’s easy. We just bring it all to Moscow and then the people come here and distribute it themselves.”
Another famous Soviet-era joke is about the forbidden books secretly reprinted at home – “samizdat” (which just means self-published in Russian). “Samizdat books would go around town pretty quickly. When you got your copy, you’d read it overnight,” Granny said. She remembers a friend calling her to say he had read the book and was ready to pass it on to her – but of course he couldn’t name the book, so instead he used the code word “grechka.” The conversation went something like: “Hi, so I ate the buckwheat and am now ready to give it to you.”
The grechka I made turned out nicely – although not as good as my grandmother’s: I didn’t have the time to let it steep in warm sheets. It does need a lot of butter, as otherwise it’s very dry. But it doesn’t need stirring – you can just put it in the pot with some water, close the lid and let it simmer on low heat for 15—20 minutes and use the time to read some forbidden (or not) literature.
Recipe:
Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add buckwheat and cook, stirring, until thick – about 15—20 minutes. When the porridge is thick, cover tightly with a lid and remove from heat. Let sit in a warm place 3—4 hours. Add butter before serving.
For 2 cups of uncooked buckwheat, use 3 cups of water, 1 teaspoon salt and 2 tablespoons butter.
Granny’s method:
1 cup buckwheat
2—2.5 cups water (depending on how soft you want it)
30gr butter, or more to taste
Salt to taste
Sift out any bad grains by spreading the kernels evenly on a table. Heat kernels in a pan for 2—3 minutes, stirring to make sure they don’t burn. Add water, bring to boil and reduce to medium to low heat, salt and cover with a lid and leave for about 15 minutes or until all water is absorbed. Add butter. Wrap in your best blankets and leave for a few hours, or at least 30 minutes.
6. A Ukrainian dish no Russian will turn down. Borscht
The week after I made a Soviet classic – grechka – I decided to follow up with another all-time favorite: borscht. Although known as an iconic Russian dish and widely consumed and loved in Russia, borscht is actually Ukrainian – an interesting thing to point out given that I was cooking it about six months into the conflict in eastern Ukraine when tensions between Ukrainians and Russians were extremely high. The Book has two versions of the recipe: “borscht” and “Ukrainian borscht” – the latter distinguished by the inclusion of lard and garlic.
Part of the purpose of the Book was to create a unified cuisine for the Soviet Union, so it incorporated dishes from a number of the republics. I think it would be fair to say that Uzbekistan and Georgia were the main contributors (outside of Russia) to the Soviet diet. Uzbekistan added plov, a dish of rice and meat, and Georgia – shashliki (meat kebabs) and kharcho soup. Cafeterias also played an important role in popularizing these non-Russian dishes across the country, but in slightly “Russified” versions.
Granny remembers discovering the difference between the local recipe for a dish and the Russian one on a visit to Georgia.
“I liked kharcho, so when I went to Georgia I ordered it at a restaurant,” she said. “But when I took one spoonful, it felt like my mouth was on fire – I couldn’t swallow it. When the waiter realized what the problem was he said: ‘ahhh, from Moscow! Then go to the Intourist cafeteria – they have some Moscow-style kharcho without the pepper.’”
“Russifying” meals is still very big in Moscow, especially with regard to Asian food – our palettes are not used to hot spices. Foreigners always smile condescendingly when told to “beware, the dish is spicy,” as they know that it will have some flavor!
The version of borscht I grew up with definitely wasn’t Ukrainian, although my great-grandmother came from Kiev. Granny always put all the ingredients in fresh, not pre-fried, as is commonly done in Russia, which made her borscht quite different from all the others. To me there were always two types of borscht: the one at home, which I liked, and all the other ones I didn’t.
The recipe from the Book turned out close to Granny’s, although of course not as good! It’s definitely much closer to the homemade borscht I’m used to than what you might find in a restaurant. Since my grandmother’s recipe is clearly the best out there (ask any Russian and you will likely hear them say the same about their own grandmothers), I am happy to share it here, and you can compare it with the one from the Book.
I went past a Ukrainian restaurant recently and an employee out front handed me a flyer with both the Russian and Ukrainian flags on it, inviting people to be friends and eat borsch. Perhaps they were afraid people would stop going to Ukrainian restaurants, given the tensions between the two formerly close neighbors. But even if Russians do stop going to Ukrainian restaurants, I’m sure nothing can put Russians off borscht, and I for one am very grateful to Ukraine for it.
Recipe:
500 g meat
300