The Soviet Diet Cookbook: exploring life, culture and history – one recipe at a time. Anna Kharzeeva
cutlets, sausages and other meat dishes.
Fried turkey:
Salt the prepared turkey on all sides, place it on a pan with its back up, pour on the melted butter, add half a cup of water and let it bake in a medium-heated oven. While baking, use a spoon to pour the juice formed around it onto the turkey and turn it so that it browns on all sides (the turkey needs to be baked anywhere from one to two and a half hours, depending on its size).
When finished baking, remove the turkey, pour out the fat, add a cup of meat broth or water, boil and sieve.
When the turkey is not prepared in its entirety but in halves, the parts must be fried after the baking process. The turkey must be served on a warm platter divided into two halves, which should then be divided into 4—8 pieces. Pour the juice over the turkey and decorate it with parsley shoots or salad leaves. Baked apples or fried potatoes can be served on the side. Serve the green salad, cucumbers and marinated fruits and berries separately.
Baked apples with preserves:
Wash the apples with cold water, remove their cores (without cutting through them), prick the peels, fill the apples with preserves and place them on a pan or tray. Pour 2—3 tablespoons of water and place the pan in an oven with medium temperature for 15—20 minutes. As soon as the apples become soft, they must be removed, cooled and placed onto a platter or plate. Then pour the syrup formed in the pan onto the apples
For 10 apples – half a cup of preserves
For the stuffing it is best to use wild strawberry, strawberry, blackcurrant or cherry (without pits) preserves. Add crushed crackers, cookie crumbs, crushed almonds or finely chopped walnuts to the preserves selected for the stuffing.
Baked apples with sugar are prepared in the same way as apples with preserves, with the only exception being that instead of the preserves, the apples are stuffed with sugar.
11. Soviet comfort food. Sausages and stewed cabbage
I couldn’t move further into this project without acknowledging the meal that is so Soviet that it should have been banned by the new government in 1991 – sausages. Not the organic, turkey-with-a-bunch-of-herbs type, where you all but get the bird’s name on the label. No, the sausages I mean are the brown-gray ones, with names like “delicious,” or “milky,” or just the name of the manufacturer, like “ostankinskiye.”
Nothing about these sausage packages would give any indication of what’s actually in the sausage. I think the producers are trying to distract you from the very fact that the ingredients are… well, you don’t want to know what they are.
It doesn’t take long to distract the sausage-buyer though – “Ah, it’s so easy to deceive me!..I’m grateful to be deceived!” in the words of Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin.
Foodies, skip the next line, or go eat a turkey sausage, because you’re not going to like this: I, too, occasionally close my eyes and buy a packet of sausages, bring them home, cook them, and then eat and enjoy them, too.
When I was a kid, Granny would sometimes make sausages with stewed cabbage. She’d cut up the sausages and distribute them among the cabbage in the faint hope that we might accidentally eat some cabbage, too. We were no fools, though, and never did.
After digging and consuming all the delicious sausage bits, we would spread the cabbage thinly on the plate and, content with the immaculate execution of this “cunning plan,” would put our heads on our arms and say in a low voice, slowly: “bol’she ne mogu!” (I can’t eat any more!). Then Granny would try and convince us to have some of the cabbage, we would make puppy eyes and look all cute, and she would eventually give in.
This time though, I have to make and eat not just the sausage, but the cabbage, too, as that’s what the recipe calls for. Worse still, I have to somehow feed it to my husband. I fear failure.
I tried to make the stewed cabbage more fun by adding spices, but it’s beyond help. It hasn’t gotten any better with (my) age. Luckily though, the cabbage shrunk a lot during cooking so the sausage/cabbage ratio worked in his favor, and I got away with it.
Granny has a very similar view on sausages:
“Sometimes I would come into the cafeteria and think to myself: ‘I feel like some sausages,’ so I’d buy two, some white bread and as soon as I finished eating I would feel disgusted and didn’t eat them again for a couple of months – then I would do the same thing again. Today there is a choice of bad sausages, but back then there was only one type. Also, I didn’t buy sausages for you in Moscow – only in Estonia in summer as they were really good there.”
We also discovered that the Soviet sausages didn’t have any MSG in them. What’s the point of junk food without MSG in it, I ask? That would be the one ingredient I would look for on the sausage cover the next time I buy them – in a year or so.
Recipes:
Stewed cabbage:
1 kg cabbage; 2 onions;
2 tablespoons tomato paste;
1 tablespoon vinegar;
1 tablespoon sugar;
1 tablespoon flour;
3 tablespoons butter;
salt and pepper to taste.
Shred cabbage and put in a saucepan with a tablespoon of butter and ½ cup water or broth. Cover and let simmer 40 minutes. In the meantime, slice the onions and brown them in another tablespoon of butter. After the cabbage has cooked 40 minutes, add onions, tomato paste, vinegar, sugar, salt, petter and 1 bay leaf. Simmer until tender, about 10 minutes. Melt the last tablespoon of butter in a skillet and add flour until it is toasted. Add cabbage to the toasted flour, and bring to a boil.
Sauerkraut can be used in place of fresh cabbage, but in this case, you do not need to add vinegar when cooking it.
Sausages:
There are several different ways to prepare sausages. They can be boiled in lightly salted water and served with mustard or grated horseradish.
They can also be fried with tomatoes. To do this, cut the sausages crosswise into 3—4 pieces, fry them in a pan with butter for 2—3 minutes, then add tomatoes that have been thinly sliced and sprinkled with salt and pepper and fry for two more minutes. Grated garlic can be added as well, and the fresh tomatoes can be replaced with canned tomatoes or tomato paste.
Sausages can also be taken out of their skins, sliced and then fried.
12. The special treat nobody makes at home. Rombaba pastry
Growing up, we didn’t have a huge selection of sweet pastries. There were bagels, marzipan, sugar puffs and a couple more, all available at any kiosk that sold baked goods. But there was one type of pastry that rose above all the others, largely thanks to its name – hats off to the Soviet marketing team – romovaya baba, or “rum mama.”
Both parts of the name were intriguing. The rum obviously sounded wonderfully naughty and exotic – all I knew about it was that pirates drank it while singing “yo ho ho,” and that I would never be allowed to have it. “Baba” just seemed a bit odd, but sounded good, and all together it places “rombaba” in a special place in pastry world, as unreachable to a ’90s kid as the Spice Girls.
As time went by and I grew up, I tried rombaba and from what I can remember quite liked it – it was something I’d have at a cafeteria every now and again. I never saw anyone make it. My mother and grandmother certainly never did,