'Wretched dishes of Soviet cuisine': what treats from the USSR we do not miss
'04.06.2022'
Source: livejournal
One of the reasons for the poor health of Soviet citizens was poor nutrition - in which there was little protein, there was practically no seafood and fruits with vegetables, but there was an overabundance of carbohydrates, which is why Soviet citizens were already acquiring characteristic shapes by the age of 45-50, writes on my blog Maxim Mirovich... Here are a few dishes that the author calls “poor”. Further - from the first person.
I have already written in general terms about Soviet cuisine, and today I would like to tell you more specifically - about those dishes, so to speak, “malnutrition” that have entered the daily diet of Soviet people. Actually, these dishes very vividly show all the poverty of Soviet life - as people were forced to literally eat whatever they could. And here, as in many other spheres of Soviet life, there were “two worlds, two Shapiros” - on paper in all kinds of “Books about tasty and healthy food” there was an ideal Soviet cuisine, but in life everything was completely different - what I mean and I'll tell you today.
Tasty breakfast cereals
The classic Soviet breakfast most often consisted of some unappetizing fried eggs, sausages or some kind of porridge. Rice, millet, pearl barley, semolina, buckwheat and oatmeal were popular in the USSR. In principle, porridge in itself is a very useful dish - but only if it is of high quality, properly cooked and consumed within reasonable limits.
Soviet porridges (especially stolovsk ones) were the most common cereals, boiled to the state of a paste. There was no question of any modern healthy cereals like “4 coarse cereals”. In addition, porridge was usually eaten in huge portions, which from the very morning created an excess of excess calories and carbohydrates in the body.
Fried sausage pasta
Perhaps, the classics of the Soviet table, which, by the way, did not talk about Stalin's "Book about tasty and healthy food" - if you look through the pictures, then all Soviet people there almost every day ate crab salads and fried chicken - while in fact these products in The USSR was available to very few, and most Soviet citizens were forced to feed on all sorts of piles.
The classic shovel dish, which was at least once a week on the table in any Soviet family - pasta with grilled sausage. Most often, doctoral or amateur (with bacon) boiled sausage was fried, and boiled pasta was in the form of a side dish. By the way, very often, for some reason, pasta was cooked the day before, then it was put in the refrigerator, and then the next day a huge clump fell out of the pan, similar to Cthulha, and fried. Such a dish - pasta with grilled sausage - even happened in Soviet canteens.
“Heavy” meat soups
The traditional Soviet “first course” was some kind of “heavy” soup cooked in bone broth - like cabbage soup or borscht. By themselves, these soups are very good, but the trouble is that in the USSR (especially in all canteens) they were usually cooked extremely tasteless - the soups turned out to be bland and fatty. And secondly, after such an already very high-calorie dish, they usually still ate some kind of “second” in the form of the same potatoes with sausages.
As a result, the lunch was very “heavy” and oversaturated with carbohydrates - let me remind you that both soup and the second were also eaten with bread. As a result, by the age of 40-50 (a fairly young age by modern standards), people in the USSR received puffy old figures.
Ubiquitous sausages
Normal meat in the USSR did not exist as a class. Rather, it was - but all the cuttings and just normal pieces of meat were available only to the nomenclature and all sorts of "thieves" - about which satirical films were filmed even in the USSR itself. At the same time, the bulk of the population was forced to eat all kinds of "meat substitutes" - cutlets, in the mince of which there was at best 30 percent "meat", and even then these were all sorts of veins and trimmings ground in a meat grinder. There was also the sausage, which I already mentioned above, as well as sausages.
Soviet sausages were considered a gourmet product. "Oh, what sausages were at that time!" - From time to time, USSR fans appear in the comments, forgetting that sausages seemed so tasty at that time precisely because people lived in a permanent deficit of protein - in fact, the same story was with “the best Soviet ice cream in the world”. Sausages were on the menu of canteens, they were eaten at home - often with the same boiled potatoes warmed up on the second / third day and a fried lump of boiled pasta sticking together.
Ravioli soup
Miracle invention of the Soviet hostesses. A cardboard pack of ravioli was sprinkled in slightly salted water, after which it was also recommended to add allspice peas and bay leaves. It turned out a kind of broth with dumplings - which in the USSR was considered a full and satisfying dish.
Here I must also say that the Soviet dumplings were creepy crap (yes, the same ones, in a cardboard box with some painted cook in the picture) - there was not much meat in the mincemeat, it was very dense and looked more like some kind of gray sausage, with a powerful garlic-pepper taste and almost no meat taste. Modern Belarusian dumplings are ten times cooler than any of the best Soviet dumplings.
Stewed Pilaf
Another miracle invention of Soviet housewives is pilaf from canned stew. As I wrote above, it was almost impossible to buy normal meat for pilaf (lamb, beef or pork pulp) in the USSR, which is why all sorts of self-made pilaf recipes began to appear - for example, pilaf with the addition of beef stew. I must say that this dish could still be more or less eaten, since good meat was used for stew (which was made mainly for the military) in the USSR.
Of course, what came out in the end - it was difficult to call "pilaf", it was more like rice porridge with stew and carrots - but this dish was even adopted by some Soviet canteens.
Underground vegetable vinegar salads
There were no normal vegetables and fruits in the USSR, but I wanted something “fresh” - and therefore dozens of recipes for salads and vinaigrettes from underground vegetables, such as boiled carrots, beets and potatoes, were also added to the scoop, where pickled cucumber and green peas were also added ... All such salads were seasoned with mayonnaise or vinegar, and turned out to be extremely “heavy”, poorly digestible and did not refresh at all - rather, on the contrary, they made any dinner heavier.
What is interesting - even now, when there is no shortage of fresh vegetables and fruits, many cafes offer this nonsense in their menu, presenting it as some kind of “traditional salads”. Friends, in the USSR they ate all this only out of despair.
Long loaf with butter and sugar for dessert
And the top of my list is a Soviet dessert, so to speak, the cherry on the cake - a loaf (or, less often, black bread), spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar on top. This was considered an everyday Soviet dish “for sweets” - normal tasty desserts, cakes and other sweet dishes were scarce in the USSR.
ForumDaily Woman is not responsible for the content of blogs and may not share the views of the author. If you want to become the author of the column, write to us - [email protected].
