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 as getting a leading role at the Bolshoi after a couple of dance classes.
I did eventually find some decent enough meat for this Soviet breakfast, and the meal was quite filling indeed. Yet it was completely weird to be having 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!’ When we wanted to keep something cold, we would get a big bowl, fill it with cold water (the only kind there was), place a pot in it with a little bit of butter, or salami, or soup, or whatever, cover it with a cloth and put the ends of the cloth into the cold water.”
I don’t think the kind of lunch described in the book was a typical one for my grandmother. When I described the feast-like lunch to her, she said: “Wow! Amazing! We never had cream soups though – didn’t have the equipment to make them.”
Fortunately I did have the equipment to make everything and it all turned out more or less ok. I followed the Book’s recipes to the letter for the mushrooms and eggplant, and I was pleased with both of them.
The recipe for the cream of chicken soup comes from the “healthy” section of the book, which is recommended for people “malnourished after difficult diseases and surgeries.” It doesn’t specify that in the menu though, which is a shame. My recommendation: unless malnourished, don’t make it. The consistency is really strange, I don’t think chicken is meant to be turned into cream. It looks like it’s already been eaten and the flavor is pretty dull.
The recipe for kompot is also pretty standard. It’s still made frequently for schoolchildren in Russia, except that now, some moms sneak in some ginger and cinnamon to add a little extra flavor.
I enjoyed the mushrooms, eggplant and kompot, and felt like a proud Soviet housewife having made it all. But not enough to give up my regular Sunday brunch spot!
Recipes:
Stuffed eggplant:
Wash eggplants, take ends off, cut open (not to the bottom), and take seeds out with a teaspoon. After that, put eggplant into salted boiling water for five minutes, stuff with chopped vegetables or mushrooms. Put in a greased, oven-proof baking dish, cover with sour cream and bake approximately 1 hour.
Mushrooms in sour cream:
For 500 grams (about 1 lb) fresh mushrooms, use 1/2 cup sour cream, 120 grams (1/4 lb) cheese, 1 teaspoon flour, 2 tablespoons oil
Clean, wash and pour boiling water over mushrooms. Drain, chop up, salt and fry in oil. When almost fried, add a teaspoon of flour and mix, then add sour cream, boil, add grated cheese and bake.
Before serving, sprinkle mushrooms with parsley or dill. You can also bake pickled mushrooms. In this case, drain the marinade, wash and chop up the mushrooms and fry.
Continue as with fresh mushrooms.
Apple or pear kompot:
Peel apples, remove the core and cut into 6—8 pieces each. So that the apples don’t go brown, before boiling, put them into cold water with a little lemon juice. Put sugar and 2 cups hot water into a pot, then add the apples and boil on low heat for 10—15 minutes until apples are soft.
Creamed chicken soup:
100 grams chicken meat; 15 grams butter; 10 grams onion; 10 grams white root vegetables; 10 grams flour; 50 grams cream; 1/2 egg yolk; 750 grams water
Boil chicken until ready. Fry onions and root vegetables in oil with flour until yellow, add broth and boil 15—20 minutes, then strain.
Mince the chicken meat twice then add it to the broth. Mix well. Add cream mixed with egg yolk.
You can serve with white bread croutons or meat pies (pirozhki).
4. Real food and realistic expectations. Fried eggs with tomatoes and croutons
After working my way through Book of Healthy and Tasty food for a month, I was pretty familiar with most of its main myths. It’s clear that propaganda was as strong in the fields of soups and stews as it was in art, labor and politics.
The main surprise for me was the quantities of food a Soviet citizen was meant to procure and consume: starting with a protein-heavy breakfast of fried meat or fish with boiled eggs, bread, cheese and milk, tea or coffee. This was followed in just a few hours by a second breakfast consisting of a vegetable bake or sandwiches. Then after work was “lunch” or the main meal of the day, which involved an appetizer, soup and a main meal with fruit kompot or dessert.
After all that, you’re supposed to have dinner, about two hours before bed. This should consist of prostokvasha (a kind of dairy drink like buttermilk), and an omelet or a salad.
The Book also reminds housewives of the importance of a balanced and diverse selection of dishes: “One must vary the menu. A housewife has the habit of making 10—12 meals… that get repeated throughout the year. As a result, members of the family get monotonous food.”
Russian, and especially Soviet food, has never known much variety, but this was mostly the result of a lack of available ingredients, rather than a lack of desire to feed a family well.
My childhood memories of “monotonous food” are confirmed by my grandmother.
“There was no food. What we ate was very much the same, no variety whatsoever,” Granny said. “There wasn’t a cult of food, like there is now. Today I think of what I want to cook, then go to the shop and get the ingredients for it. Back in the Soviet times, I went to the shop to try and find anything, and then cooked with whatever I found. There was never a fuss about food – you just cooked and ate what you could find, that’s it.”
Then she added: “Don’t forget, the Book was an ad for the happy Soviet life. Sure, some recipes were realistic, but a big part of the Book is just for show.”
And what a show it is! The variety of recipes is truly endless. Time has worked in its favor, too. Now that you can get the ingredients, the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food can be ranked up there with some of the best cookbooks I’ve seen. Although it could be more user-friendly. Of the overall lack of instructions, I can only assume the authors thought: “Why write it all out if no one’s going to be able to make it anyway?”
For this “light” dinner, I chose to cook fried eggs with a side dish – a meal that didn’t really suffer from a lack of instructions. The meal was pretty simple and quick and, I must say, absolutely delicious! I cut up dark bread and fried it in a pan, and then added tomatoes, which I stewed for a bit before pouring the eggs on top. If you have a lot of “base” and add other vegetables, it will be a little bit like Israeli shakshuka, in which eggs are poached in a tomato base. I had never before thought to fry eggs right on top of tomatoes and fried dark bread, and that was clearly my loss. Eating breakfast for dinner makes sense, too, when you’ve had meat for breakfast.
Recipe:
To make fried eggs with a side dish you need to first fry pieces of dark bread, lard, ham, sausages, salami, zucchini etc..
Then put eggs on top, salt and keep on the stove for 1—2 minutes and then bake for 3—4 minutes. As soon as the egg white is the color of milk, serve it on the frying pan or a warm plate.
If you don’t have an oven, the frying pan with eggs should be covered with a lid or plate.
5. In praise of grechka. Buckwheat
My second Soviet breakfast was a meal with which I was very well acquainted. Every Russian kid I knew grew up on it, and I’m pretty certain all Russians have loved it at some point in their lives. It’s grechka, the ubiquitous buckwheat porridge that is served not only for breakfast but also appears as a side dish at lunch or dinner.
Buckwheat has to be sorted before cooking, and as a kid, I always had the task of picking out all the bad grains. I remember sitting at a table filled with uncooked buckwheat, talking to my mother, grandmother and brother while sifting through it – it was a bonding experience for every Soviet family.
There are many different ways of cooking buckwheat, and someone adept at a particular method will insist religiously that his or her is the only way. The Book seems to take this into consideration, suggesting several options for additions to buckwheat, including cooking it with butter, eggs, liver, mushrooms and onion or even brains.
After the buckwheat is fully 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.