The Soviet Diet Cookbook: exploring life, culture and history – one recipe at a time

© Anna Kharzeeva, 2021

ISBN 978-5-0055-1758-6

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Preface

The Soviet Diet Cookbook project began as a modified Russian version of “Julie and Julia” – a modern girl recreating the experience of cooking from a classic cookbook of another era and writing about it. But the experience differed from that of the “Julie and Julia” project almost from the start. For one thing, our “modern girl,” Anna Kharzeeva, would be exploring the recipes of her childhood and, more importantly, she would be doing so with the advice of her grandmother, Elena Moiseevna Blumek, who used the book as a young Soviet housewife, and with tips passed down from her great-grandmother, Mindl (Munya) Israilovna Maisil, who learned to get by with whatever was available during the shortages of the Russian Revolution and World War II.

What we hadn’t realized going in was that the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food, the book we dubbed “the Soviet diet cookbook,” was as much a propaganda tool as a collection of recipes. While Julia Child might have liked to create a revolution in the American diet via the Art of French Cooking, the purpose of the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food, or simply the Book, was to bring the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution to the Russian diet and help create a new Soviet woman. Among the Book’s modest goals were to free women from the drudgery of the kitchen, create a unified cuisine for the “friendship of peoples” and popularize mass-produced food. With this understanding, we expanded our approach to include an examination of how successful these aims had been at the level of the housewife cooking in the home.

The Book was the brainchild of Anastas Mikoyan, a prominent Soviet official who came up with the idea while serving as People’s Commissar for Internal and External Trade in the late 1920s. One of the first Soviet leaders to travel to the United States, he returned with ideas such as canned food and corn flakes, which fit in well with his plans for revolutionizing the lives of Soviet women by having them spend less time preparing meals.

Mikoyan also understood the importance of food in national culture and identity, and he recognized that creating a new country, the Soviet Union, out of 15 separate republics, would necessarily involve developing a unified food culture. The Book of Healthy and Tasty Food therefore includes recipes from Central Asia and the Caucasus as well as the republics of European Russia. A testament to the Book’s success is that many of the regional dishes included in it – plov from Uzbekistan, dolma from Armenia, Georgian kharcho – are today mainstays of Russian cafeterias and identified as part of “Russian cuisine” by foreign tourists.

The first edition of the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food appeared in 1939, but the revamped and expanded 1952 version was better known, and so it was this edition – which was also the one used by Elena Blumek – that we chose to cook from for the Soviet Diet Cookbook project. Since the publication of the 1952 edition, the book has been reprinted nearly every year (my own is a 1953 edition, still featuring the smiling face of Comrade Stalin) and has sold more than 8 million copies.

As it happens, we picked an ideal time to start cooking the Soviet way. We began discussing the project in Summer 2014 with a start date of Sept. 1. On Aug. 7, 2014, the Russian government banned the import of most fresh foods from Europe and the United States in retaliation for economic sanctions imposed by those countries over Russia’s involvement in an armed conflict that had erupted in neighboring Ukraine. Suddenly there had never been a better time to cook with limited, locally produced ingredients. And, for the first time in many years, modern Russian cooks, like their mothers and grandmothers before them, were forced to decide what to make based on what was available in the stores.

At the beginning of the project, we agreed that Anna would cook one meal from the Book per week in a rotation: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a “special project” – a recipe that would take more time and didn’t necessarily fit the description of a meal, such as pickles or jam. Although we debated grouping the recipes in chapters reflecting the rotation for this book, we instead chose to present the recipes in this book chronologically in the order they were cooked. We chose this approach because Anna’s experience with the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food and its methodology grows over time. Having said that, each text stands alone and can be enjoyed without having read any of the others.

In addition to Anna, her grandmother and great-grandmother, the experiences of a number of other Soviet housewives went into the Soviet Diet Cookbook, as we sought a more complete picture of cooking culture in the Soviet Union. Among the people Anna asked for their memories of Soviet cooking were Galina Vasileyvna, who shared her experiences with the foods of her young adulthood in a Soviet village; Aina Vladimirovna, who grew up partially in an orphanage after her parents were declared enemies of the people; and Valentina Mikhailovna, who was also a Muscovite.

Much thanks is also due to Anna’s husband, Sandy Higgs, who was open to having his meals co-opted once a week, as well as the entire multimedia team at Russia Beyond the Headlines, who sponsored and maintained this project, particularly Maria Azhnina, Yaroslav Cohen, Daria Donina, Elena Potapova, Vsevolod Pulya and Anna Sorokina.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Lara McCoy for bringing her daughters to my cooking class one snowy Sunday afternoon in Moscow eight years ago.

I am grateful she then asked me to come on this cooking adventure that made me discover so much about my family, my country and ultimately myself. I want to thank her for having this brilliant idea and for getting me to write my first ever lines about food and making me fall in love with writing. If it wasn’t for her, I would have never made turnips, ponchiki or gematogen strips (although I’m not sure I’m actually grateful for this). Thank you also for creating fun & catchy headlines for each meal.

This book wouldn’t have been possible without the stories from my babushka. Her brilliant, cutting, funny and very real recollections are what makes this book what it is. Her memory, ability to analyze, reminisce and make sense of things are truly inspirational to me.

I am grateful to my mum for feeding me corn flakes and buckwheat during the turbulent 90s, for sharing her memories and for saving the lemon cakes.

I am also very grateful to everyone else who contributed their stories, memories and recipes for the book: my babushka Svetlana Eliazarovna Kharzeeva, Galina Vassilyevna, Valya, Aina, Sasha, Marina Nikolaevna Lebedeva, Narine Mikaelyan, Engely Georgievich Bubelev, Caye Higgs, Nargiz Mukhitdinova, Oleg Valdman, Zviad Jojua, Anton Morozov, Sonia Rashidovna, Vlad Bykhanov

I am grateful to the team of RBTH for publishing my posts every week for two years and for putting up with my early photography attempts and teaching me how to improve them.

I am grateful to my husband for proofreading the first months’ blogs before I had the courage to send them to Lara unedited, for giving me tips along the way and mainly for patiently suffering through all the cooking failures and setting a record on how much Soviet food an Australian can endure.

I am also grateful to all the readers of the blog, everyone who has liked, shared and commented on it. I took some of the comments on board and learned something from all of them.

Foreword: It’s not just a book, it’s a way of life

“Granny, you know, yesterday I ordered a food delivery and the guy brought it within 20 minutes! I was out of pasta and just ordered it on my phone, and it got here so quickly!” I am very excited about this new service that delivers food within 20 minutes or so, no minimum order, no delivery fee. My Australian friend said just the idea of it gave her goosebumps.

My grandmother, however, couldn’t look less interested. She lives on the 5th floor of a building with no elevator, and I thought she might be happy to have food delivered so quickly and easily. But she says she prefers to pick out her groceries herself.

A lot has changed since she was young. When she was my age, she had to procure each and every ingredient and carry it up the same five flights of stairs. As a young woman, her two-room apartment was home to herself, her daughter, her husband and her mother. Granny lived with her mother and their other family members until her mother died at the age of almost 105. For about 30 of those years, they shared an apartment – and one kitchen – with six other families.

Like practically every Soviet woman, she had a copy of the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food, although teaching at a school and sourcing ingredients didn’t leave much time for cooking.

The same Book of Healthy and Tasty Food still occupies a proud place on my grandmother’s bookcase, although when I pulled it out in summer 2014 to start the project of cooking my way through it – with my grandmother’s advice – it was quite dusty. I was very curious to see how this famous book stood the test of time. Will the recipes be something I want to eat? WIll its instructions for young housewives of the past still make sense today? What will Granny have to say about it?

It was a fascinating read. I was born in the Soviet Union – albeit only five years before it ceased to exist – and all my life I heard about the Book of Healthy and Tasty Food from my mother and grandmother, but never had really looked into it. As I learned during the course of the project, it was the foundation for the cooking I grew up with.

My grandmother’s table always involved a lot of soups – ones using fresh ingredients rather than fried ones, as many Russians do – porridges, baked pies (pirozhki) and vegetables, with the occasional serving of fried potatoes and sour cream. And dill and parsley were always on the table. Dessert was sponge cake with apples or cherries. Growing up, I never noticed that dessert was always the same – my Australian husband had to point it out to me.

The Book, as it was popularly known, and as I called it during the project, features more than 1,000 recipes and includes not only classic Russian dishes, but also Uzbek, Georgian and Ukrainian meals – after all, it was a book for the entire Soviet Union! During the course of the project, I made over 80 of these meals, trying my hand at Russian meals, “ethnic foods” from the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as recipes from the sections “for children” and “for illness.”

The Book of Healthy and Tasty food is not just a cookbook, though, and during the project, I learned more than how to make Soviet meals. The goal of the Book was to explain to every Soviet woman everything she needed to know about food. It’s a guide to understanding nutritional values of food, working out a meal plan, cooking and setting a table. The book is, like any Soviet state-run project, is as much a propaganda piece as it is a cookbook.

It’s clear that the authors of the book saw food primarily as a source of nutrition – they explain how food is key to good health, increasing work productivity and a longer life. The authors also say that the aim of the new socialist assembly lines, which produced many of these new ingredients, was to liberate women from the “hard and thankless” work of preparing meals.The enjoyment of food or its preparation was not a priority and yet, as I came to discover, the sourcing and preparation of food still required a great deal of time and effort.

This matched up with my grandmother’s experience as well.

“There used to be no food in shops,” Granny said. “There were ready-made food departments in restaurants where you could buy something. Each workplace had a cafeteria where the employees had lunch, and some places had a fridge with food that would get distributed among the workers. Around the holidays, we could pre-order food, but there wasn’t always enough, and when there wasn’t, there would be a lottery – the lucky ones would end up with grains, red caviar, tea, cookies and salami. There were ‘distribution points’ in special establishments like KGB or the Central Committee – my husband’s friend worked in the Central Committee and he was able to get him vobla [sun-dried fish]. We would wander around shops trying to find anything during work hours – our boss didn’t mind, in fact she said: if you find anything, get some for me, too!”

Over the course of this book, you’ll find me cooking 80 different meals and getting my grandmother’s opinion about each of them – and boy, does the woman have opinions!

Some recipes work well, while others just don’t (at least for me). For every dish I failed at (or failed me) I added a (better) version of the dish provided by my grandmother and her friends.

Come along on this journey as I get out my herring plates, fill up my avos’ka and prepare an edible fur coat. Confused? I’ll try to explain along the way as we explore that mysterious, difficult, bizarre yet fun period of time known as the Soviet Union one recipe at a time.

If you do dare to prepare some of these, let me know by tagging @anna.kharzeeva, and I will send you a medal – or not, depending on how it goes.

Buckle up, comrades, it will be a fun ride!

1. The Soviet breakfast of champions. Fried meat, boiled eggs, bread and cheese

My first Soviet meal really did sound easy and not too time consuming – just like the party line said it should be. According to the instructions, all you need to do is get some meat or fish, fry it, boil a couple of eggs, slice off a piece of bread and cheese and make some tea, coffee or get a glass of milk.

Still less time-consuming is the instruction to “get yogurt out of the fridge,” which is the level of sophistication I’m ready for on a workday morning.

In reality, the fun begins with “just getting some meat” – even now, getting decent meat, especially beef, in Moscow, is not an easy task.

From what I understand, the problem with finding good meat began with Stalin. The Soviet leader got rid of all the beef cattle and decided that dairy cows could be used for both milk and meat. The result was very tough beef that almost always needs tenderizing. Sometimes even slow cooking it doesn’t help – let alone getting a cut decent enough to fry a steak.

There are seven grocery stores within a 10-minute walk from my house, and as far as I know, not one has decent, affordable meat.

But this is nothing compared to Granny’s memories of getting meat during the Soviet times.

“Butchers used to be the richest people in the country. Having the acquaintance of a butcher was priceless,” Granny said. “Butchers used to sell all the meat to ‘their people’ before it hit the shelves – in fact, it was just bones you could find in the shops. My colleague’s mother-in-law was a grocery shop manager, and we used to go to her shop to get meat. But even the shop manager couldn’t be guaranteed a good cut – her success depended on the butcher’s mood.”

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.”