Recipes for disaster: Soviet recipes
Hutton's Soviet stroganoff
4 min read
Politicians making a meal of it. This week: cookbooks as propaganda
“Correct distribution of nutrients and selection of dishes during the day is one of the most important requirements of rational nutrition.” It’s not quite Nigella Lawson, but then The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food isn’t quite How To Be A Domestic Goddess.
First published in 1939, The Book was the official cookbook of the Soviet Union. It was intended to help housewives (I use the word advisedly) prepare meals for their families that were, well, tasty and healthy. It was huge – my translated edition runs to 700 pages – and offered much more than recipes: there were instructions on how to plan menus, how to set the table, even how to use a knife and fork.
But it was also, like everything produced by the Soviet state, a work of propaganda. Published the same decade that government policies had seen millions perish as the result of famine, it painted a picture of a happy people enjoying the fruits of the communist state.
Alison Smith is professor of history at Toronto University, and the author of Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia. She says Russia’s rulers had long worried that their people ate less meat than other nations, especially the British. “There’s this real concern that Russian peasants in particular ate very little other than bread, porridge and cabbage.” The Soviet era was supposed to bring abundance. In practice, that meant sausage, a relatively cheap form of meat that stored well.
The Book was produced under the supervision of Anastas Mikoyan, the people’s commissar of the Food Industry. He’d visited the USA and wanted to see food production modernised in the USSR. His recipe book was enthusiastic about tinned food and ice cream, the foodstuffs of the future. The promise of communism was that food wouldn’t just be more plentiful, says Smith, but of a higher quality. “It’s canned peas, it’s sausages, it’s champagne, it’s mayonnaise.”
The reality, of course, was a little different. Few comrades would ever have been able to enjoy the more luxurious meals that the book suggests, and the authors knew that. They put descriptions of three-course meals served with silverware next to advice on storing and reusing leftovers. And there was still a lot of porridge. My edition has 26 recipes, including the enticing “Buckwheat Porridge with Beef Lung” (boil the lung in salted water for 90 minutes, fry it with onions, add to porridge).
There were instructions on how to plan menus, how to set the table, even how to use a knife and fork
My butcher had no lungs to hand, so I’ve settled for making beef stroganoff. Fry onions, then chopped meat, then add sour cream and something called “Yuzhni sauce”. There are whole Reddit threads of people looking for western substitutes for Yuzhni sauce – “sweet, sour and a bit spicy” – but the general advice seems to be to use mustard.
According to Smith, the book had an aspirational message. “It is very much a sort of vision of a life that very few people actually have,” she says. “A dream of a world of plenty.” Communist children would flick through it as British kids did the Argos catalogue. Even refugees from communism would take their copy with them.
My stroganoff, accompanied by fried potatoes and broccoli, is both simple to cook and tasty. Whether half a pot of cream counts as “healthy” is a discussion I shall have with the first Soviet doctor I meet.
But if readers in the 1950s had felt the recipes offered them hope of what they might one day be able to enjoy, as the decades wore on, food shortages meant they may have felt they were being taunted by them. As the queues for food grow longer through the 80s, says Smith, “the ability to access those dreams becomes even more attenuated”.
After the Second World War, the book had claimed that the USSR, unlike Britain, had left rationing behind. But by the 1980s, it was increasingly clear that life, and food, was more abundant in the West.
“Maybe the distance started to feel too much. There start to be so many challenges that the that the dream just loses its ability to be there for people.”
