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

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, so for me it has always been a store-bought treat.

Granny confirmed my memories: “I never baked it and I don’t know anyone who did. In fact, we didn’t bake much at home at all – imagine baking in a kitchen shared between five to seven families! We only had a small table in it, and it wasn’t nearly enough to prepare the dough. That’s why many people fried their pirozhki instead of baking them. It was only under Khrushchev that people started getting their own apartments, which allowed for more baking.”

She also remembered that “rombabas were everywhere – in every cafeteria and bread shop. I don’t suppose they used real rum in it, as it wasn’t something anyone ever had at home. For alcohol there was vodka and Georgian wine – Stalin loved his kindzmarauli [a sweet Georgian red wine], and Soviet champagne for special occasions.”

I really can’t imagine making rombaba in the kitchen of a communal apartment. You end up using just about every bowl and utensil you own, and the clean-up is worthy of a “subbotnik” – a communal neighborhood spring cleaning.

Although I made half a recipe, it was a huge portion, so I asked my husband to take some into the office with him – thank God for offices where people will eat just about anything! He was given a mission to find out what people thought of the rombabas I made: if they were like what they remembered.

The homemade rombabas weren’t quite like what I remember, and I don’t think it’s just the rum messing with my memory. The results: 4 of the 5 participants said they weren’t like they remembered, but one said the rombaba tasted exactly as she recalled. Further research showed that she was the only one who had ever tried homemade rombabas.

That’s it, Granny… I’ve had enough of your “no one else baked it at home” tales. And, since you’ve had your own kitchen for the last 50 years, there truly is no excuse not to try this recipe.

Making the yeast dough wasn’t that hard, and I just followed the Book’s instructions. As for the sauce, I ended up with a lot of it, and my “babas” were soaked in it much more than the store-bought ones. The sauce is really delicious though, so I guess soaking the pastries thoroughly is not a bad idea – if you’re going to eat them then and there, that is. I don’t think they would keep very well that way.

I may not mess about with the lay of the land any more, however. I’ll buy my rombabas from the shop and pour a Bacardi to go with it. Rum has very much made it to Russian parties and homes by now and has replaced Stalin’s preferred Georgian tipple. These days, “Dear Leader” would have to stay sober. Or maybe not, as the home of rum is none other than communist Cuba.

Recipe:

Dissolve yeast in 1 cup of warm milk. Add three cups of flour and knead into a stiff dough. Roll into a ball. Make 5 or 6 shallow cuts in the ball and place the dough into a pan filled with 2—2 ½ liters warm water. Cover with a lid and set in a warm place for 40—50 minutes.

For the cakes:

1 kg flour; 2 cups milk;

7 eggs; 1 ¼ cups sugar;

300 grams butter; ¾ tsp salt;

200 grams raisins; ½ tsp vanilla;

50 grams yeast.

For the sauce

½ cup sugar; 1 ¾ cups water;

4—6 spoonfuls of rum, wine or other liquor.

When the dough increases in volume by 50%, remove it from the water with a slotted spoon. Separate the eggs. Add egg yolks to sugar and mix until there is no white showing. Whip egg whites into a froth. Add to the dough ball the second cup of warm milk, salt, vanilla and egg yolks mixed with sugar. Mix well.

Add the remaining flour and knead the dough. After that, add the butter to the dough and knead very well. The dough should not be too thick. Again cover and put in a warm place. When the dough again increases in volume by 50 percent, add the raisins, stir and pour the batter into the prepared mold.

Cover and put in a warm place to rise. When the dough has risen to 3/4 the height of the molds, then gently, not shaking, put it in a cool oven, approximately 45—60 minutes.

During baking, the mold must be rotated with great caution, as even a slight push can cause the dough to fall. When the rombabas are ready, (readiness is determined in the same manner as in cakes). Remove from the mold and put on a dish. When cool, pour the syrup over them, carefully turning on a platter so they are soaked in the syrup soaked from all sides. Then, put them on a separate dish to dry. Put on another dish, covered with a paper towel, to serve

13. The breakfast all Russians love to hate. Mannaya kasha (semolina porridge)

This week, my breakfast meal was mannaya kasha or semolina porridge, affectionately known as manka. This is the breakfast that Soviet people really had every day, unlike the one described in the Book.

These days, however, I would never serve it for breakfast if I wanted people to speak to me again. Not that everyone hates it, but your chances of at least half the people in the room having a reaction of: “anything but this, I can’t believe this is happening to me” when served this meal are very high.

The reason for such a reaction is that manka has always been considered the best breakfast meal for kids, and it is served everywhere – at home, in preschool, at school, at the office cafeteria… It’s a milky gooey mass on a plate that, if not quite cooked right, or not very hot, turns quickly into… a milky gooey mass that is slightly less edible. It is a real life nightmare for many.

In a famous short story, “All Secrets Become Known,” a boy has to eat his manka or he won’t be allowed to go to the Kremlin. He hates the stuff and pours it out the window and straight on to someone’s hat. I still remember the drawing in the book with the porridge coming off a tall skinny man’s hat, nose and coat. I know many people who would say that’s exactly where it belongs.

Lucky for me, I actually like manka. Granny will make it for me on the odd occasion and I’m always happy to have it. I even ordered it at a restaurant recently! I loved watching people’s reaction when I told them what I ate. I think I narrowly avoided being put in a mental institution.

Even though I have manka every now and again, up to this point, I’ve been able to avoid making it for myself, as I know it’s not easy to keep it from forming lumps and/or burning. I was really focused and trying very hard, yet my porridge didn’t turn out perfectly – it was a little bit burnt, and had a few lumps in it. I ate it anyway.

Granny says she was surprised when in a kind of home economics class she conducted at school, a pupil was making manka with cold water. He put the dry manka in the proportion of 2 tablespoons per 1 cup water into cold water and then slowly brought it to a boil. He explained that this way there were fewer lumps. Granny took his advice to heart and makes manka that way to this day.

I also feel grateful to manka, since I recently found out it helped my parents survive. They were both born in 1963, a year in which, according to Granny, “all the food suddenly disappeared from shops.” “There were no grains,” she said. “When your mom was little, I was surprised to find a packet of manka in the shop, and when I took it home, I saw that it had worms and bugs in it. Turned out it was the ‘strategic reserves’ that had been made a while ago and had gone bad.”

My dad’s mother says that when she was pregnant with my father and living in Kursk, she had even less food than there was in Moscow. She would be given some manka as well as some other foods at a special office for women who were pregnant or had young children, and that was a huge help.

It seems to me that unlike we young modern Russians, the Soviet adults stayed loyal to their childhood savior.

“There were carrot, cabbage and beet rissoles with manka for sale in the ‘gastronomy’ sections of restaurants and cafes,” Granny remembers. “They were all very popular.”

Granny’s friend Galina Vasileyvna also shared this story about the ubiquity of manka in the Soviet diet:

“When ‘ptichye moloko’ (bird’s milk) cake first appeared, it would be sold at the Praga Restaurant. It was so popular that you had to put in a pre-order and then wait your turn. Those who didn’t want to wait developed a recipe for it that could be made at home. In it, they replaced the soufflé with manka porridge. The recipe went around the whole country, traveling from city to city.”

I will continue to stay loyal to the meal that kept me, my parents and grandparents full in the mornings – the porridge, not the cake. That would be my Soviet nightmare.

Recipe:

¾ cup milk; 3 teaspoons semolina; ½ teaspoon sugar; 1 teaspoon butter.

Add ¼ cup water to the milk and bring to a boil. When the liquid is boiling, slowly add the semolina, stirring constantly.

Add the sugar and a pinch of salt and cook on low heat 10—15 minutes. Put the butter on top of the porridge before serving.

Granny’s method:

2 heaped tablespoons semolina

1 cup milk or water, or half of each

Sugar to taste

Pinch of salt

Place the semolina into cold water in a pot, slowly bring to boil, add salt and sugar, reduce heat and stir constantly until it thickens up. Serve with jam.

14. Happy Soviet New Year’s eve. Olivier salad, biskvit

New Year’s Eve is a huge deal in Russia. It was made into the main holiday of the year during the Soviet era, since it wasn’t possible to celebrate a religious holiday like Christmas in an atheist state. As a result, New Year’s Eve is both an occasion to spend time with family and have a party with friends.

Most young Russians spend New Year’s Eve like this: From 9pm-midnight, you stuff yourself with the tastiest dishes your mother and grandmother can make. Then, as soon as you watch the broadcast of the president making his speech at 11:55, and hear the bells in the Kremlin tower strike 12, you’ll be out the door with three bottles of champagne up your sleeve. After a very civilized night out, you come home and collapse into bed at 5am, but don’t fall asleep until 9, since the fireworks go on until sun-up, which in midwinter is about 9am.

You spend the next three days finishing off everything that wasn’t eaten on Dec. 31. Good thing Russians get the first 10 days of January off from work!

New Year’s Eve dinner always includes Olivier salad; white bread with tiny canned fish known as shproty; an abundance of mandarins or oranges; the beet salad called vinaigrette; herring “under a fur coat” of carrots, potatoes, beets and onions; pickles; and a bottle or two of Soviet champagne. For dessert, in my family there would be “biskvit” – the only type of cake ever to be made in my family. Ever.

The best effort was always made for the most special night of the year, although the results of that effort depended on the era and financial ability.

“My mother said that growing up, I ate one orange,” Granny told me, remembering New Year’s Eves of her childhood. “She went to the Torgsin [a special store that accepted payment only in hard currency, not rubles] and exchanged a silver spoon for one orange.”

I ask here if that was a damn good orange – one worth family silver – but she can’t remember. I pretend I’m not upset and think of ordering a silver orange to use up my rubles before their value decreases further, given that this particular winter the ruble collapsed as a result of Western sanctions on Russia and the conflict in Ukraine.

As for vinaigrette, Granny remembers that when they lived “in evacuation” during World War II, her mother would make vinaigrette, and the people in the village they were evacuated to told her that they “had all the ingredients available, but they only serve this sort of food to pigs.”

The same villagers seemed keen to learn to make biskvit, though. During the war years, presents for soldiers at the front were collected in every town, and my great-grandmother made biskvit for the collection. Apparently everyone was very interested in the cake. At least according to the legend. I’ve noticed over time that most stories involving my great-grandmother feature everyone being stunned and amazed by the things she does!

I made the Soviet biskvit for a friend’s New Year’s Eve party, and it was a complete failure. I made it at my friend’s apartment and there was no mixer to use, so I whipped the dough by hand, which was clearly not enough. As a result, the cake turned out more like a flat omelette. I didn’t tell Granny, knowing she would just laugh, but I thought it would be a good chance to write her recipe down.

I was very surprised, shocked even, that the book didn’t have a recipe for Olivier salad, considering the outsized role it plays in the Russian diet. I would mock its presence at every New Year’s table, until the mocking turned into a tradition. I now must have it every year. In part it’s a joke, in part it’s just a really tasty salad. The past two years, I got my husband to barbeque some chicken to include in it, and made my own mayo, and, well, I’m salivating as I write this.

Olivier salad is one of the “noble” dishes, like beef stroganoff, vinaigrette or guryev porridge, that was Soviet-ized and put on every Soviet table with bologna substituting for the pre-revolutionary willow grouse meat. A quick search online shows a lot of theories, full of mystery and historical knowledge about Olivier and a lot of “I am right, you are wrong” comments that show Russians are still very passionate about this dish.

Trying to solve the mystery of Olivier, I started asking Granny questions.

“Did you always have Olivier?”

“We had vinaigrette and one other salad. We didn’t name the other salad anything.”

“So you had Olivier but didn’t call it that?”

“I don’t remember exactly when Olivier appeared, but everyone made salads to their own taste. The book you’re using, it’s from 1953, when there couldn’t be any foreign names. The salad must have become popular later.”

“But vinaigrette and beef stroganoff are not exactly Russian names.”

“They had long become Russian words by then. And, anyway, looking for logic in our country is laughable and useless.”

Whatever the explanation, Olivier salad will always have a place on my New Year’s table, along with biskvit, but Granny’s version – not the Soviet one!

Recipes:

Olivier salad:

4 medium carrots

4 eggs

6 medium potatoes

5—6 pickled cucumbers

1 can green peas

1.5 chicken breasts

2—3 Tbsp mayonnaise

Boil potatoes, carrots and chicken. Allow to cool. Cut up ingredients into cubes, add mayonnaise.

biskvit:

100 grams wheat flour;

100 grams potato flour;

1 cup sugar;

10 eggs;

¼ tsp vanilla

Separate the egg whites from the yolks. Put the whites in a cool place. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until you can no longer see any white. You can add vanilla here. Then add the flour. Stir. Whip the egg whites into a solid foam. Mix them into the dough gently.

Pour the dough into a springform pan that has been lightly greased and floured. Fill the form ¾ full. Put in the oven at the average temperature for baking. Bake until the cake breaks free easily from the mold. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

Cut the cake in two (or into more pieces) and spread jam between the layers. The top of the cake can be covered with glaze and decorated with more jam, berries, candied fruit or nuts. Cut into thin slices with a sharp knife.

Granny’s biskvit:

5—6 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup mix of flour and cocoa or ground coffee

Mix 5 big or 6 small eggs with a cup of sugar using an electric mixer. Slowly add 1 cup of flour and cocoa, ground coffee or anything else you’d like to add. You can make half a batch with cocoa, and half plain and combine them in a baking mold. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, first at 180C and then at 160. Leave until almost cool in the oven with a slightly open oven door.