As it was in the USSR. The taste of our childhood
These wonderful books were published in the USSR on the topic of healthy baby food. But, as far as I remember, these books in our house were on their own, and the food itself, and it was very different from what was described in these books
An old woman walks around the yards
Gives advice to mothers.
Do not eat carrots, grandma teaches,
Infants with carrots puff!
Verse from the book "Baby Food"
Gives advice to mothers.
Do not eat carrots, grandma teaches,
Infants with carrots puff!
Verse from the book "Baby Food"
History and documents. That's how it happens: I went to read comments on my material about the ancient city of Poliohni, and in the end I learned that many, well, at least three of those who read it, would like to indulge in a little nostalgia again and read material about how people ate in Soviet times. And even they even came up with a name for the material: “Yummies of our childhood”. If so, why not write? However, there is one “but”. Firstly, such material, if someone would like objectivity from him, is simply impossible. It is necessary to work and work on it as a generalizing work, and it’s not a fact that it will be possible to cover such an extensive topic in the volume of one article (even five articles), primarily because one of the features of the food supply of the USSR was a fairly noticeable differentiation of supplies . Secondly, I’m used to writing only about what I know well. Either from my own experience, or based on the information provided (and verified!). In this case, such information is excluded. And again, only memories remain. And in some respects they are typical, but in some respects they are not. But, on the other hand, this is also interesting. Compare how it was with us if someone remembers this time. Remember so remember! Well, you need to start the story about the “yummy” with a few general remarks, so that I don’t have to repeat myself later.
The spread of the book "Nutrition of the student." I remember this photograph seemed just awfully shameful to me ... A naked boy with girls, and they feel him ... If that happened to me at that time, I would die on the spot!
I already wrote once that I remember myself somewhere from the age of five, when my grandfather was still working at school, and my grandmother also worked in the library, and they both retired in 1960. Grandfather received 90 p., He had two orders and several medals, his grandmother 28 p., But also a medal for the war - she worked in a military hospital. Mom already taught at the university and had 125 p. and another 40 p. - alimony from a father who lived in another city. The house was built in 1882, two rooms, in the middle of a large Russian stove, closet, canopy, sheds, a large garden. I could only compare my life with the way my comrades lived along Proletarskaya Street. Among them were the children of the workers of the ZIF plant, the son of a pilot of the Penza air squad ... in general, I did not know other children. Once I calculated that for 13 households we had 6 boys of about the same age and 2 girls. On Mirskaya Street there are two more boys and two more people at the very end of Proletarskaya, but this is still a lot of houses. So, the population decline in the country began already in the early 50's.
And this is an epigraph from the book "On tasty and healthy food" edition of 1955
Well, now it’s possible about what we ate and what kind of “goodies” we had. They ate in different ways. Since my mother all the time went to further training, then to pass the candidate exam, then to graduate school for three years, most of my life as a child I had to feed with my grandmother, and mother’s cooking was a pleasant addition. Grandmother’s mother was a housekeeper for some count and a companion for his daughter, so she learned to play the piano and was able to cook very well. But I didn’t really like to do it. And why, of course. It was necessary to cook either on the stove - on the stove, or on an electric stove, if in the winter, or on a kerogas in the canopy, if in the summer. All the time I had to make a garbage can, which had a rather vile look, so now it does not surprise me. Well, then I just did not understand this.
Illustration from the book "On tasty and healthy food." And right, my lunch. In any case, somewhere until 1962, everything was just that. Then buckwheat gradually became a rarity. Often in cooking used semi-finished products. Kissel, in any case, we had just that
Therefore, for breakfast there was usually a roll of butter, jam and tea. This is with grandma. When my mother was there, everything changed magically: for breakfast a salad was served in a special “my” bowl, pancakes with raspberry jam, soft-boiled eggs ... Options: scrambled eggs, fried eggs, “talkers with green onions” or with sausage. In summer - pancakes with berries, berries with milk: strawberries or raspberries. In the gardens of my comrades, berries did not grow: potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes were grown there. From berry crops - only currants and gooseberries. But this was also abundant in our garden.
But this all was simply not there then! On the market they sold dill, parsley in bundles, and that’s it! All this, depicted in this illustration, was “somewhere out there”, in another life, but really absent
But now all this and much more of edible and very healthy greens grows in my country in abundance. Why it was impossible to plant and grow at that time is simply incomprehensible. Probably the inertia of thinking again.
But for dinner, my grandmother was preparing in great detail. Soups were cooked: pea, rice, with meatballs, "from sorrel", chicken noodles, always homemade, cabbage soup from fresh and sour cabbage, pickle, often fish soup, canned fish soup - mackerel and pink salmon. Sometimes milk noodles were boiled - sweet, salty - never. We also did not cook borsch and did not make beetroot salad. The reason is my complete disgust for her. And the reason for it, as I found out a lot later, was secondhand smoke! After breakfast and lunch until the age of 70, my grandfather folded a “goat leg” from a newspaper and smoked either a samosad or Herzegovina Flora, and I sat at the table opposite and smelled. So I started smoking from the moment I learned to sit at the table, and smoked in this way until the doctors forbade smoking to my grandfather on pain of death. And no one here understood that it was wrong with a child, that it was very harmful ... And what thought it suggests (although not only that), what if my “ancestors”, who had higher education and worked at school, were so wild, then what happened to those who did not have it? Who just moved, for example, to the city from the village. He had four classes behind him. Seven classes ... Or ... stayed on the farm. However, I also got to know what was there, though later, from 1977 to 1981, and I even wrote about this somehow ...
Most of all I was surprised that two of my friends in a neighboring house fried potatoes in butter. They lived poorly, and fried potatoes were their main dish. But ... in our house it was fried on a vegetable, and there - on a creamy one. Once, I was amazed by this and said that it burns, does not give a crisp, and besides, you will not “save it”. The answer was: “But we are not poor!”
But we digress from the topic of food. For lunch, one of the aforementioned first was surely served, and the second was fried fish: halibut, pike, catfish (a neighbor used to catch in Sura, so they weren’t translated on our table), flounder. Boiled meat was served from the soup: pork, beef, chicken. There was a vinaigrette, homemade salinity: cucumbers and tomatoes were always served to fried potatoes. My grandmother quite often made very tasty and large meatballs. They had pasta or mashed potatoes for lunch. Porridge, buckwheat, pearl barley and millet, served with milk or butter. But I didn’t eat millet. Occasionally there was stewed cabbage with meat. On the third was homemade compote - boiled, my grandmother did not make compotes in the jars.
Dumplings were a common convenience food. Sold in white cardboard boxes with a blue inscription "Dumplings." They were bought home and served in dining rooms, but my grandmother recognized only home-made dumplings. And the taste with the "store" was a big difference. And it’s in the picture they are so beautiful, but in real life for some reason they either stuck together or fell apart
Quite often, we baked cakes. In the summer in the electric oven in the canopy. But in the winter, it was just something. Inside the furnace was empty, there was a vault, it was quite spacious. So, firewood was laid there, burned, the coals were scattered, after which pies were laid on the baking sheets, and the entrance to the "mouth" was closed by a damper. It was called a "hearth furnace." They explained to me that there, in the oven, they used to soar and wash, but how this happened was beyond my understanding. Climb there after the fire burned there? Never! But pies came out ... huge, like bast shoes, and magnificent, like feather-bed. They were eaten with meat broth from the filling, which was always with raw onions, but from boiled meat.
But for dinner they again drank "tea with a bun." For this reason, both my grandmother and I became hungry by 21 o’clock and went to the kitchen, where they “reinforced” directly from the pan, which is why, naturally, in the morning the food often soured and the first had to be cooked again! The fact that you can’t do this, that a glass of kefir is the best “food” for the night, and you need to have dinner at around 19.00, for some reason no one knew in our family. And this is all the more surprising because there were many books on healthy eating in our family. There was a very colorful book “Vitamins”, there was a book “About tasty and healthy food” of the 1955 edition, there were two simply wonderful books about baby food: “Baby Food” and “School Student Nutrition”. And at first they even read them to me out loud, and then I already read them myself ... as something from the realm of fantasy. It simply did not occur to anyone that all of this could be cooked and eaten. This is what the inertia of thinking was in people.
I don’t remember our domestic canned food, except perhaps the cans with squash caviar - this product has always been plenty. But I remember very tasty canned goods from Bulgaria in iron cans: stuffed peppers and cabbage rolls. These products on our table were frequent guests!
Because of grandfather's smoking, I had a very poor appetite before school. That is, I just refused homemade food and grew thin as a sliver. Naturally, the neighbors with noticeable joy in their voices did not forget to ask my relatives: “Don’t you feed him at all?” And this was expressed to me as a reproach for "disgrace to the family." But in some places outside the house I ate well, and it was there that they took me to “fatten” me. The first such place was at the Penza-I main station - a branch of the restaurant located on the platform. Where from our house I had to go with my grandmother on foot, and quite far away. And the place was wonderful! Fenced by a cast iron fence. Umbrellas above the tables! Locomotives fly by — frrrr, steam over the apron — beauty! There I always took a “set lunch”: borsch or kharcho soup, and schnitzel with rice and delicious brown gravy, which my grandmother never made. Since then, food with gravy has become something “chic” for me - this was a strange consequence of a specific upbringing.
The second place was the Sun Café in the city center opposite the building of the CPSU Regional Committee. Mom drove me there on Sundays. Served there ... sausages with stewed cabbage and beer. And then my mother took a beer, which was given to me, and to both of us two sausages with a side dish. In free sale, as I recall, we did not have them in Penza. In any case, we never bought them. But mother sometimes brought them from the dining room of the OK CPSU ...
The first time I saw black caviar was on sale in Moscow in the Yeliseyevsky shop on Gorky Street. Although in restaurants and cafes, sandwiches with her were freely sold even in 1968. But she was not in Penza. But red caviar from under the floor was constantly offered on the market. But only she was not particularly considered a delicacy ...
My childhood impressions of food began to change little by little only after 1961, when my mother was lucky to show me Moscow and Leningrad. In Moscow, I first ate ice cream with strawberries frozen in it, and in the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg - sandwiches with black caviar. And ... he immediately fell ill with a severe cold, because ice cream was already very cold, like the wind from the Neva. We lived with a relative - the general, and then the first time I saw what general's apartments are, and secondly, I ate plenty of this very caviar, which he simply could not translate, and ... drank grape juice. At high temperatures, I always had vomiting in my childhood, and the doctor ordered me to drink more and maintain my heart. And I could not drink water! So I was given grape juice from the bottles, just like in the book "Schoolchildren's Nutrition."
They returned home, in 1962 I went to school, and my mother again returned with advanced training at the University of Minsk and brought a recipe ... Olivier salad, which had to be seasoned with mayonnaise. And no one in our family even tried it ... But they bought it! We tried it! "Muck!" - said the grandfather. “I won’t eat!” I said, tasting the salad, but somehow they pushed it into me. These are we were "wild people", although it seems to be literate, and very well-read. The taste was just very undeveloped, that’s what ...
There were two types of mayonnaise in jars: Provence and Spring with a dill flavor. Well, I was forced to eat Olivier salad only after my mother showed me this picture. Before the authority of such a thick and smart book, I, of course, saved
At school until the 5th grade, we regularly went to have a big break for breakfast. They handed over money for it, but it was some penny. They served semolina porridge with oil poured in the middle, which I carefully ate so that, God forbid, it doesn’t mix with porridge, mashed potatoes with a cutlet (and gravy - cheers!), One sausage with a side dish: rice, pasta, millet porridge ( disgusting!), stewed cabbage (it’s a pity that without beer - ha ha!), and to this compote, tea or cocoa and a bun or bun. Baking was its own - opposite the school was a factory-kitchen.
There were a lot of canned food. But such sprats were bought “to the table” only for the holiday and “to the guests”. We made soup from mackerel in our own juice and canned pink salmon. Sprats in tomato were sometimes bought for dinner with boiled potatoes
And here, having gathered everything at school, for the first time I tried to cook food with my own hands, but this and everything else that came next will be discussed next time.
To be continued ...
- Vyacheslav Shpakovsky
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Information