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

When I started this project, I was prepared for a few errors along the way, and sour cabbage was the first serious one. This local take on sauerkraut is a suitable addition to any lunch or dinner. It is made throughout Russia mostly by older women who share their recipes as though they were the most exciting story ever. They belong to a kind of “cabbage club,” and I’ve witnessed a few of the meetings.

I had to stop my grandmother from using the exciting opportunity to tell me her version of the gripping tale. I have to follow the recipe in the Book, I told her. Much to her delight, I failed miserably. She laughed and told me to throw my cabbage out.

Now that the crisis is over I have to analyze where I went wrong. First, I couldn’t find a glass jar in any of the shops nearby. However, the Book says you can use a clay pot, and I had one at home. The recipe said to put pressure on the pot, so I got a jar of pickled ginger and put it on some little wooden slats to weigh it down. Then there was the birch stake I was supposed to impale the cabbage with – not one of the selection I had worked to stab the cabbage effectively. Granny said I had cut the cabbage too thickly, didn’t squeeze it enough, used too small a pot and didn’t have nearly enough pressure on top. She once again offered her own recipe. I promised to think about it.

I seem to be the first female in my family who can’t make sour cabbage. My great-grandmother apparently made it all the time. I remembered the story she told me about one occasion in her late teens:

“During the civil war, which lasted several years after the revolution, we lived in Kiev and the government changed eight times in a very short space of time. My family [parents and 6 siblings] had guests over – imagine how many people there were with each of us bringing a friend or two! We were playing games and missed the curfew, which meant everyone had to stay overnight. My mother was terrified as there was no food in the house. So my friend and I went to the basement and got some potatoes, some sour cabbage, pickles and pickled tomatoes out of wooden barrels, and set a beautiful table with just the four types of food. We still had beautiful plates and cutlery, so it looked very formal. I went into the living room and said ‘I’d like to invite everyone to the dining room.’ My mother looked terrified, as she knew there was no food in the house. Everyone was stunned at the dinner we’d scraped together.”

My great-grandmother would tell that story at almost every dinner. I always liked the idea of a fun atmosphere of so many young people playing games together, eating a simple dinner, then playing again until the curfew was lifted in the morning and they could go home. Pickled vegetables really can make any meal better, even during a civil war.

I was determined to get better at this, so I asked Granny for her recipe after all.

Recipe:

Sour cabbage can be made in wooden tubs. A small amount (5—10kg) can be pickled in glass jars or clay pots. Choose good heads of cabbage without green leaves, cut the heads into strips and mix with salt (250g of salt for 10kg of cabbage).

Cover the bottom of the cleaned tub with a tiny layer of rye flour, cover it with cabbage leaves and then put as many cabbage strips inside as possible. Cover the top with cabbage leaves. To add flavor and aroma, you can add carrots cut into circles, apples (the antonovka kind), cowberries and cranberries. Put a wooden circle on top of the tub and weigh it down with a clean stone. After several days, the cabbage will start to sour and a layer of foam will appear on the top.

The amount of foam will first increase and then disappear. When the foam is gone, the cabbage is ready.

During the souring process, poke the cabbage frequently with a clean birch stake to release gas. If it happens, that means that the cabbage is sour and ready. If mold or crystals appear on the top during the process, remove it carefully and continue souring.

Granny’s recipe:

3 kg cabbage

1 carrot

2 tablespoons rock salt

2 tablespoons sugar

6—7 liter enamel saucepan

Take the top leaves off the cabbage. Put some at the bottom of a saucepan and leave some to put on top. Slice up the rest of the cabbage leaves into fine strips, add the salt and sugar. Squeeze the cabbage, add it to the saucepan and push it down.

Cover with the remaining whole leaves, put a flat plate on the cabbage, and set a 3-liter glass jar of water on top of the plate. Add enough water into the cabbage to cover the plate.

After 24 hours, take the jar and plate off and poke through the cabbage with a knife to let the air out. Leave it open for 60—90 minutes. Replace the plate and jar. Continue this process once a day for 2 days. After 3 days, put the cabbage into smaller jars, close tightly and store in the refrigerator.

9. A circle of sunshine for a gray day. Pancakes with pumpkin puree

November was well and truly settling in when I made this recipe. It’s not the best time of year in Moscow – gray, cold, rainy, and the days get very short. For those affected by it, SAD (seasonal affective disorder) has spread its wings by now. SAD must be a recent phenomenon, because when someone is down, Granny says: “He/she has… it’s called… dep-res-sion!” Her look implies that Soviets only learned the term to talk about modern-day “softies” and certainly never had time for it themselves.

In Russian, the words for “recipe” and “prescription” are the same: “retsept.” Luckily there’s a pumpkin pancake recipe in the Book – in the “old recipes” section – as a prescription to cure that “softie” SADness. It looks like the perfect comfort food. It grabbed me when I saw it in summer, but I patiently waited till it was autumn and I could justify making a pumpkin recipe.

Pancakes have been around for a long time in Russia. Round, hot and golden, they remind us of the sun, and are therefore baked during Maslenitsa – the pagan holiday of welcoming spring, during which pancakes are consumed non-stop for a week. I get very keen on paganism that week. And then very keen on the gym the week after.

During Soviet times, Maslenitsa was still quietly celebrated in apartments, although not as widely as it is these days.

Granny remembers that “when we were evacuated” (which she often talks about, referring to the period in World War II when all Muscovites had to leave the capital for the countryside) they stopped at someone’s house at a village. The hostess made a bunch of wheat pancakes. “I still remember she served the pancakes with melted butter that was poured over the pancakes – it was delicious,” she said.

It seems like Russians consider themselves a cut above anyone else at consuming pancakes. I can just hear someone in a Russian town saying, “I’m not proud of much, but I sure know how to down a couple of dozen pancakes.” Chekhov wrote a short story called ‘Stupid Frenchman’, in which a Frenchman thought the Russian next to him was trying to commit suicide by eating too many pancakes, whereas the Russian was just having his normal appetizer.

Opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya wrote in her memoirs that when they had foreign guests over they never had much food to offer, but thank goodness those foreigners got full on three pancakes each. Needless to say, no Russian would ever be full on three pancakes – they might have their citizenship revoked!

I halved the book’s recipe as it looked like a huge batch (I put in 2 eggs instead of 3, as it’s pretty tough to get half an egg). I stewed the pumpkin and added some cinnamon and ground ginger to make it more interesting. Granny always adds a tablespoon of sunflower oil into the batter to avoid oiling the pan each time, and that’s what I did, too. It does take a while to wait for the batter to rise, and then each pancake takes 3—4 minutes to make, so it’s more of a brunch recipe, although a delicious one. Half the batch made 18 rather big pancakes, which went well both with melted cheese and jam or honey and plain yogurt!

To prove my Russian-ness by pancake consumption, I devoured my pumpkin pancakes in just a couple of sittings (minus the three my husband took to work). They aren’t like the Soviet food I’m used to – especially if you add some cinnamon – and in fact it isn’t a genuine Soviet recipe (as it comes from the “old recipe” section), but they make for a lovely addition to the Book and are sure to cure any autumn blues. Plus you can recycle the process in a few months for Maslenitsa!

Recipe:

Cook 1 kg pumpkin, peeled and cut into cubes, until soft. Press through a sieve to make puree. Pour pumpkin puree into 1 liter of milk and heat until it is the temperature of fresh milk. Into the milk-puree mix, add 15 g yeast and 3 eggs. Stir. Add 2—2 ½ cups flour until the dough is the right consistency. Put in a warm place and let sit for two hours. Then, add 1 tbsp oil, ½ cup sugar and a sprinkle of salt. Again sit in a warm place until it rises. Then, form and cook the pancakes.

10. Thanksgiving dinner on the Soviet diet. Fried turkey, mashed potatoes, baked apple with preserves, cranberry mousse

By the end of November, Russians are slowly getting excited about the biggest holiday of the year – New Year’s Eve. It’s the Soviet substitute for Christmas, which in Russian Orthodoxy is marked on Jan. 7 and not widely celebrated. In Moscow, New Year trees are being set up, people are starting to shop for presents and everyone is dreaming of the main dish on the New Year table – Olivier salad. No one is thinking about turkey and pumpkin pie.

I don’t think many Russians know much about Thanksgiving. They may be aware that it exists, but if you asked anyone on the street if the fourth Thursday in November is different from any other day in the United States, I doubt they would have an answer. I know I didn’t have an answer until about four years ago, when a Canadian/Australian couple invited my husband and me over for Thanksgiving dinner.

Now I remember, and if you ask me what’s special about this day in late November (or in October, in the case of Canadian Thanksgiving), I would say that it is special because there is turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie… and I don’t have to cook any of it! I love Thanksgiving dinner – my Australian friend Karen is a spectacular cook and I remember crawling out from under the dinner table and plopping myself on the sofa, wondering if I had indeed had enough – or could I maybe fit just one more heavenly slice in?

Since then I’ve been very lucky to get to go to two more Thanksgiving dinners with a bunch of Americans who were all away from home, gathered together in a Moscow apartment, and having a wonderful time.

This year I thought I’d give it a go myself. On the downside, I had to make my own dinner, but on the plus side, I found some recipes in the Book that worked really well. There was just one turkey recipe, so that choice was easy – the Book says that turkey should be served with baked apples, which is a great idea. I also used a cranberry sauce dessert recipe with less sugar and, of course, mashed potatoes. I didn’t have an American around to test it on, but my Australian husband and I thought it was an appropriate Soviet Thanksgiving dinner.

I asked Granny if she knew much about Thanksgiving and the food that’s usually served: “Thanksgiving? American Thanksgiving? I know of it, but don’t know anything about it. I think they eat turkey, a whole one. In the Soviet times I’d never even heard of turkey – we certainly never cooked it. It’s surprising there’s a turkey recipe in the book. As for mashed potatoes – I always loved them, and they are very handy as you can always use leftovers to make a zapekanka or patties.”

Making this dinner wasn’t nearly as time and energy-consuming as cooking a real American Thanksgiving dinner. To make the sauce, I crushed the berries and rubbed them through a sieve, then boiled them for about 15 minutes, adding a little bit of sugar and semolina as suggested. I didn’t follow the rest of the recipe, as I wasn’t after dessert, and it worked well. With the mashed potatoes, I just followed the recipe and they turned out nicely. My husband is the mashed potato expert in our family, and while he said the Soviet potatoes weren’t as good as his, they did the job.

As for the turkey, the book’s recipe seemed completely weird. I didn’t see the need to pour melted butter on the poor bird, or why I should boil the already-roasted turkey. So I just read the part for turkey fillet and fried it in a pan, which worked for me.

Baked apples are a common dessert at Granny’s and in many Russian kitchens. Granny pierces whole apples with a fork, adds a little water and bakes them until soft, for about 30 minutes, which is what I did, ignoring the part about adding jam, as I wanted them as a savoury side.

I know Granny would love to try a real Thanksgiving dinner – she enjoys cowberry sauce with meat, and now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, hopefully she’ll have the chance to!

Recipes:

Cranberry mousse with semolina:

Place the washed, sorted-out cranberries into a pan and crush them with a wooden pestle, adding a third of a cup of boiled water and sieving them through gauze. The juice should be kept cool.

For one cup of cranberries, use one cup of sugar and three tablespoons of semolina

The crushed berries should be boiled for five minutes in three cups of water, strained and the mix should then be used to cook the semolina. Pour and stir the semolina gradually into the boiling mix.

After 20 minutes of slow boiling, pour in the sugar, let the mass boil and remove from the burner. Pour the juice into the cooked mass and whip it until obtaining a thick foam. When the mass has increased twice in volume, pour it into containers and place them in a cold spot. The cranberry mousse can be served with cold milk.

Mashed potatoes:

Boil the peeled and washed potatoes, drain the water and keep the pan with the potatoes on a small flame or in the oven so that the remaining water evaporates.

For one kilogram of potatoes, use one cup of milk and two tablespoons of butter

Afterwards, without letting the potatoes cool, rub them through a sieve or crush them with a wooden pestle, add the butter and salt and, while stirring, gradually add the hot milk. Mashed potatoes are served individually or as a side dish to ham, tongue, cutlets, sausages and other meat dishes.

Fried turkey:

Salt the prepared turkey on all sides, place it on a pan with its back up, pour on the melted butter, add half a cup of water and let it bake in a medium-heated oven. While baking, use a spoon to pour the juice formed around it onto the turkey and turn it so that it browns on all sides (the turkey needs to be baked anywhere from one to two and a half hours, depending on its size).

When finished baking, remove the turkey, pour out the fat, add a cup of meat broth or water, boil and sieve.

When the turkey is not prepared in its entirety but in halves, the parts must be fried after the baking process. The turkey must be served on a warm platter divided into two halves, which should then be divided into 4—8 pieces. Pour the juice over the turkey and decorate it with parsley shoots or salad leaves. Baked apples or fried potatoes can be served on the side. Serve the green salad, cucumbers and marinated fruits and berries separately.

Baked apples with preserves:

Wash the apples with cold water, remove their cores (without cutting through them), prick the peels, fill the apples with preserves and place them on a pan or tray. Pour 2—3 tablespoons of water and place the pan in an oven with medium temperature for 15—20 minutes. As soon as the apples become soft, they must be removed, cooled and placed onto a platter or plate. Then pour the syrup formed in the pan onto the apples

For 10 apples – half a cup of preserves

For the stuffing it is best to use wild strawberry, strawberry, blackcurrant or cherry (without pits) preserves. Add crushed crackers, cookie crumbs, crushed almonds or finely chopped walnuts to the preserves selected for the stuffing.

Baked apples with sugar are prepared in the same way as apples with preserves, with the only exception being that instead of the preserves, the apples are stuffed with sugar.

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.