The former USSR was also a culinary power, a taste and societal chronicle by François Guilbert
After publishing in 2021 Cold War Hot Dishes at Éditions de l'Epure, the journalist from the Russian-speaking editorial team of Radio France Internationale returns to “THE” culinary source from the Soviet era, the homemade one from her childhood in the era of Nikita Khrushchev and then Leonid Brezhnev. However, the anthology that she edits and comments on today dates well before her birth. Its content had such a profound impact on the culture of families in the USSR that it remains an emblematic reference for all Russian cooks. The latest edition, however, dates back more than a quarter of a century and, as with its predecessors, it is difficult to find a volume on the second-hand book markets.
Dedicated to the Soviet housewife, the first edition of Book of good and healthy food dates back to 1939
The manuscript bears the marks of the Stalinist era and has retained them over time; those of the primacy of industry over all other activities, of a Russo-centric Soviet world where Baltic, Caucasian and Central Asian specificities are barely mentioned and of a regime of lies, many of the products mentioned having been inaccessible to the greater number of families, including those in the middle class. In such a marked political-ideological context: a book of cooking recipes – printed in more than 7 million copies and updated for six decades – can be a book of propaganda and edification of the masses. The photos of semi-finished products from the food industry illustrating this version finalized in 1952 bear witness to this; the hygienist and productivist councils of the time even more so.
To reflect this significant reality, Guélia Pevzner not only added a preface of nearly thirty pages but she took care in introducing the chapters and some recipes to recontextualize an ingredient, a social practice or even a trait of the moment.
This unique Soviet cookbook is a monument of bygone times and the history of the Russian world
The author who writes a weekly gastronomic column for the radio while also producing a monthly column entitled The taste of Guélia on the cultures of taste web platform General Food, maintains through this reissue the memory of a disappeared Soviet world, in particular that of the so-called era of stagnation (zastoï). His comments on this slice of history are also an opportunity to mention, here and there, bitter humorous anecdotes about food (anecdoty) which she fed. In terms of governance, it also recalls the major role played for decades by the member of the political bureau of the Communist Party Anastase Mikoyan (1895 – 1978) on the meals of l’Homo Sovieticus.
-This photograph taken with the aim of having a wide-angle view shows the profound gap existing in any dictatorship between a world praised in words and writings and the reality of the day. Looking at certain recommendations, we see how the initial drafting officials were aware of the general poverty and food shortages reigning in society and that it was appropriate to mask them with a number of simple and easy recipes. But for doctrinal consistency, it was nonetheless necessary to mask “bourgeois” or “cosmopolitan” heritage.
It is thus comical to have seen elevated to the rank of national dish the cutlets (meatballs) while they had a lot to do, from the 1930s, with Yankee hamburgers but Stalinist environment obliges, they should not be enjoyed more than once every ten days according to the nutritionists of reference. The Russians never do as they are told: they cannot carry out their cutlets without onion, the ingredient does not appear in the recipe for Book promoted by the Communist Party and the Soviet government.
Guélia Pevzner : Soviet cuisine, The book of good and healthy foodLes Éditions de l’Épure, 2024, 557 p, €32
François Guilbert
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