Previously, as you know, the sky was bluer, the grass was greener, and lemonade and sausage were tastier. Here we need to add a smiling emoticon, because... Well, in fact, either the lemonade with sausage was tastier, or the receptors responsible for recognizing tastes are more sensitive.
And we ourselves had a simpler attitude to everything. If now we are constantly in search of new tastes, then in childhood, what we like was for some reason not boring. Didn't you notice?
So today - about the "delicacies" of the Soviet resort childhood. Since I raised the topic of what Russian vacationers eat abroad, you can remember what Soviet vacationers ate at home, right?
Let's omit food in canteens at boarding houses and sanatoriums. I don’t know about you, but my parents and I very rarely found myself there (if I did, I didn’t feel delighted with proper and wholesome nutrition there). But when we were resting as "savages", as it was called then - here it was possible to come off to the fullest.
There seemed to be nothing more beautiful than the sandwiches that were made on the beach.
They were made from black bread, green onions, cucumbers and tomatoes. But the main ingredient was sprats. Sprats from a tin can, which did not spoil in the heat - unlike sausages or sausages, and therefore they could be safely taken with you to the beach.
Do you know how many times I have bought sprats in recent years in an attempt to find those delicious ones? And, most importantly, without the smell of spoiled fish, which was filled with flavorings and oil, in order to be disposed of?
Do not count. Sometimes they came across quite decent ones. That is, without the exquisite notes of rotten in the aroma. However, to taste - it's not that, all the same. Why? Who knows. Maybe the fish has gone bad? Or maybe production technology.
By the way, about the fish. In Yalta, I remember, for lunch they often took a local "delicacy" - fried sea bass. These perches were sold - already fried - in the cooking of any supermarket. Red, gutted, but with heads, with bulging eyes, they frightened with their appearance and delighted with... taste.
The meat is dense, white, well done and at the same time not dry. The fish themselves are pleasantly large, there is something to eat in them.
I haven't seen such perch (sea bass!) For a long time, even raw. And even more so ready-made. And in cooking, there is more and more capelin at the price of trout now ...
And the king of all resorts, I remember, was chicken. Chicken tobacco.
This chicken, too, has not been tasted for a long time. The problem here is in the chickens themselves - now the broiler chicken is a mutant that, forgive me, can be killed - 1700 grams is almost the minimum weight.
Anything less - already refers to gherkins, in which there is practically nothing. And in those days, despite the "deficits" and other horrors, chickens remained chickens - with legs, with breasts, with thighs and meat that did not creep out from the slightest pressure. The aroma of these chickens floated above the cafes, attracting vacationers there ...
You can, of course, remember the small - the size of saucers - pizzas in Yalta. And surprisingly tasty, soft kebabs on Lake Ritsa, and not gnawed, as if made of rubber - kebabs in a very fashionable in those days cafe with wigwam buildings in Jurmala. And “cooperative” soft ice cream, which was “let” from freezers into fragile cones made from “home-baked” waffles. Nobody poured chocolate into the corners of these cones, and they were folded so that there was always a hole, so the ice cream had to be eaten almost at speed, but how delicious it seemed! And shrimp - small Black Sea ones - which old ladies sold almost on every corner in Odessa in glasses - like seeds.
None of this is now gone.
What do you remember?