Every time I write about some particulars of Soviet cookery (not a shop, but culinary culture, that is, the culture of cooking), people come to the comments who consider it their duty write:
-You're lying! There are no traditions of Soviet cooking, and never have been, people lived in an eternal search for something to eat at all.
And, in support of this position, they begin to give a bunch of arguments. They say, there was no sturgeon, from a certain moment, and when it was, not everyone could afford it. There were no mushrooms for sale! There were not many cheeses - look, in every decent foreign recipe the name of the cheese you need to use, but here even in the “Book of Delicious and Healthy Food”, a kind of Bible of Soviet cookery, in the recipes they often write this - take cheese.
What does this mean? This means that there were no cheeses in the country! What you get - and eat this. And with meat the same way, and with sausages, and with other products.
And this is what I want to say ...
The other day, we discussed with a friend whether it is possible to use ordinary raw smoked sausage instead of chorizio (chorizo) in lentil stew with a claim to Spanish origin? That is, sausage is just a meat component, so the type of it that is available was used. it is in the region of preparation, or is it just chorizo - a kind of claim, without which the soup impossible.
He claims no chorizo - no stew. But if you think about it, lentil stew is a very, very primitive, cheap dish that belongs to poor cuisine. Therefore, there is chorizo - good, no - we put what we have in stock. To achieve an authentic Spanish-Portuguese flavor, take more paprika (or don't use it if you don't have it).
And this attitude to the recipe is also normal. I have tried and "empty" lentil stew during travel, and with sausages, and smoked meats, and just on the bones, and just with meat... Moreover, in those regions where this dish was considered a kind of “primordially delicious, like our cabbage soup, let's say.
Why am I telling all this? And to the fact that the peculiarity of any kitchen is its class division. Uh-huh. Something like that. There is no Russian cuisine as such, there is no French cuisine as such. And English. Both Spanish and Japanese... It will all be divided into hundreds of classes and subclasses - rural and urban, poor and aristocratic, hunter's cuisine, fisherman's cuisine and the cuisine of the emperor (tsar-tsarevich, king-prince).
And arguing that in the Soviet Union culinary traditions, as such, did not exist, everything was bad with food (few varieties, few species, some delicacy positions were absent as a class), the authors of these statements about such a class division forget.
The main idea and main feature of Soviet cookery was that all residents could eat quickly, efficiently and economically, in accordance with scientific and medical recommendations. But it so happened that the USSR, oddly enough, made it possible to increase the welfare of the population (yes, now for many it sounds crazy, but for many peasants and workers life in the USSR seemed like paradise compared to what was BEFORE the appearance of this country, let's really look at the world realistically - if milk rivers flowed in the Russian Empire between the jelly banks, revolutions suffocated).
What happens when wealth rises?
That's right, the perception of products as prestigious and non-prestigious begins to lead... This division, which has been laid in the minds for centuries, the idea of Soviet cooking could not defeat. This is what we observe when we read indignant that there is no Soviet cooking, there were no products, that was not, that was not ...
There was she. It's just its main feature, declassification with the availability of all basic basic products (not that. which in different periods of time is considered delicacies) are not taken into account. But to tell the truth, this idea was destroyed by people themselves, back in the days of the USSR, because our society cannot be without classes ...