I tried to understand which foods I had never tasted in my unhappy and hungry Soviet childhood (irony, if anything), which I had never heard of, and which I had heard but had not seen.
You know, I actually had to sit for a very long time. And my list was not very impressive. And rather strange. Parma ham, lobster and truffles were not included in it (you will not believe, but still there are people, and not only in Russia, who have not heard of them), tried only democratic positions remember.
And it all turned out a little democratic, and also wildly. Because it is generally believed that in the USSR it is not clear what they ate, there was nothing, food appeared only after its collapse, but in fact... Hmm.
In the first place (and the first thing that comes to mind)... soy sauce. It would have been worth producing and selling in impressive volumes, but this was not the case. The most interesting thing is that soy sauce, in principle, was, because it is included in the recipe of some delicious sauces produced by Soviet industry (sauce y "Vostochny", "Moscow", "Indian fruit"), but in bottles, just soy sauce, not met. It appeared only in the nineties.
Second place - crab sticks and imitation crab meat, that is, surimi. I don’t remember them (although, perhaps, they were released). However, if they were produced, we did not get it, I will not be particularly upset - instead of crab sticks, krill meat went perfectly into salads.
The third place is avocado. You will laugh, but he really was not in the USSR. It was not a deficit, it was not at all. Is it worth getting upset about this? I do not know. However, avocados were not widely used then and all over the world. Avocado became a wildly popular superfood in the 2000s. And even then not right away ...
The fourth place is coconut and some very exotic fruits such as lychee, pomelo. Here the coconut was wildly interesting to me for a small one - it was especially interesting to try coconut milk, which seemed to be real food of the gods. However, there were no coconuts. I just read about many exotic fruits in the magazine "Vokrug Sveta", yes, I really wanted to try them, but now to say that I can't live without them - I can't. To be honest, now we prefer to gorge ourselves on exotic things for future use while traveling, because the quality of imported fruits is very lame - even in expensive stores.
Fifth place - yoghurts in the form in which they are now used to seeing. That is, thick, almost creamy, with pieces of something there, and in jars. They, it seems, were not there either. There was children's fruit kefir, other sour-milk sweet drinks, but there were no such yogurts.
I cannot say that this is bad either. Yogurt in a jar is most often a completely useless product - it contains so much sugar and preservatives, with flavors that all the fermented milk benefits have long ago thrown back the pseudopods, flagella, and what else is there for bacteria.
I do not argue, my memories are very individual, like any other person. But I can't remember anything else that is bought often now. Rare gourmet sauces, such as Vietnamese fish or Worcestershire, are still not used in everyday cuisine. As well as, for example, balsamic vinegar (it was not there either). Parma, jamon, oysters - yes, I have not seen in stores. Truffles too (as now, truffles are more of a custom-made product). So now, many have only read about them, and the appearance of oysters is clearly not a sign of the country's development.
Tell me, do you still remember something like that, which was not there before, but now we eat every day? I mean a product as a class, not a single variety or species in a product category.