In one of the letters, Krupskaya described how the exiled Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was fed in Shushenskoye. As an exile, he was allocated money for living, and the future revolutionary did not know the everyday problems.
- The cheapness in this Shushenskoye was amazing. For example, Vladimir Ilyich for his "salary" - an eight-ruble allowance - had a clean room, feeding, washing and repairing clothes - and that was considered to be paying dearly.. . True, lunch and dinner were rather simple - one week for Vladimir Ilyich they killed a ram, which they fed him every day until he had eaten everything; how to eat - they bought meat for a week, a worker in the yard - in a trough where they prepared fodder for cattle, chopped the purchased meat into cutlets for Vladimir Ilyich - also for a whole week ...
I don't even know what to say about this. While people from peasant families often ate meat for the first time in the army (poverty among the peasants was terrible, and the Russian Empire exported wheat, which their own residents lacked ("white bread - for a white body"), they took care of the food of exiled Vladimir Ilyich... If the channel was political, then you can was to reflect on the fact that caste in Russia was still strongly developed, and therefore Lenin, as a native of a noble family, was not particularly oppressed (class, class!).
But the channel here is chef's, so I’ll talk about cutlets. A very interesting topic, by the way. If only because cutlets are not at all a traditional Russian dish. It is believed that it came in the time of Peter the Great either from France (côtelette), or from Germany (K otelett), but in those days it was not chopped meat, but whole, fried on the bone.
Around the time of Empress Elizabeth, a recipe for chicken cutlets de volai was brought to Russia from France, at the end From the 18th century, it seemed like cutlets made of minced meat appeared, and at the beginning of the 19th century, the phenomenon of "Pozharsky" happened cutlets.
Around the "Pozharsky" cutlets there are legends, they say, the emperor drove, drove, but for some reason I hardly believe in these legends. I read the most truthful version from the kitchen historians Syutkins - Evdokim Pozharsky was famous for his chopped veal cutlets, and after the death of her father, his daughter Daria came up with the idea of making them from chicken. And the emperor who could taste them was not Alexander I, but Nicholas I.
And "Pozharsky" in those days was called not only chicken, cutlets, but in general - cutlets. Chef Ignatius Radetsky published a recipe for fire cutlets in the "Almanac of Gastronomes" under the name Cotelette de volaille a la Pojarski, a recipe for fish cakes that he called simply Pozharsky and a recipe for turkey cutlets (also Pozharskikh).
Urbain Dubois in his book La cuisine classique (1864) gives two whole recipes for côtelettes à la Pajarski, one from veal, the other from hazel grouse.
Then, by the way, cutlets were "purely meat". They were only breaded in croutons.
What kind of food did Lenin eat?
Most likely, just the "purely meat" option. For a sample, you can take a recipe from 1880 from the book by A. N. Toliverova, A. N. Salnikova “Cookbook for young housewives. Lean and light "home table" ", only replace poultry meat with veal.
Peel, gut, wash 3 hazel grouse or 1 grater, remove all meat from the bones, chop, add 3 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons of cream, grind 1 egg with a spoon until smooth, salt, sprinkle with a little pepper, make cutlets; roll in an egg, then in breadcrumbs and fry in a skillet in oil.
By the way, white bread without a crust began to be added to minced meat only at the very beginning of the twentieth century. And these were new trends, not very well known in the village. In the book "Notes on the course of the culinary school" in 1907, bread is already mentioned in the recipe for cutlets.
Krupskaya wrote to Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova about her husband (letter dated May 22, 1898):
- He has become terribly healthy, and his appearance is brilliant in comparison with what he was in St. Petersburg.
Still, on mutton and cutlets.