Do you think the problem of counterfeit and poor quality products is a problem of our time? Ha! Three times ha!
I already wrote about how products were counterfeited (falsified, ok, let's be tolerant), and what they did with them in order to sell spoiled instead of fresh, in England. To which many replied - it was in all London, and we have the best traditions of the Russian merchant class, no deception! And the manufacturer (that is, a peasant), a kind man has always been honest, not crafty.
We have always had the best quality on the shelves!
I do not know. Bulk purchases of dormant tea, and then drying and mixing it with all sorts of additives and, of course, selling it under the guise of the present, was practiced in Moscow for a long time - many years before the revolution.
Yes, and reading old cookery and household books, one only wonders - as in the nineteenth century the housewives worried - not to feed the family with filth.
Ekaterina Avdeeva in her "The Complete Cookbook of an Experienced Russian Housewife or Guide to Reducing Household Costs" such a tragic story of dry broth tells that she, she, she wants to grab a stomach - and how good Vologda peasants conscience allowed such compatriots to feed (irony, if what).
The very presence of dry broth in those days is not surprising. True, it is very difficult to call it truly dry, this substance most likely resembled a very viscous jellied meat, boiled to the maximum. Or maybe it was actually dry, in the form of pebbles?
Avdeeva gives a gorgeous recipe, I was already drooling:
the back quarter and front shoulder of the calf, three chickens, 2 hares, one turkey, two ducks must be roasted without salt until half cooked in the oven or on a spit. Take two pounds of lean beef, put it all in a large cat, season with 15 celery (most likely root?), 15 leek, 15 onions, fifteen parsley and fifteen carrots, take one-eighth of each clove and English pepper, and cook day.
All this is then squeezed out, filled with water again and a new broth is cooked, and when it is ready, both broths are mixed, seasoned with nutmeg and nutmeg and boiled again until thickened... And only then, first, the brew solidifies in the forms, followed by drying.
To be honest, I almost choked on my saliva while reading the original set of products. Then I thought - well, damn it, they ate ...
And then I was disappointed: the problems were the same as now. Well, you can't buy a good dry broth!
Avdeeva scolds the dry broth sold in shops, writes that it is huge glue lumps seasoned with Liebig's meat extract (an interesting thing). And only at the Milyutins in the shops, and even Eliseev and Smurov, you can buy something better, but even this will be better with the huge content of "fur glue".
And even in the "Gazette of the St. Petersburg Police" (1871) they wrote, "what disgusting circumstances are accompanied at the points of the manufacture of dry broth, its production"
Why is that?
It turns out that the Vologda peasants, already famous for their butter, were the most active broth producers.
- One Vologda province produces more than 5,000 poods of that dry broth, which you see in Petersburg, and in all shops of the empire. These 5,000 poods come from 20,000 calves. And what kind of calves are they? You think, perhaps, that these are calves, at least 2 - 3 weeks old, i.e. those who have some meat. Nothing happened - these are all calves 2 - 3, many, many, like 6-day-olds, beaten so mercilessly in fact, in order to reduce the number of sucking calves that consume a lot of milk, writes Avdeeva.
And he calls the resulting mass not broth, but "fur glue", and advises checking the broth by sprinkling with heated alcohol - if 75 percent dissolves, then this is broth. But he adds:
- You can be sure that Vologda's beautiful glossy broth, in cobblestone tiles, will never give these results, just apply glue in it, and all of it is nothing more than a mass of fur glue, so inconvenient for digestive human organs.
Wondering what Katerina would say after tasting a modern bouillon cube, huh?