I am reproached for the fact that I very often praise dishes from Soviet cafes to canteens. Like, I'm lying godlessly. Well, or I’m cheating, at least. Because in the Soviet public catering, nothing tasty was prepared by default!
Not true. The food was delicious. That's just not all (alas).
There were categories of dishes that in my childhood (I think, not only me) to force me to eat was impossible. Even on pain of excommunication from all the benefits of the advancing communism (irony, if someone does not understand).
And to be honest, I still do not understand: what was done with the products, since it turned out to be so... disgusting.
I compiled a small list of seemingly simple dishes that they managed to disfigure beyond recognition, and even now they did not cook better.
Pasta comes first
Yes, there were no good pasta, to which we are now accustomed, made from durum wheat flour. But even banal horns or feathers were cooked at home so that they could be eaten and not without pleasure, but in cafes and canteens obtained a substance, amazing in its abomination, which, with a chomp, broke off from the common monolith and lay on a plate brick.
The pasta in the school cafeteria, even if it was served with gravy, most often remained on the plates.
Probably, somewhere they cooked pasta well, but I have never come across such a place.
Even now, in most establishments, taking pasta is a risk for the guest. Even if the name of the establishment flaunts "restaurant", there is a great risk of getting something inedible.
And it would be okay to turn the pasta into horror after "sobriety". So they and freshly brewed more like a slimy alien.
One must have talent in order to create something like that!
Second place - rice
Cooking rice is not that difficult. In Asia, even hawkers do this, when hygiene aficionados get their hair on end and diarrhea immediately occurs.
But here with rice you can check cooks for handlessness. They even manage to make the side dish crumbly rice into a mass for modeling, and with a strange aftertaste. Okay, earlier, when the country had exclusively Krasnodar rice (during the selection of which, attention was paid to yield, and not to taste), such a result could be understood.
But now it seems that decent domestic varieties have appeared, and there is a lot of imported rice.
But cafes and canteens continue to delight with "something" for a side dish, in which you can recognize rice - but you don't feel like eating it at all. Here I will add - I'm not talking about expensive restaurants and decent cafes where guests are appreciated. And about the mass market, so to speak. By the way, all kinds of dry low-error in the same category. More nasty than disgusting cooked rice, disguised with a mixture of alcohol bite and sugar, is hard to come up with.
Stewed cabbage - third place
Oh, the horror of the school cafeteria (and not only the school cafeteria). While traveling with my parents in the Soviet Union, I firmly learned the rule: if on the way to a catering establishment you have a powerful cabbage spirit in your nose, run away from there, no matter how you crave calories!
Braised cabbage, so delicious at home, in canteens and other establishments, acquired strange shades of both taste and smell.
Even if there were no blotches of spoiled sheets in it, it smelled like a poorly washed rag. It tasted flat and insipid - neither tuda nor syuda.
How this was possible, given that the technological cards for the same cabbage look very decent and the dishes prepared according to them should be tasty - I personally do not understand.
And yes, today the story is the same with cabbage ...
What do you remember “filthy”?