Galocha Cultural: Livro "The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food" / "O Livro da Comida Saborosa e Saudável" / "Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище" / "Kniga o Vkusnoi i Zdorovoi Pishche", União Soviética, Atual Rússia, Artigo

Livro "The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food" / "O Livro da Comida Saborosa e Saudável" / "Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище" / "Kniga o Vkusnoi i Zdorovoi Pishche", União Soviética, Atual Rússia, Artigo
Livro

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, by Anastas Ivanovich Mikoian, 1952 edition.

Long queues, food shortages and potatoes are what most of us associate with Soviet cooking. But a 1952 edition of a Russian cookery book, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, tells a different story. It opens with a double-page spread of a lavishly laid table, replete with caviar, champagne and overflowing fruit bowls: more Liberace than Lenin. Photographs of food production – egg farming, apple harvesting, fruit canning – and recipes for dishes such as aubergine caviar, beef Stroganoff, Russian salad, nut pudding and apple pie are scattered throughout its 400 pages. The overall impression is one of abundance. In reality, aside from the privileged few, the majority of the Russian population existed on a diet made dull and monotonous by the limited availability of many foods. What was on offer in the book was not an achievable culinary proposition, but a promise of what might be enjoyed once the ideals of communism were realised. It was as much a political as a practical text – and a powerful one at that. The 1952 edition, currently on display at the British Library’s Propaganda exhibition, sold 2.5 million copies. Written by scientists from the Institute of Nutrition of the Academy of Medical Scientists of the USSR, Tasty and Healthy Food begins with a chapter on the successes of the domestic food industry, followed by “The Foundations of Rational Nutrition”. The rest of the book consists of recipes and advice about etiquette, diet and hygiene, interspersed with information on such new food products as canned sweet corn and ready-made dumplings. The recipes themselves range from the opulent – sturgeon in jelly, cold piglet with horseradish – to the ordinary: bean soup, cabbage stuffed with meat. A suggested June lunch menu sounds appetising without being extravagant: herring, lamb ragout, rice with milk, stuffed cabbage and apple and plum compote. But the actual availability of food would have made this, and many other meals in the book, virtually impossible to achieve. Tasty and Healthy Food was the brainchild of Anastas Ivanovich Mikoian. Born in Armenia in 1895, Mikoian survived at the highest levels of power from 1926 to the Brezhnev era, serving as the People’s Commissar of the Food Industry in the 1930s. He travelled widely, including to the US, and became convinced of the need to modernise the way the USSR produced and consumed its food. He introduced “Fish Day” on Thursdays to improve the population’s nutritional intake, built a vast new meat processing industry and popularised ice cream. By publishing Tasty and Healthy Food, Mikoian combined his passion for food with the communist project. Readers are encouraged to enjoy eating, but food is ultimately serving a larger goal. Eat “with appetite and pleasure”, but with a mind on nutrition because this “is good for health but also your ability to labour and this is the main priority of the Communist Party and Soviet government.”

First published in 1939, less than a decade after Stalin’s collective farm system had caused widespread famine, the book marked a change in ideology regarding domestic life. From 1917 to the early 1930s, the communist eating ideal was of collective dining. Communal food systems supposedly had revolutionary benefits: maximising the use of labour and food resources; instilling shared communist values; liberating women from the burden of domestic cooking and thereby bringing them into the workforce. In practice, however, communal dining was often grim, with limited choice, poor food and bad hygiene. With its cover embossed “To the Soviet Housewife from the People’s Commissariat of the Food Industry”, the book suggested a return to the domestic kitchen, and attempted to reconcile pre-revolutionary dining with communism. By using recipes from across the USSR, the book also aimed to propagate a culinary narrative about the country. There was caviar from the Far East, fruit from the Crimea, wines from Georgia, Armenian cognac and recipes for kharcho (spicy Georgian soup) and Ukranian halushki (dumplings). For generations of Russians, Tasty and Healthy Food created a shared culinary communist fantasy. If reality had been closer to that ideal, perhaps the Iron Curtain would still be in place.

It’s a Saturday morning in autumn when I sit down with the Soviet Book of Tasty and Healthy Food to decide what dishes to make for a feast that evening. Based on the day and the season, the iconic cookbook makes several suggestions for a three-course dinner. I do as it advises and choose a menu composed of both meat and vegetable dishes. It’s also crucial, I note, for the menu to have variety: “Oftentimes, this is overlooked. Not all housewives take the time and effort to make a plan for food preparation in advance. Mostly they only have around ten or 12 dishes that they alternate throughout the years, and the family receives monotonous meals.”

Keen to excel in my role as a good Soviet housewife, I take on board both pieces of counsel. I settle on a herring salad and mushrooms in sour cream to start with, followed by pumpkin soup and kharcho, a Georgian broth flavoured with beef and sour plums. For our main course I opt for the fried duck with apples and a Ukranian dish, holubtsi, vegetable-stuffed cabbage leaves. We’ll end on a sweet note: apple kissel (think puree), sour cream mousse and syrniki, or curd fritters. Each dish will chased by shots of vodka and washed down with Soviet champagne, a somewhat embroidered term for sparkling wine from the Black Sea region.

As a vegetarian, I enlist the help of two comrades for the meat-based dishes. We travel to five different supermarkets, including a specialist Russian one, in search of ingredients. It takes us a few hours to gather the necessary constituents, a fairly easy task given we’re in London. As I nose through the aisles packed with food, I consider how this would not have been the case when the book was first published in 1939 or even in the decades that followed.

Despite the myth of abundance perpetuated by the book, the Thirties were characterised by severe food shortages and rationing. The book’s lush imagery of tables laden with sumptuous tableware, bowls overflowing with fruit, pyramids of cheese and meat, tins of caviar and cream-filled cakes were nothing but a chimera. This aspirational quality — and the fact that it was the only cookbook available — made it a thumping success. Since the updated 1952 edition, more than eight million copies of the book have been printed. “It was the book my mum used all the time,” says Moscow-born Karina Baldry, the author of Russia on a Plate. “It was our culinary bible and the only cookbook on our shelves.”

The propagandist tome was curated by the People’s Commissar of the Food Industry Anastas Mikoyan, a mustachioed Armenian who introduced ketchup and kornfleks to the Soviet Union following a three-month trip to the US in 1936. The visit to the heartland of capitalism was a fruitful one. Mikoyan returned with the technical know-how and equipment to produce machine-made ice-cream and hamburgers — the buns, writes Anya Von Bremzen in her recently published memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, were dispensed with during World War Two. The result was kotlety, a Russian dish much-loved today. As well as recipes from across the Soviet Union, which aimed to propagate a narrative of cultural harmony, Mikoyan’s cookbook pontificates on hygiene, etiquette and nutrition. There’s even a chapter with a long list of salubrious dishes for those with any number of ailments from bowel disorders to liver disease.

According to Katya Rogatchevskaia, lead east European curator (Russian) for London’s British Library, until its publication, the only other cookbook was A Gift for Young Housewives, which came out in 1861. “The Soviet cookbook was very well received because for a long time there was no cookery book in Russian,” she says. “It became a luxury item that was kept not in the kitchen but in the living room where people could sit down and look through it. Even though books were generally not expensive, shortages meant this one became scarce, making it more like a ‘coffee table’ book.”

While the book contains much simple fare, recipes with ingredients such as suckling pig, sturgeon and salmon caviar were all part of an illusion that befitted Joseph Stalin’s ideological trajectory well. In contrast to the Bolsheviks’ ascetic approach to food in the Twenties, writes Von Bremzen, under Stalin food became an integral part of his myth of prosperity. Unlike the Bolsheviks, Stalin’s brand of socialism was tinged with elements of a more bourgeois nature. In this way, the cookbook not only symbolised a kind of aspirational socialism but even went so far as to suggest that the good life had already been attained.

The book overlooked the fact that Stalin’s policy of enforced collectivisation had sparked a series of food crises including a year-long famine in 1932 that precipitated an estimated seven million deaths in the Soviet Union. “The book was a fantasy of society but people perceived it for what it was,” says Von Bremzen. “They perceived it as a kind of Potemkin village. It was a part of Stalin’s discourse but it also relieved everyday drabness. So many people have the same memories of being mesmerised by it.”

A few years after the famine in 1935, Stalin uttered one of his most risible statements: “Life has gotten better, comrades, life has gotten more cheerful.” This message was coupled with a call for greater culturedness, another theme picked up on by the cookbook, and one which we try to adhere to when we later lay the table. We start with a white, well-pressed tablecloth ensuring the middle fold aligns to the centre of the table. We dot the table with plates of thinly sliced bread and serve wine from bottles that have been pre-opened. Vodka is in a decanter. Each spoon and fork is placed with its concave side up while each knife’s cutting edge faces the plate. Flowers, as it rightly advises, “add beauty to the table”. We open the champagne immediately before pouring into glasses. The champagne has particular significance. It was during the late Thirties that Stalin took a personal interest in reviving the champagne industry, pledging to produce 20 million bottles a year by 1942. For a few years, it was even sold on tap in certain stores.

A second edition of the cookbook was published in 1952, which Von Bremzen describes as “bigger, better, happier and more politically virulent”, in line with Stalin’s antisemitic, anti-imperialist shift in ideology. By 1952, recipes from outside of the Soviet Union were expunged to allow for a greater focus on national identity and articles extolling the success of food production increased in number. “By 1952, there was a feel that more food was available even though this wasn’t the case,” says Rogatchevskaia.

Compared to today’s detailed recipes with their lists of ingredients as long as your arm, those in the book are somewhat laconic. There’s a lot of guesswork involved and it’s impossible to stick to the lacklustre recipes. Mushrooms without garlic? Kharcho without spices? Pumpkin soup without so much as a hint of cinnamon or nutmeg? It isn’t long before we deviate, adding garlic to the mushrooms and chilli to the pumpkin soup. The kharcho is also jazzed up with a sprinkling of garlic, chilli, mint and vegetable stock. The bland Soviet fare we discover just isn’t suited to our contemporary palettes.

When we finally sit down to eat, we make a vain attempt to adopt the etiquette outlined in the book, which Von Bremzen tells me was aimed at the “newly urbanised who wouldn’t have known how to hold a fork”. Plated food is served from the right while all other dishes are served from the left. We do as we’re instructed and hold our forks in a “tilted position”, fearing that failure to do so will cause the utensil to “slip and throw the contents of the plate onto the table”. We don’t last long. With each vodka shot, our state-prescribed table manners begin to slip. By the time we finish our meal, we pay no heed to the book, which advises all good housewives to promptly clean up after themselves. “Leaving dishes unwashed,” it chides, “is unacceptable.” We close the book and put it to one side.

In 1935, barely a few years after the paroxysms of the first five-year plan, Joseph Stalin made a famously upbeat pronouncement: "Life has become better, comrades. Life has become happier."

It was the Leader of Progressive Humanity's "happiness" pivot. Endlessly echoed on posters and in the press, it kicked off the official new orientation of the second half of the terror-filled Soviet 30s. Ditching the utopian asceticism of the Bolsheviks, the state now promoted a socialist version of bourgeois living. Stakhanovite miners and party nomenklatura elites received ornate furniture sets and apartment keys for outstanding achievements. A buoyant consumer goods drive was launched; along with it, an aggressive campaign for a "new cultured lifestyle". These Stalinist mantras of good cheer and prosperity shimmered like magical incantations in the collective psyche of a half-starving citizenry, still reeling from the horrors of collectivisation.

Part of this sunniness mandate was the creation of a Soviet socialist food canon – source of all the meat patties (kotleti), mayonnaise-laden salads, and spicier fare from ethnic republics that would fuel the USSR for its next 50-plus years. Anastas Mikoyan, the moustached Armenian (then commissar of the food industry), served as the chief engineer of the Soviet palate – and gullet. In 1936 Mikoyan criss-crossed the US, scouring for secrets of capitalist food manufacturing to bring home. In 1939 – at the end of Stalin's blood-soaked purges – Mikoyan's commissariat issued an official Soviet cookbook. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food would become a totalitarian kitchen bible. Shared by one sixth of the world's population, the 15 republics and over 100 ethnicities of the USSR, it ran through a dozen editions with more than 8m copies in print (and still selling).

My mother, Larisa, was five, living in Stalin's Moscow with her family, when the hefty tome with its parsley-green cover entered her life. Ogling the fantastical colourised photographs – tables crowded with silver and crystal, platters of beef decorated with tomato rosettes, frilly cakes poised amid elaborate tea sets – she was utterly mesmerised. The images conjured up skatert' samobranka, the enchanted tablecloth from Russian folklore that covered itself with food at the snap of a finger. Or perhaps she thought of the popular Soviet tune of the day, "We were born to turn fairytale into reality", whenever her mother Liza transformed the book's recipes into fish suspended in glistening aspic, or canapes with frilly mayonnaise borders. Kniga (The Book) even taught my mom how to read. It sparked a fascination with food that's animated her entire life.

And she wasn't alone.

Across the 11 Soviet timezones, generations of women grew up leafing spellbound through the well-splotched pages of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. In the universe of culinary advice, it had and has no equal. With 400 recipes it was an encyclopaedic cooking manual, sure. But with its didactic commentaries, ideological sermonising, neo-Enlightenment scientific excursions, and lustrous photo spreads advertising the glories of Soviet canneries, fisheries and meat-processing plants, this landmark of domestic socialist realist propaganda offered much more. It offered a complete blueprint of "joyous", "abundant", "cultured" socialist living.

You could also chart the USSR's political and cultural shifts by comparing Kniga's editions. The inaugural 1939 "Mikoyan" green volume appeared when an internationalist Bolshevik rhetoric still held sway. This was an internationalism celebrated, for instance, in the hit 1936 Soviet musical comedy film Circus, in which the great Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels sang a lullaby to the mixed-race child of an American heroine. Mikhoels' lullaby was later deleted. So was the singer – assassinated in 1948 on Stalin's orders amid general antisemitic hysteria. Reflecting the postwar political mood, xenophobia reigned in the monumental 1952 edition of Kniga (the volume that taught my mother how to cook). Gone were 1939's Jewish teiglach recipes; vanished, Kalmyk tea (Kalmyks being a Mongolic minority deported for supposed Nazi collaboration). Canapes, croutons, consommes – such "rootless cosmopolitan" froufrou was expunged. Ditto sendvichi, kornfleks, and ketchup, American delicacies snatched by Mikoyan from his 30s US trip. With its sombre brown covers, the iconic 1952 Kniga was more politically virulent, solemnly happier, with the monumental bulk of Stalinist skyscrapers. The appearance was meaningful. Cooking was obviously no frivolous matter. No! Cooking, dear comrades, represented a collective utopian project: Self-improvement and Acculturation through Kitchen Labour.

Come the next edition, in August 1953, and surprise! All of Stalin's didactic quotes had disappeared at his death. The streamlined cover of the 1960s editions reflected Nikita Khrushchev's campaign against pompous Stalinist ornamentalism. The kitschy 70s volume, from my own Moscow childhood, bristled with recipes from the Soviet republics, echoing Leonid Brezhnev's propaganda of ethnic equalisation.

Kremlin winds shifted and commissars vanished, but the official myth of abundance persisted – and Soviet citizens clung to the magic tablecloth fairytale. They imagined Riga sprats or Abkhazian tangerines suddenly materialising at stores; dreamed of days overflowing with hard salami and buttery sturgeon. Even in the cynical 70s, the kitchen remained an island of optimism. Because who could resist the utopia of the socialist good life promoted so graphically in Kniga? Consider the opening photo-panorama of that high-Stalinist 1952 edition. Here are craggy oysters – oysters! – heaped on a silver platter between bottles of Crimean and Georgian wines. Long-stemmed cut-crystal goblets tower over glistening fish in aspic. A bottle of Sovetskoye-brand champagne – Stalin's pet project – angles its neck toward a majestic suckling pig.

Meanwhile, the intro informs us, capitalist states condemn working citizens to constant undereating, and often to death by starvation. Any cookbook is selling a fantasy, of course; but it was the wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and the absence in shops that made Kniga's myth of plenty so poignant. Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled up the deception; long-suffering H sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, on reality depicted "in its revolutionary development" – past and present fused into a triumphant projection of a radiant future.

When Soviet Jews began emigrating in the 70s, many packed the hefty cookbook in their paltry 40kg baggage allowance. By then Kniga had become so cherished an icon that comrades lugged it with them even as they fled the repressive state that published it. My fervently anti-Soviet mother, however, abandoned her copy when we left for the US in 1974. The tattered volume that taught her and her mother proper socialist cooking was by then ideologically radioactive to her.

A few years ago, setting out to write a memoir about Soviet food, I presented Mom with Mikoyan's original 1939 edition. First she flinched. Then she fell for it – hard.

"Drab, dreary recipes," she'd grumble – while cooking up a storm from the gaudy pages and matching her table settings in outer-borough New York to ones in the photos, like her mother in Moscow 70 years before. She piped mayonnaise borders on to "Stalinist-baroque" crab salads, carved tomato rosettes, and fashioned kotleti from meat, carrots, cabbage and beets. Every night she phoned friends, roaring at Kniga's vaunting invocations of "mankind's centuries-old dream of building a communist society … of an abundant, happy, and joyous life".

"I'm not nostalgic," she'd correct me. "I just like old cookbooks. And this one, wow, a real antique!"

Until: "What do they call that syndrome when victims fall for their tormentors …?"

The Russia of today, meanwhile, is gripped by a nostalgia for the USSR. Our Kniga is enjoying a reborn star turn. Its 50th anniversary a few years ago was lavishly celebrated in the press. The fairy tale, despite all, endures.

Fotos da edição de 1939: