Memories of the past. The publication of the material "Kitchen in the USSR: how to choose a wife-cook and take the queue in the store in the morning" aroused the keenest interest among the readers of "VO", so we continue the theme of memories and the theme of food, although today from a slightly different angle. That is, what the food supply in the USSR became from 1985 to 1991 will be told, but photographs of dishes will be given as illustrations and a little about it will be told. Let it be a kind of story within a story.
So, the previous material ended with the fact that with the coming to power of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985, hopes really revived in people: the relatively young initiative general secretary, who finally replaced the "crowned elders", may actually do something. And then there was talk about "a lesson in truth", "socialism with a human face" … In a word, people began to hope that now everything will be fine. People in general too often hope for the best and talk about it loudly, instead of just waiting a little and watching how it turns out in practice.
As for me, I personally had no time to think too much. In June, after passing the last exam of the candidate minimum, I was enrolled in the postgraduate study at Kuibyshev State University, where I should have arrived on November 1, and before that work at my institute. But my wife and I were so curious that we went to Kuibyshev before going on vacation to see where I was to spend the next three years. We looked at the hostel, went shopping, and there was both, and even … chocolate mushrooms in multi-colored metallized pieces of paper - that is, something that was no longer in Penza. "Well, you can live here!" - we decided, and so we left.
Well, on November 1, I was already there, checked into a rather miserable room and … the very next day I was faced with the problem of food. Everything that we saw in the summer suddenly disappeared somewhere, or rather, in four months, so I had to cook semolina for myself for breakfast. However, there was another reason for this. From all the experiences associated with admission, I developed severe gastritis with zero acidity, so I constantly had to drink Pepsidil with food - that still muck, an analogue of gastric juice, produced from the intestines of pigs. The attempt to dine in the student canteen failed immediately, so for all three years I not only collected material and wrote a dissertation, but also cooked like a chef. The fact is that, besides me, there were three or four graduate students living in the graduate student block, I made friends with two, and, since we were all family people, sophisticated in life, we quickly calculated that if there is a person willing to cook for everyone, then this is more convenient than having everyone cooking for themselves or eating in the student dining room. We decided to add up to some extent for a month and assigned responsibilities. So I got rid of washing dishes and peeling potatoes, but I had to cook three times a day.
By the way, we ate in the most dietary way, therefore, probably, graduate school passed for us without any particular harm to health. All products, except butter and milk, were purchased from the market. Well, the menu was like that. For breakfast, often semolina porridge, but not just, but with raisins, prunes, dried apricots. Milk noodles (not salted) and milk rice porridge. Omelet, scrambled eggs, stewed vegetables, toasts in tomato, "bull's eye" - the same croutons from a roll greased with tomato sauce, but with a hole in the middle, where the egg was poured, and then all this was baked, and a real "eye" was obtained … And also cheese cakes, pancakes, pancakes with jam. For lunch: rice soups, peas, "noodles", cabbage soup - all in meat or vegetable broth. For the second - mashed potatoes with meat from the soup, stew with vegetables, sometimes (rarely) sausages from the regional committee's canteen. Then tea, and for dinner - "tea with a bun", kefir and … that's it!
Other graduate students from home brought who what. Someone meat (those who were from the village), others - jam, some homemade pickles. The fish helped us a lot. The fact is that then at the tram stop with a fork at KUAI and the "Ravine of the Underground Workers" they put a huge iron tank and sold live carp from it until the very frost. I bought them, wrapped them in foil and baked them in the oven. Delicious and hassle-free! A popular holiday dish we had was a pumpkin kebab. The meat is lightly fried with onions and tomatoes, the rice is boiled until half cooked, then all this is put into a gutted and salted pumpkin from the inside, the hole is closed with a pumpkin lid again, after which it is baked in the oven for about four hours over low heat. Very tasty, and the pumpkin itself can be eaten instead of bread!
During all three years, quite often we managed to feast on buckwheat porridge. The fact is that among the graduate students at our department of the history of the CPSU was the daughter of the second secretary of the OK CPSU - a very nice girl, kind and responsive, to whom we visited, and she … always treated us to crumbly buckwheat porridge. We even called her Buckwheat Porridge by a sinful deed and periodically decided which of the three of us to visit her.
Again, it is interesting that many bars and cafes opened at that time in Kuibyshev itself, serving delicious ice cream and desserts: whipped egg whites with sugar, various fruits and crushed nuts. And when we wanted something sweet, we usually went to such a bar and … treated ourselves.
Many will probably be surprised: where did the money come from for such a good life? And this is where it comes from: graduate students who worked before entering graduate school in their specialty were paid not 75, but 90 rubles, this is, firstly, and secondly, we all lectured through the Knowledge Society and the RK KPSS. 5 rubles a lecture seems to be a little, but if you read 20 lectures a month, it comes out decently. In addition, I also conducted television programs on local TV, and since there were more people in the Kuibyshev region than in the Penza region, the fee was also higher - 50 rubles instead of 40. And then there were articles in newspapers, articles in magazines, so that a month sometimes more than 200 rubles came out, which allowed not only to eat from the market, but also to send money home and even put it off for a summer vacation by the sea. Of course, without wine and kebabs, but still by the sea!
However, in 1986 the food situation got worse. Then coupons for sausage were introduced in Kuibyshev. They were regional and semi-monthly, and they were given to us by the head. hostel. And there was a problem with them … You go into the store: there is a sausage and there is no queue. But … not your area, so walk by. You go to "your store" - there is sausage, there is a line to the door, and you hurry to the archive or give a lecture. And then the 15th comes, and you throw away all the unmarketable coupons! Interesting, by the way, was that sausage. Very tasty on the first day, with garlic. But after lying in the refrigerator overnight, she lost all her freshness and taste, and a strange green ring also appeared on her cut … The black cat that lived on our floor did not eat this sausage under any circumstances.
In the same year, they called me from Minsk and said that my book "From everything at hand", which I offered to the publishing house "Polymya", was being prepared for publication. But that the publishing house has a lot of questions and comments on the text, so I urgently need to come to Minsk and solve everything on the spot. It was December, but with a delay of a day on the Krasnoyarsk-Minsk plane, I still got there. There was no limit to surprise: in Kuibyshev, snow was waist-deep, a blizzard was sweeping, and here there was a light frost, and there was no snow at all, and even the Svisloch River, on the banks of which the house stood, where the First Congress of the RSDLP was held in 1898, did not freeze!
They settled me in the hotel "Minsk", in a junior suite - to the envy of the whole line of business travelers in the lobby. In the morning I went along Masherov Avenue to look for a publishing house - and I immediately caught my eye: the traffic lights are red, there are no cars, there is a crowd at the crossings, but no one is crossing the roadway! Suddenly someone ran alone. Immediately after the shouts: "Russian, Russian!" "However, - I think, - it is not necessary to do that!"
It was dawn, but it was still early. I decided to have breakfast, but where? I went into the first store I came across, and there … bottled milk and various things, sour cream, varenets, fermented baked milk, sausages, homemade cheese, Russian cheese and - what surprised and delighted me most - boiled blood sausage. I bought Borodino bread, fermented baked milk, homemade cheese, blood sausage: “Would you like to warm it up? Let's do it now! After my Kuibyshev, I was almost speechless. He nodded, grabbed all this food - and to the bank of the Svisloch. I sat on a stone, I eat, I drink. The beauty! Then a policeman passes by … He saw that I had kefir and went on.
I went up to the publishing house, got to know each other, and work began with us. And then - then tea. Well, here I started to share my impressions and talk about our sausage with a green circle. And they don’t believe! I give them a roll of coupons for half a month. Publishing employees are shocked. "How so? We live in one country!"
They gave me a job for the night, to do it in the morning. At the hotel I say to the maid: tea with lemon in the room every hour. And they wore it unquestioningly all night until five in the morning! And I already forgot the taste of lemon! They were very expensive in Kuibyshev on the market … Persimmon was even cheaper.
Began to leave - arranged a farewell tea party with cake "Minsky". I didn’t eat better cake then. Well, I arrived … and my visit to the abundant Minsk became for a long time a topic for discussion both at the department and at my home, because I brought tights and something else linen to my wife and daughter … in a word, I returned as if from Oz. And my scientific advisor listened to me and opened in front of me the text of the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of 1943 on measures to help regions and republics that suffered from German aggression, and points his finger at the text, and it says: “Return the evacuated cattle according to the payroll ". That is, the cattle were evacuated to the Penza, Ulyanovsk and Kuibyshev regions in running herds. At the same time, the mortality rate reached 50 percent or more. Then the cattle were handed over for meat for the army. Then, in taking care of the affected areas, they returned all of it according to the lists (!), Laying the foundation for a prosperous agriculture in the liberated areas and robbing the collective farms and peasants of these three regions and several others to the bone. Well, the new machines supplied to the USSR under Lend-Lease, equipment, timber, cement, brick - everything went there in the first place. "Showcase of the post-war rise of our socialist economy!" They took all the guests from abroad and showed them everything, but in Ulyanovsk they showed only the house-museum of V. I. Lenin … “This is how it all started,” said my supervisor.
It is interesting that when in 1990 my second book (“When the lessons were done”) was published in the same publishing house and in the same Minsk, and I was again called there to work on it, the food supply there became worse at times. Blood sausage disappeared, shelves with cheeses and dairy products were emptied, natural flax products disappeared, and Minsk cake disappeared. “Oh, how bad our food is now,” the publishers complained to me. That is, the problem of food has become common for the whole of our country.
Well, in my own Penza, where I returned after defending my dissertation in 1988, I found a way out for myself, as, in fact, many others have found it. Since I again began to broadcast on local TV, every week I received a ration there worth 4 rubles. 50 kopecks It included chicken, a pack of sugar (rice, semolina, millet) and a can of tomato sauce. Or mayonnaise or green peas. In principle, it was possible to take two rations, if someone refused his own, and this happened. Plus, again, the market from which everything else came, and, of course, the city of Moscow was the source of supply.
But even there, the same cheese in the Cheese store on Gorky Street began to be given only a pound of hands, although, fortunately for me, this rule did not apply to Roquefort. "The whole village" in line was choking for the "Russian" cheese. Well, in "Eliseevsky" there were literally queues for everything. And again, the amount of goods on hand was limited.
This is how we lived, and then we arrived from Anapa in the fall of 1991, and on TV there was “Swan Lake”. But what happened next is a completely different story.
