The old woman walks through the yards, Provides advice to mothers.
Don't eat carrots, grandma teaches
Babies are full of carrots!
Poem from the book "Baby food"
History and documents. This is how it happens: I went to read the comments on my material about the ancient city of Poliochni, but in the end I found out that many, well, about at least three, of those who read it, would like to indulge in nostalgia again and read the material about how people ate in Soviet times. And they even came up with a name for the material: "The Delights of Our Childhood." If so, why not write? However, there is one "but" here. First, such material, if someone would like objectivity from him, is simply impossible. It is necessary to work and work on it as a generalizing work, and even then it is not a fact that it will be possible to cover such an extensive topic in the volume of one article (even five articles), primarily because one of the features of the food supply of the USSR was a rather noticeable differentiation of supplies … Secondly, I am used to writing only about what I know well. Either from my own experience, or based on the information provided (and verified!). In this case, however, such information is excluded. And again, only memories remain. And in some ways they are typical, but in some ways they are not. But, on the other hand, this is also interesting. Compare how it was with us, if someone remembers this time. To remember so to remember! Well, to start the story about the "tasty treat" it is necessary with a few general remarks, so that later I will not repeat myself.
Once I already wrote that I remember myself from about five years old, when my grandfather was still working at school, and my grandmother also worked in the library there, and they both retired in 1960. Grandfather received 90 rubles, he had two orders and several medals, grandmother received 28 rubles, but also a medal for the war - she worked in a military hospital. Mom already taught at the university and had 125 rubles. and another 40 p. - alimony from a father who lived in another city. The house was built in 1882, two rooms, in the middle there is a large Russian stove, a closet, a canopy, sheds, a large garden. I could only compare my life with how my comrades lived on Proletarskaya Street. Among them were the children of the workers of the ZIF plant, the son of the pilot of the Penza air squadron … in general, I did not know other children. Once I calculated that there were 6 boys of about the same age and 2 girls for 13 households. There are two more boys on Mirskaya Street and two more people at the very end of Proletarskaya Street, but there are still many houses. So the population decline in the country began in the early 50s.
Well, now it is possible and about what we ate and what kind of "delicious" we had. They ate differently. Since my mother all the time went either to improve her qualifications, then to pass the candidate exam, then to graduate school for three years, most of my life as a child I had to feed from my grandmother, and my mother's cooking was a pleasant addition. My grandmother's mother was a housekeeper for some count and a companion for his daughter, so she learned to play the piano and knew how to cook very well. But she didn't really like to do it. And why is understandable. It was necessary to cook either on the stove - on the stove, or on the electric stove, if in winter, or on kerosene gas in the hallway, if in summer. All the time I had to take out the garbage can, which had a rather disgusting appearance, so now it does not surprise me. Well, then I just did not understand it.
Therefore, breakfast usually included a roll with butter, jam and tea. This is with my grandmother. When my mother was there, everything changed magically: a salad was served for breakfast in a special "my" bowl, pancakes with raspberry jam, soft-boiled eggs … Options: scrambled eggs, fried eggs, "chatterbox with green onions" or with sausage. In summer - pancakes with berries, berries with milk: strawberries or raspberries. In the gardens of my comrades, berries did not grow: they grew potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes. From berry crops - only currants and gooseberries. But this and in our garden was in abundance.
But now all this and many more of edible and very useful greens grow in abundance in my dacha. Why it could not have been planted and grown at that time is simply incomprehensible. Probably again the inertia of thinking.
But my grandmother was preparing very thoroughly for dinner. Soups were cooked: pea, rice, with meatballs, "sorrel", chicken noodles, always homemade, cabbage soup from fresh and sauerkraut, pickle, often fish soup, canned fish soup - mackerel and pink salmon. Sometimes milk noodles were cooked - sweet, salty - never. They also did not cook borscht and did not make vinaigrette with beets. The reason is my complete disgust for her. And the reason for it, as I found out much later, was secondhand smoke! My grandfather, after breakfast and lunch until he was 70, would roll up a “goat's leg” from the newspaper and smoke either Samosad or Herzegovina Flor, while I sat at the table opposite and smelled. So I started smoking from the moment I learned to sit at the table, and smoked in this way, until the doctors prohibited my grandfather from smoking on pain of death. And no one here understood that it is impossible to do this with a child, that it is very harmful … And this is what this leads to (although not only this), what if my "ancestors", who had a higher education and worked at school, were so wild, then what happened to those who did not have it? Who just moved, for example, to the city from the village. He had four classes behind him. Seven classes … Or … stayed on the farm. However, I also happened to get acquainted with what was there, however, later, from 1977 to 1981, and I even wrote about this somehow …
But we digress from the topic of food. For lunch, something from the above-mentioned first was necessarily served, for the second fried fish: halibut, pike, catfish (a neighbor caught in Sura, so they were not translated on our table), flounder. Boiled meat from soup was served: pork, beef, chicken. There was a vinaigrette, homemade pickles were always served with fried potatoes: cucumbers and tomatoes. Also, my grandmother often made very tasty and large cutlets. For lunch, they had pasta or mashed potatoes as a side dish. Porridge, buckwheat, pearl barley and millet, were served with milk or butter. But I didn't eat millet. Occasionally there was stewed cabbage with meat. The third was homemade compote - boiled, grandmother did not make compotes in jars.
Quite often we baked pies. In the summer, in an electric oven in the entryway. But in winter it was just something. The inside of the furnace was empty, there was a vault, it was quite spacious. So, firewood was put there, burned, the coals were scattered, after which pies were laid there on baking sheets, and the entrance to the "mouth" was closed with a damper. This was called the "hearth oven". They explained to me that there, in the oven, they used to steam and wash, but how this happened was beyond my understanding. Climbing there after the fire was burning there? Never! But the pies also came out … huge, like sandals, and lush, like a feather bed. They were eaten with meat broth from the filling, which has always been with raw onions, but boiled meat.
But for dinner they again drank tea with a bun. That is why both my grandmother and I became hungry by 21 o'clock and went to the kitchen, where they "refreshed themselves" directly from the pan, which, of course, the next morning the food often sour and the first one had to be cooked again! For some reason, no one in our family knew that it was impossible to do this, that a glass of kefir was the optimal “meal” for the night, and you need to have supper somewhere at 19.00. And this is all the more surprising that there were many books on healthy eating in our family. There was a very colorful book "Vitamins", there was a book "On tasty and healthy food" published in 1955, there were two simply wonderful books about baby food: "Baby food" and "Schoolchildren's food". And at first they even read them aloud to me, and then I read them myself … as something from the realm of fantasy. It just never occurred to anyone that all this could be cooked and eaten. This is what the inertia of thinking was in people.
Because of my grandfather's smoking, I had a very bad appetite before school. That is, I just gave up homemade food and grew thin as a splinter. Naturally, the neighbors, with noticeable joy in their voices, did not forget to ask my relatives: "Are you not feeding him at all?" And this was expressed to me as a reproach for "disgrace to the family." But in some places outside the house I ate well, and that's where they took me to "feed". The first such place was at the main station Penza-I - a branch of the restaurant placed on the platform. Where from our house my grandmother and I had to walk, and quite far. And the place was wonderful! Fenced with a cast iron fence. There are umbrellas over the tables! Steam locomotives are flying by - fr-rr, pouring over the platform with a ferry, - beauty! There they always took me a "set meal": borscht or kharcho soup, and schnitzel with rice and delicious brown gravy, which my grandmother never made. Since then, eating with gravy has become something "chic" for me - such was the strange consequence of a specific upbringing.
The second place was the cafe "Solnyshko" in the city center opposite the building of the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Mom took me there on Sundays. Served there … sausages with stewed cabbage and beer. And so my mother took herself a beer, which I got, and we both got two sausages with a side dish. As far as I remember, we did not have them on free sale in Penza. In any case, we have never bought them. But my mother sometimes brought them from the dining room of the OK KPSS …
My childhood impressions of food began to change little by little only after 1961, when my mother was lucky to show me Moscow and Leningrad. In Moscow, for the first time, I ate ice cream with frozen strawberries in it, and in the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg - sandwiches with black caviar. And … he immediately fell ill with a severe cold, because the ice cream was too cold, like the wind from the Neva. We lived with a relative - a general, and then for the first time I saw what general's apartments are, and secondly, I ate enough of this very caviar, which he simply did not translate, and … drank grape juice. At a high temperature, vomiting always opened in my childhood, and the doctor ordered me to drink more and support my heart. And I couldn't drink water! So they gave me grape juice from bottles, just like in the book "Schoolchildren's Nutrition".
We returned home, in 1962 I went to school, and my mother once again returned from advanced training at the Minsk University and brought a recipe … for the Olivier salad, which had to be seasoned with mayonnaise. And no one in our family even tried it … But they bought it! We tried it! "Disgusting!" - said the grandfather. "I will not eat!" - I said, having tasted the salad, but somehow they shoved it into me. These were the "wild people" we were, although it seemed to be both literate and very well-read. The taste was just very undeveloped, that's it …
At school, until the 5th grade, we regularly went to breakfast during the big break. They donated money for this, but it was just a penny. They served semolina porridge with butter poured in the middle, which I diligently ate so that, God forbid, it would not mix with the porridge, mashed potatoes with a cutlet (and gravy - hurray!), One sausage each with a side dish: rice, pasta, millet porridge (disgusting!), stewed cabbage (it's a pity that no beer - ha ha!), and to this compote, tea or cocoa and a bun or bun. The baking was its own - opposite the school there was a kitchen factory.
And here, having collected everything at school, I first tried to cook food with my own hands, but this and everything else that happened next will be told next time.
