Life Hacks Of The Soviet Canteen: Useful Tips From The Times Of The USSR

2024 Author: Bailey Albertson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 12:53

Life hacks of the Soviet canteen - the secrets of economy and taste

Catering establishments in the USSR were striking in their ingenuity. All the dishes on the menu were satisfying enough to quickly satiate a grown man, but at the same time they were extremely low cost. How did the chefs manage to achieve this? Consider the popular tricks used by food service workers.

Saving

In conditions of total shortage, food savings were at the forefront. For her sake, the workers dodged as best they could. The following tricks have become the most popular (many of them are still actively used in our kitchens):

• using the cheapest vegetables. In the realities of the USSR, the most affordable were beets, potatoes, cabbage, onions and carrots. Hence the potato and beet cutlets, cabbage fillings for pies and pancakes, carrot salads. And onions were generally added wherever possible. They tried to use these vegetables in the maximum of dishes, replacing them with more expensive meat products;
• cooking broth without meat. The meat products were very expensive, and therefore the broth was often cooked on the bone. To get rich, you had to wait about 4 hours. But the cost of the soup dropped sharply;
• finding real coffee in Soviet canteens was most likely unrealistic. Chicory was widely used instead of coffee beans. It tastes like coffee, but much cheaper. And to hide the nuances of taste, the drink was often oversweetened;
• By the way, the same strategy with excess sugar worked on tea. The canteens re-brewed the same raw material many times, and in the end the taste of the tea was already quite weak. To hide this, at least three tablespoons of sugar were added to each cup;
• to cut the cost of butter, Soviet canteens promoted steamed food. Of course, concern for the health of the population was declared as the official motivation. But the first and main reason for this decision was precisely the economy - steamed vegetables and meat are much cheaper than fried;
• dilution. Many people who have found the Soviet public catering recall with horror how milk and beer were diluted with water to an almost complete lack of taste. And in sour cream and sour cream, there was almost no - one kefir (at best) or water (at worst).

Modern Soviet-style canteens will never be able to convey the atmosphere of total scarcity that affected the quality of food (usually not in the best way)

A special category of thrifty tricks is waste-free production. In the kitchen, every piece of food that was spent or not eaten by visitors should have been beneficial:

• Nowadays it is customary to dilute mashed potatoes with milk or cream to achieve a pleasant consistency and richness of taste. In Soviet canteens, it was also diluted - only with water. For this, they usually used broth from mashed potatoes. Such water is saturated with starch, and therefore dilution does not greatly spoil the taste and texture of the dish;
• uneaten pieces of cake and crumbs (yes, the crumbs were also carefully collected) turned out to be a good cake "Potato", which is popular to this day. It is believed that the Anthill cake appeared in about the same way;
• Are there uneaten pieces of bread that risk getting stale? And they have a use! Minced meat was actively diluted with bread, which was then used for cooking, for example, cutlets;
• remember the listed cheap vegetables? They were usually used to make salads in the beginning. But if the portion remained uneaten, then they were processed - some into cutlets, some into pancakes, some into filling for a pie.

Taste

Sanitary norms forbade Soviet canteens to use spices familiar to modern people. Therefore, chefs have come up with cheap but effective ways to make their dishes not only satisfying, but also delicious:

• garlic. It was added to almost any meat dishes, but this spice, as it turned out, goes especially well with meat cutlets. Just one finely chopped clove of garlic changed the taste of a whole batch of 15–20 cutlets;
• crackers. Even the most empty soup becomes tastier and more interesting if you add a few slices of dried bread to it;
• there were practically no fresh salads, but in almost every dining room there were classic Soviet "herring under a fur coat" or "Olivier". It was forbidden to use spices, but mayonnaise, vinegar or cheap vegetable oil were not. So the cooks filled the salads with whatever they could. True, sometimes they overdid it.

It is worth noting that Soviet canteens were not incentivized to serve delicious food to visitors. There was no competition as such, the institution could not go bankrupt, and therefore the chefs focused more on the economy of dishes, and not on their taste.

Satiety

During the Soviet era, catering was interested in ensuring that the visitor was full as quickly as possible. To do this, the chefs have resorted to simple but effective tricks:

• a lot of dough, onions and butter. The popularity of pies, chebureks, dumplings is explained by their satiety. At the same time, Soviet canteens tried to make as little meat filling as possible, diluting it with cheap onions and making the dough layer thicker;
• Scrambled eggs were rare in canteens. But the omelet was almost a must. Whipped egg mass with the addition of milk is not only cheap, but also very satisfying - which cannot be said about scrambled eggs;
• bread in Soviet canteens was either free or very cheap. It would seem, how does this harmonize with the idea of saving? This is actually a very clever trick - bread is a satisfying food. If a person takes one or two slices of bread at dinner, then the probability that he will not be full of the first and second courses and will come for more, tends to zero.

A classic lunch set of first and second courses, most of the diners were full

Most people have different attitudes toward Soviet canteens. Someone feels pleasant nostalgia, while others are glad that this time of total scarcity is over. But some life hacks invented by Soviet chefs are used in many families to this day.