Soviet Cuisine

My Mother in law has three basic dishes and they are prepared and served in rotation.

First there is sosiski and macaroni, which is cheap, and I mean really cheap, hot dog sausages served with cheap pasta. The sausages are made of, horses hooves, kangaroo eyes and sawdust and the pasta is just pasta, no sauce, no flavor no reason to keep on living.

The second dish is Kotleti and Grechka, which is kinda cheap burgers and buckwheat. The burgers are made from half a pound of the cheapest frozen minced beef, or kangaroo, or homeless person, no one knows for sure, and three hundred and 17 pounds of stale bread, sweepings from the kitchen floor and whatever sawdust that was not used in the sausages. Having been formed into shapeless blobs these cutlets are then fried for 15 days in salted engine oil. The buckwheat is boiled, then it is boiled, then a spell of boiling and thin it needs finishing off with a quick boiling. If any flavour remains it can be boiled again.

Pelmeni with sour cream. Pelmeni is ravioli without sauce. Apparently it can be handmade and quite delicious, but most of it comes out of frozen packets and tastes like dog food wrapped in leather before being boiled in old washing up water. Then sour cream, from a packet is daubed over it.  There are sweet versions of Pelmeni in which the dogfood is flavoured with strawberry, but it’s the same shit.

 I heard an English chef once arguing that the state of native British cuisine was a result of the period of rationing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom#After_the_war  following the second world war, when house wives and even restaurant owners were forced by shortages to make the best of poor ingredients. In Russia they has far more severe rationing for decades and decades, and incredibly ineffective food production on top of that. Our weekly menus likely stem from that.