Peoples'
Friendship Salad and other culinary expressions of brotherhood
Elena
Sorokina
The
taste of ice cream interests you more than building communism !
—Joseph
Stalin to Anastas Mikoyan
In
1936, Stalin commissioned a cookbook from
Anastas Mikoyan,
his Commissar for Food Industry. After a period of thorough study of
the cuisines of the various Soviet republics and their
appropriateness as proper nutrition for the builders of communism,
the first edition of The
Book of Delicious
and Healthy Food
was published in 1939. The book did not aim to give certain foods a
fashionable aura. Instead, the emerging communist empire was
concerned with an entirely different issue—educating its
multinational citizens in rationally organized nutrition. But even
more importantly, the book aimed at expressing the new Soviet
identity-in-construction—the keyword for which was “friendship”
between the constituent republics— in culinary terms.
Through its countless editions, The
Book of Delicious and Healthy Food
tried to synthesize the experience of different peoples, presenting
the union between them as the acme of historical evolution.
If
Soviet Marxism declared itself the only truly scientific ideology,
one based on the most advanced achievements of human thought, then
Soviet cuisine was to be equally based on an explicitly scientific
approach. Cooking was not considered an art but rather a kind of
science. It was not undertaken in the pursuit of pleasure, but rather
to afford moderate satisfaction and reasonable enjoyment, all in the
service of optimizing the health of the hardworking
citizen according
to scientifically determined guidelines. Simply put, food was part of
the production process and had to be approached as such, rationally
and pragmatically. The new bible of Soviet cuisine was thus overtly
didactic, scientific, and educational: long passages on women’s
liberation from kitchen slavery and a thorough analysis of vitamins,
minerals, and calories preceded the book’s two thousand recipes.
Strong political guidance was equally important: each chapter opened
with a quote by Stalin, Molotov, or Mikoyan, praising the
achievements of socialist industrialization, defining new
far-reaching goals for meat and fish production, or reflecting on the
importance of good packaging for vegetables. Recipes of soups,
steaks, and omelettes followed.
Going
even further, we could speculate on parallels between the Soviet
cuisine-in-construction and the structure of Soviet Marxism itself,
with its influences from German philosophy, English political
economy, and French utopian socialism. Similarly, approved Soviet
food consisted of multiple influences—traditional Russian
cuisine; local dishes
from other Soviet
republics; and a
third element that presented a perplexing ideological problem, as it
was neither socialist nor communist, and had no detectable traces of
Marxism-Leninism whatsoever. This last strand was the influence of
French cuisine, which was difficult to suppress even though
the Soviet Union in the 1930s was, on the face of it,
rather hostile toward Gallic cooking. French food was too emblematic
of the exploitation of the working class, too related to the sinister
Tsarist past, and
too tied to the decadence of capitalism. It ostensibly represented a
set of values
fundamentally
opposed to those
of the nascent Soviet identity. In fact, numerous books of the time,
written by various directors of government food agencies, were highly
critical of French cuisine, heralding instead new “emancipatory”
ways of cooking,
and trying to
shield the soon-to be-communist citizen from obsolete and
contemptible bourgeois habits.
However,
despite the strong ideological will of the government and a series of
state-endorsed initiatives, healthy, delicious Soviet food continued
to retain hints of Frenchness, still evident in the 1939 edition.
Frivolous canapés,
soufflés, and tartelettes remained
from the damned Tsarist past, betraying serious ideological
concessions and looking somewhat suspicious in direct vicinity to
borscht
and pelmeny.
Obviously, things
had to change, and they did, as many capitalist ingredients
disappeared with capitalism. One of the most dazzling metamorphoses
was the one undergone by the enormously popular Soviet dish known
today in its brutally abbreviated supermarket version as "Russian
salad," and originally called “salade Olivier.”
The
ever-popular salad—the Soviet dish par
excellence, as
beloved by party leaders and the intelligentsia as it was by workers
and peasants—was in fact the brainchild of a Francophone chef who
created it in 1860s. Named for its inventor, Lucien Olivier, the
Belgian-born chef of Moscow’s famed Hermitage restaurant, it was
originally made with grouse, veal tongue, caviar, lettuce, crayfish
tails, and capers, and occasionally truffles, cubed aspic, or smoked
duck. In its original incarnation, it contained just a few potato
slices as
a decorative addition, a little hint of Russianness deployed with
Gallic flair. The 1939 edition keeps the original recipe almost
unaltered, while changing the name to the less pretentious
"game salad".
From
that moment on, we can trace the spectacular transformation of this
salad through the Soviet era from a decadent delicacy born of rotten
capitalism into a healthy, delicious Soviet culinary star,
internationalist in form and socialist in content. Of course, during
this epochal transformation a number of necessary modifications and
substitutions had to be made. Instead of grouse, alien to the working
class, chicken or even sausage was used; crayfish tails were replaced
by cooked carrot—presumably to preserve the original color, a
substitution that further democratized the dish. Truffles, caviar,
and capers disappeared altogether, with potato gradually becoming the
main ingredient. And thus the favorite dish of the Soviet table was
born, retaining almost no trace of its original bourgeois decadence
other than its French name. Like any successful brand, the
Soviet version of the salade Olivier had imitations, interpretations,
and appropriations carrying different names, such as “Stolichny
salad,” especially rich in potato, or “people’s friendship
salad,” featuring fancy ingredients such as ham and fresh
cucumbers. One ingredient, however, remained unaltered since the
times of Lucien Olivier—mayonnaise.
Today,
we can only speculate on the full impact of French influences on the
formation of a classless, multinational Soviet cuisine because later
editions of the book assiduously suppressed all ideologically
objectionable or politically problematic elements. For example, by
the 1952 edition, all explicit references to French delicacies such
as profiteroles, croquettes, and croutons disappear, as do mentions
of "Kalmyk tea" and "Vyborg biscuits."
(In 1944, the
Kalmyk people had been forcibly exiled to Siberia and Central Asia;
the town of Vyborg, seized from the Finns in 1940, likewise bore a
number of undesirable connotations.) After World War II, some former
ideological and culinary friends had to be withdrawn from the
delicious and healthy canon of brotherhood and friendship. French
traces, however, were more difficult to eliminate and remained
present in a great number of recipes, although their ideological
meaning was significantly modified by their new Soviet veneer. The
peoples’ friendship salad, as much as the salade Olivier on which
it was based, perfectly exemplifies the principle of a
non-discriminatory blend: all ingredients are made to seem equal, and
equally bound to each other, by mayonnaise, a perfect instrument of
ideological reconciliation. Mayonnaise, deeply non-Soviet in its
initial raffinement,
began to be commercially produced in the USSR in 1936, and
surprisingly became the country’s preeminent condiment,
the binding
element in almost all Soviet salads. Perhaps the basis of
mayonnaise’s compatibility with the Soviet ideology of friendship
lay in the fact that its simple components combine to create
something altogether new, a perfect medium in which disparate
“ingredients” can coexist peacefully, enriching each other
without any one element dominating the whole.