CCCP Cookbook: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine

"I love this book. It’s such a weird book. Partly I like it for the design. It’s from Fuel Publishing , and I have a lot of their books. It has a lovely exposed spine, all these original pictures in it from Soviet cookbooks, it’s very cool. Of course, we shouldn’t glamorise the Soviet Union in any way—even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But we also can’t change the past. This is an incredibly interesting look, a deep dive into Soviet cuisine and culture. I spoke earlier about the propaganda of food. This book explains it all quite well—how the Soviet Union took dishes from other countries and claimed them for itself. That still exists today. Like, if you ask a Muscovite what kind of food they’re fond of, often you’ll get the reply ‘Georgian.’ There are excellent Georgian restaurants in Moscow. And, in a country like Latvia, which is currently anti-Russia—for good reason—and where cars with Russian number plates are now banned and where Russian signs have been removed and statues to Pushkin taken down, you’ll go to the main market, and there will be an Uzbek baker selling Uzbek non bread, and there are Uzbek restaurants in seaside resorts in Latvia, too, because the cuisine of the wider former Soviet Union is still very prevalent in all of these countries. People don’t want to move away from it, they like it. So, in this book, they talk about this sharing. They also talk about the Tatars and the chebureki , that’s an interesting story. As I said earlier, the Tatars were deported en masse to Central Asia. Many were in Uzbekistan. People thought that chebureki—which are slightly greasy, flaky turnovers with mincemeat inside—were a Central Asian dish, but they are Tatar. There’s a popular stall in Riga, the Latvian capital, selling chebureki. So, yes, it’s full of true stories of different cuisines, their influences, and how food lives on in different guises. If you go to Georgia now, the restaurants all have signs in their windows saying, ‘if you don’t believe what Putin is doing is wrong, then don’t come in,’ or, ‘free champagne on the death of Putin.’ But at the same time, the food has a way of staying on, it’s a kind of memory. When I was reading this book, it reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich , who once wrote that when the Soviet Union collapsed, no one was interested in reading Solzhenitsyn . What they did was rush out and buy ten types of sausages and twenty different biscuits. Food is always important to people—while literature is sometimes less so, especially at a time of economic freefall. The photography is so terrible and so wonderful at the same time. It has a faded, 1970s style. You have to read it to put everything in context, to understand Soviet cuisine."