A bill is being brought before the Russian parliament that will force restaurants to make at least 50% of the food they serve traditional Russian cuisine in order to promote patriotism. Freedom Fries have finally been defeated as the favorite food of crazed patriots.
This is especially hilarious since traditional Russian cuisine was destroyed back in 1917. Based on the way pre-revolutionary authors made it sound, it was great. But nobody knows it any longer or has access to the ingredients. The Russians might just as well mandate the use of the cuisine that was popular in the Roman Empire. But when did little things like practicality ever stop passionate patriots?
Clarissa's Blog 
Freedom fries was just a name change along with liberty cabbage (sauerkraut). It’s not like Americans stopped eating them.
Isn’t food the last thing from a culture to go/last thing an immigrant gives up?
People can lose contact with language, music, art and folkways, but food is food.
Why aren’t Russians eating traditional Russian food anymore? This is like the French mandating that a certain percentage of songs on radio stations be French.
Relatedly:MREs around the world so soldiers can feel super patriotic eating rations.
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ETA: The Toubon Law
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There was so much hunger after the revolution, people barely had enough good to sustain life. And that went on for decades. The first (and the last) time in the USSR when food became abundant and easily available was in the late 1950s-1960s. But by that time, there were several generations that never tasted the traditional cuisine. So it’s been lost. It’s a pity because it used to be considered one of the healthiest cuisines in the world (unlike the very unhealthy Ukrainian food), but you can’t mandate it into existence today. I can’t imagine where one would even get the ingredients, especially on a mass scale.
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I am really curious about this: can you give an example of a traditional Russian dish for which you can’t get ingredients today?
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The politician who proposed the legislation, for instance, mentioned dishes made of bryukva and moroshka. I vaguely know that the former is a vegetable and the latter is a type of berry but I’ve never seen them.
Since I cook as a hobby, I used to read a lot about the traditional Russian cuisine but I didn’t understand half of the words. One example: “rasstegai s vyazigoj.” This is like a super traditional dish. But I have no idea what it is or what it even looks like. Possibly these are tiny little pies. And that’s the extent of my knowledge. Even the vocabulary is lost.
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Very interesting. Google tells me that moroshka is the cloudberry, which is an arctic berry frequently used in Finland and the north of Sweden:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_chamaemorus
It is delicious in jams and there is a famous Finnish liquour Lakka that is made of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakka
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I asked N and he says he might have seen it once. But it’s no longer a staple. It’s more of a rarity.
I’m all for this cuisine being recovered but I don’t think it will ever happen on a mass scale.
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I love Finnish Lakka, wonderful and unique taste. Why it isn’t used more in desserts (a lakka reduction over vanilla icecream would probably be awesome) I’ll never understand.
Jam from cloudberry tastes nice but the seeds are large and tend to stick between the teeth and it’s hard to get them out.
And isn’t bryukva a rutabaga (British: swede)?
A common US misconception used to be that “Eastern European” cuisine is full of turnips and rutabagas but possibly due to poverty stigma they’re hardly eaten in Poland (in wartime they were used as a food of last resort and afterward people avoided them).
Looking at cognates in other slavic languages (and maybe some baltic and/or finnic languages) might help decypher some of the unknown terms but you’ve got enough on your plate already (so to speak) to fool around with old Russian foods.
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I never saw a turnip either before moving to North America. I’d heard about them in folk tales and such but never saw them. We only had cabbage and potatoes.
Even the famous Olivier salad is nothing like the pre-revolutionary original, I hear. It’s now a poor person’s Olivier salad. 🙂
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And, more from Google, brukva (a bit different spelling) seems to be rutabaga or swede, commonly used in Irish/Scottish cooking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutabaga
Very interesting that this kind of rather basic and cold-climate vegetable has been forgotten.
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Ha! It’s rutabaga??? That’s so interesting. The first time I tasted rutabaga was here in North America. I had no idea it was the same thing.
Also, check out stroganina http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2012/strogonina-frozen-sashimi-of-the-russian-arctic/ which used to be served at fancy restaurants in Moscow before the revolution. But I never tried it, of course.
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I love sashimi, so this sounds very tasty.
Re: rutabaga, so maybe you can then actually try to make some of these old recipes?
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I never heard of liberty cabbage. Love it. 🙂
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Aren’t there recipe/cook books from the pre-Soviet era? What ingredients can’t be found now?
And surely by “traditional Russian cuisine” they mean Soviet era insitutional food.
And I assume the reason has less to do with ‘patritiotism’ than making sure that the Russian palate remains as limited as possible so they don’t get a hankering for foods (fer instance cheeese) that feckless modern Russians can’t make very well on their own (and can’t afford to import on a large scale either).
In the communist era in Poland food was limited (including ration cards at times) and monotonous (though the ingredients were generally natural and high quality) and things continued like that for a long time after (though w/out ration cards).
But starting sometime around 2000 a revival of artisanal and ‘lost’ foods began and is still going strong alongside the increase of basic ingredients that aren’t part of the traditional diet (esp new types of vegetables like chinese cabbage and broccoli etc).
Moral of the story: Soviet style government will lead inexorably to soviet style everything else, even if the country has the resources to do a whole lot better.
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How about patriotic flowers? The Russian phytosanitary authority, Rosselkhnoznadzor ¸ issued a ban against flowers from Holland this week. When I was in Russia many years ago, flowers were few and far between even in private gardens. England had its War of the Roses and now Russia has its War of the Tulips.
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The soil is really poor in most of Russia. Growing flowers is extremely hard, so importing is pretty much the only solution. And now they have to go and bam the imported flowers.
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“The soil is really poor in most of Russia. Growing flowers is extremely hard”
What about fertilizer? Greenhouses? (or is glass another one of those things that Russians can’t make?)
Actually you could start a regular series about something that’s normal in most of the world and Russians have never figured out “Things Russians Can’t Make, part 34 – glass”
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Yes, greenhouses, fertilization – could be done, but it’s so much work. It’s easier to just forget about it and go without.
And it’s like that about so many things. It’s just not worth the effort, it’s not going to work out anyway, etc. In my part of Ukraine, the soil is great but the defeatist attitudes are identical.
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Russia is on a roll against western decadence. It’s now considering banning gay emojis.
“According to Izvestia newspaper, the country’s media regulator could ban the characters from social media if an investigation finds they contravene laws intended to prevent gay “propaganda”.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/01/russia-could-ban-same-sex-emojis-for-promoting
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Stupid fucks. They have turned themselves into a total joke.
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