The weirdest Soviet foods I remember are as follows:
A. Boiled potato sandwiches. You slice boiled potatoes and place them on bread with some salt and pepper on top.
B. Watermelon rind jam. It was not at all bad-tasting, by the way. In the same family is candy made out of sugared orange peel.
C. Canned pasta. People were so into canning that when there was nothing else to can, they’d can cooked pasta in some weird liquid. It was like Chef Boyardee but in glass jars. Disgusting, both visually and taste-wise.
D. Of course, there’s also the famous Olivier salad that was a rendering of the signature dish of a French chef in cheap Soviet ingredients. The Olivier salad is such an atrocious mix of ingredients that even Spanish cuisine pales in comparison. I adore it, though, even knowing how exceptionally unhealthy it is.
E. Pasta with sugar. My family never reached such levels of poverty but among the even less fortunate it was popular to eat cooked pasta with a generous sprinkling of sugar. Nobody heard of pasta sauce. Cheese and butter were a distant dream, so this was a way to make the sad, grey-colored and very sticky Soviet pasta slide in better.
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Nor jam, but pickles: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/watermelon-rind-pickles/
A staple on the summer relish plates of my (very midwestern American) childhood.
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Those were popular in the south, in my grandma’s time. Even when I was little you could still buy pickled eggs and pickled pigs’ feet out of huge jars in the gas station shops. Is there anything people *don’t* pickle?
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“pickled eggs and pickled pigs’ feet”
Trashy yes…. but I loved both (especially the pigs’ feet).
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I didn’t realize they were trashy! Perhaps that is why they’d disappeared by the time I was an adult.
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No idea about the pigs feet, but shouldn’t we eat pickled eggs?
Here in the UK I can still get them at local chippy which is 2 minutes walk away, and at any of the other 10 within 2 miles of here.
(a chippy is a takeaway selling fish and chips – such an important part of British culture that they were one of the few foods not rationed during the 1939-45 war).
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