![]() We get stories of kitchens shared by eighteen families and the chaos that sharing caused. People saved their mayonnaise jars so they could give their doctors urine samples. If you bought meat and did not bring your own paper, you would have to carry it in your hands. ![]() Not only was there a never-ending culture of the defitsit (shortage) of goods there was also no packaging. “Not too rotten,” the author remembers her mother saying to a sales clerk. This book goes through decade after decade of Russian life, from pre-to post-Soviet times, and in each section accompanies family anecdotes with recollections of meals. ![]() Meals assembled with such effort were all the more appreciated. ![]() We think of lines as annoyances to avoid in Russia they were not only unavoidable but also a central fact of life-even “a quasisurrogate church,” as one Russian novel, composed entirely of dialogues in a queue, puts it. To get food and other necessities, Homo sovieticus could count on spending a third of his or her nonworking hours waiting in lines, where a special kind of communality developed. Soviet cooking? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Wasn’t the Soviet Union a place where everything was in short supply, people waited on endless lines, there was little if any choice, and the center of every meal was vodka? Yes, indeed, and yet a quite interesting cuisine developed under these conditions. ![]()
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