This is National Cookbook Month.
Sometimes a cookbook is more than a set of recipes, it’s a window into a culture.
Like a cookbook that the USSR published for decades, that revealed what the ruling class wanted people to think of their country, even if that wasn’t anywhere near the reality.
The book is known in English as The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food; people in the USSR often called it just “the book” because everyone seemed to have one (maybe because there weren’t many other cookbook options around?)
It came out in the late 1930s, a time when the Soviet Union was trying to pick up the economic pieces after its original plan backfired so badly that the country went through an enormous famine.
As leadership changed course, they commissioned a cookbook to show off all the delicious and abundant foods that comrades would be soon able to enjoy.
Cookbook director Anastas Mikoyan traveled the globe to find tasty and healthy foods to include, as well as ways to mass produce enough of them to avoid more starvation.
Ironically, a lot of what he set up for the new Soviet system was based on the food production in the capitalist United States (not that the cookbook spent a lot of time mentioning this).
The book featured thousands of recipes, some simple and filling, others elegant and complex.
There were cooking tips and nutrition facts, plus reminders that the point of all this food was to make sure Soviet citizens could grow strong and work hard.
The book even called for communal cooking, which it said was more efficient than each individual household making its own meals.
But all of this was aspirational.
People didn’t much want to take turns cooking for the whole neighborhood, and a lot of the ingredients in the book’s recipes weren’t available in shops, and if they were, the higher-ups would get them first, or the people would have to stand in a long line to try to get them.
All of which meant that the cookbook was less of an instruction guide to a new era of joy and plenty, but what Polly Russell of the British Library called it: “a shared culinary communist fantasy.”
Today in 1957, a newspaper article proclaimed “it’s raining coins!”
A driver in Montgomery, Alabama, somehow managed to break off the tops of five downtown parking meters, which sent change flying into the streets.
And I’m betting that driver couldn’t use the change to pay for all the meter repairs.
The great Stalinist bake off: Russia’s kitchen bible (The Guardian)
It’s Raining Coins! (The Stockman’s Journal via Newspapers.com)
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Image via Wikicommons