Sausage at 2.20

What Soviet products were actually made of
The truth and myths about real sausage and butter

Anna Boyko, "Express Newspaper" "What are we eating?

Some nonsense! Genetically modified foods, palm oil, soy protein in sausage… It's funny that such speeches can be heard not only from those who yearn for Soviet times – for the simple reason that they spent their youth or childhood in the USSR, but also from boys and girls who did not find the Union. What was Soviet food really like in the 70s and 80s?

And gingerbread, by the way, is always not enough for everyone

Firstly, the food was different – for those who received special rations, went to special stores and had the opportunity to purchase goods "from under the counter" or at the market, and for ordinary hard workers. The social stratification in the Union was very pronounced: some bought market cottage cheese and market meat for a lot of money, others received black and red caviar as "voluntary offerings", and the most numerous third parties either stood in queues for hours for scarce goods, or bought beef bones, rotten potatoes and the very sausage that according to modern myths, then they were made from real meat.

GOST is a stretchable concept

One of the main arguments in favor of the naturalness of Soviet products is "then there were GOST standards". Well, they really were. But, firstly, they were different - for export and for domestic products, secondly, they often changed depending on whether the harvest was good, and thirdly, there were numerous notes to the GOST standards. According to these notes, in some cases it was permissible to replace some ingredients with others.

In beef sausage, up to 15% of the meat could be replaced with pork trimmings and up to 100% with yak or buffalo meat. In the production of sausages or sausages, it was allowed to use "old", not sold out sausages, as well as smoked meat trimmings – do not waste the same good. Part of the meat was legally replaced by bone broth, blood plasma (serum), protein stabilizers, wheat flour, potato starch.

Even if we remove the widespread theft from the brackets, it turns out that sausage products were often not made from meat alone. And if we consider that at that time it was considered prestigious to live on the principle of "drag every nail from the factory, you are the owner here, not the guest," it turns out that meat did not get into some varieties of sausage at all. More precisely, this way: there were workshops of various profiles in solid industries – in some they made sausages and sausages for export, for bribes and control – without any substitutes, and in others they made products for the people, from cheeks, boiled bladders and starch. In smaller factories, there was also a "sausage bundle": for example, an elite product was produced in the first shift, and a harsh surrogate was produced in the second and third.

How much are carcinogens?

Soviet chips – potato slices fried to a crisp in bags, which, by the way, did not reach all regions of the country, were fried in oil. His – quite legally, according to TU! – changed once every eight months.

Butter was quite expensive, and sunflower oil was exceptionally unrefined and often cloudy, its smell was liked on everything; housewives of those times often used margarine or so–called cooking fat for frying and baking. These wonderful fats were produced using hydrogenated vegetable fat, cotton palmitin and the notorious palm oil, which for some reason is considered an exclusive accessory of modern products. By the way, in Soviet times this oil was not cleaned as thoroughly as it is now.

Nitrates and nitrites were actively added to the notorious sausage, as well as to sausages and sausages – quite legally, according to GOST.

As for dairy products, they were of high quality only in the Baltic States – there is such a rich tradition of making "milk", which was not so easy to kill with notes to Soviet GOST; and the Baltic republics were supplied better than the rest. Both milk and sour cream were mercilessly diluted. Starch was added to the sour cream so that it was not blatantly liquid.

Sweet life

According to legend, scarce cakes and sweets "Bird's Milk" were made using agar-agar, cocoa butter and eggs; in practice, these components were replaced with starch, vegetable fats and melange. Ice cream of the most diverse varieties was only in the capitals, and even in Leningrad. In the provinces, they knew about cream sundae and popsicles only from books and movies; at best, two or three varieties of ice cream were sold in stores - milk, chocolate, berry. And in the south of Russia there were regions where such a strange delicacy as tomato ice cream was sold as a cold treat; there was no alternative to it – dairy products were sent to the capital.

The people's favorite cake "Log" and cake "Potato" were made from confectionery waste: cookie crumbs, defective biscuits, margarine and cocoa powder were mixed. And even for such goodies in the shops there were queues.

So those who desperately yearn for Soviet quality products either did not eat like ordinary people, or simply do not really understand what Soviet products are.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  13.09.2017