Missed Aspect of Russian Cooking

[soid]

 I noticed one aspect of Russian/Slavic cooking is rarely covered in thematic cookbooks. Recently I reviewed four Russian/Slavic/Soviet food related books and neither one talked about it. I better realized in China, in contrast to Chinese local cooking – when we were at a lunch table, eating last night's leftovers, someone ran a joke about us, “poor”, eating no freshly cooked food. In contrast, I realized, the very essence of Russian home cooking is the efficacy of cooking enough food for multiple days; eating what would be called "leftovers" – in fact, the food prepared specifically for eating over multiple days. Russians say, a good pot of borscht is good only next day. Various pickling techniques are in the same vein: pickled once, the vegetables are consumed over next weeks, by the time fresh veggies would've been rotten.

I will call myself an aficionado of this approach because it frees people's time from cooking everyday, and also reduces food waste. When I was a kid my mother would typically cook a pot of soup, varying different recipes; a pot that would be eaten for multiple days with some other dishes: cutlets, fish, and various grains.

I wonder of the origin of cooking for many days, and how common this attitude is across Slavic cultures. I wonder if it could be related to Socialist times, and, perhaps, Lenin's unexpectedly insightful writings on emancipation of women from "kitchen slavery":

... she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins ... against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins.

The reality of Soviet life, however, was not freedom from household drudgery, but scarce food availability that caused widespread home-cooking, home-farming and home canning. But people did embrace this image of "kitchen slavery" driving considerations of efficacy in cooking, especially with respect to women's home labour often overlooked by men, traditionally focused on career advancement and free from home errands.

Regardless of the origins in Soviet context, food preservation for later consumption is of course not unique to Soviet times. The origin of Swiss fondue is in the way of eating stale bread by dipping it in melted stale cheese. Italian frittata originates as a recipe of eating leftovers scrambled with eggs. Perhaps, due to the failures of the Soviet model in agriculture, widespread home cooking, this aspect of cooking efficacy staying in Eastern Europe more than in other countries; and due to the communist ideology, it was given another spin by displacing food appreciation and turning people from drudgery of cooking routine to other interesting things in life.

Soviet era poster: "Down with kitchen slavery!" Other signs on the poster, on the building top to bottom: Club, Canteen, Factory, Kitchen, Kinder-garden. Running across: Make New Life. Grigoriy Shegal, 1931.