Cookery Books in the Soviet Union

The disparity between fact and theory in the availability of supplies is one of the factors which pose, for anyone who proposes to write about Russian cooking, the basic dilemma: whether to be idealistic or realistic. One can either produce a mouth-watering selection of recipes based on nineteenth-century cookery books, literary and historical sources; or one can base one’s work on what is physically available and possible in the Soviet Union today in terms of money, time, energy and ingredients. The conditions of life of a Soviet woman, combining the problems of housekeeping and queueing in shops with a full-time job, are very different from those of a nineteenth-century housewife with her retinue of servants and plenty of money and leisure.