a nation hungryan economy to plan and a lot of propaganda to do.
Coming across images today of the assortment of sausages that, at least in theory, were available in grocery stores for the Soviet people during the post-war years is a visual spectacle, something that runs counter to all our preconceived ideas about what should be on those starving family tables and also a carousel of alchemical challenges as we see more and more elaborate and exotic sausages.
Pure modern art mass produced in the Soviet Union (you will find a wide variety of examples at the end of the post).
Account the YouTube popularizer of Russian origin My Name Is Andong that everything took off thanks to trip to Chicago by Anastas Mikoyánthen a senior member of the Politburo, in 1936. He lived there for three months, when the countries were still experiencing an idyllic period of cooperation, and with his stay he not only took down recipes for a lot of products that would later drive his people crazy on their return home, such as ice cream, ketchup or hamburgers, but he learned how factories and companies there were applying innovations produced by the second industrial revolution.
Among them, they discovered that extensive livestock farming and the acceleration of processes could help the use of animal waste for its reconversion into sausages, which were stored much longer.
The Sausage Doctor. The desired one.
All this led to two elements of our interest, the first, the Recipe Album of the People’s Commissariat of the Food Industry of the USSR for the companies of the People’s Commissariat of the Food Industry “Sausages and Smoked Foods”, where production standards were established that no one could ignore for each type of sausage and which gave rise to this beautiful variety of dozens of meat buns.
We are pleased to introduce Doctor Sausage
And second, the order was given for the production of a lot of new products, of which we are going to highlight one and only one, the Doktorskaya kolbasa, Doktorskaya kolbasa or Doctor Sausage. He was on the verge of calling himself Doctor Stalin because they were so proud of the discovery, but someone thought that it wouldn’t be such a good idea in the long run to associate the leader of the Party with a meat flute.
The Doctor Sausage was a natural recipe, without additives, with a very high proportion of beef and pork (60% of its weight) to be talking about a combat product and with the rest of the additives being easily found. It was cooked, it had to be soft to feed from children to adults, low in fat for those with stomach problems, and its nutritional composition would help to remove the most impoverished classes of famine, as well as allowing them access to meat.
A good protein for everything, which is why the State spent good money promoting its sausage with the desire that it reach every table.
To say it was a success would be an understatement. The divulger’s mother, who did spend her life, childhood included, in the USSR, remembers it. He tells how chopped was not for every day, but the day it was bought was a party. Kolbasa sandwiches They were the favorites of the workers in the street vendors’ stalls. Salchipapas, kolbasa with fried eggskobalsa in the Olivier salad (precursor of what we know as Russian salad)…
The old woman fondly remembers what they called the “doctor’s tear”, that the mortadella, if you squeezed it, made it a little greasy. It was juicy. Doctor Sausage is the Proustian madeleine of an entire former Soviet generation, almost a symbol of pride, since, no matter how much variety they had in the capitalist bloc, the poor here also had delicious little luxuries, such as demonstrate posts like thiswhere those nostalgic for the regime instrumentalize these sausages as an example of communal prosperity.
If you wanted, you could replicate the original recipe at home. following these steps.
What happened? That when things started to go wrong, and despite the institutional vacuum of messages confirming this trend, people knew that they would lose thanks to these sausages. “In the 60s, in the mid-60s… From then on the Doctor stopped being the same. He was no longer good,” recalls the octogenarian. Memory may take a small toll on women here, since the industry did not change the production standard until 1974.
The bad harvests of the late 70s caused a decrease in the number of cattle, the kolbasa began to disappear from the stores and people cried, so the State allowed it to be manufactured again under formulas of lower meat purity.
The result was a progressive loss of quality until its citizens ended up turning their backs on those sausages that no longer had anything to do with the gastronomic triumph of what they did not know was the golden age of the regime. For posterity, the memory of its flavor and the propaganda images of a political project that found ways to get its chest out even from its guts.
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