Fast food of the times of the USSR - donuts, pasties and pies

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The conviction that under the USSR the control over the quality of products was perfect is now ubiquitous. It fully corresponds to the thesis, approved by the official propaganda, that the Soviet Union was an earthly paradise. And in the Kremlin "a window burned until the morning", exuding concern for the common people.

More than once I have had to show how illusory these representations are. But here's another illustration of the unsurpassed quality of Soviet food. The journalists of the TVTs channel tried to figure out our pasties and how they were fried.

I must say right away that the plot contains a lot of empty chatter, characteristic of the program "No Deception". But there are also grains of truth.

So, really, oil for frying in public catering was a product that today causes some confusion. Numerous donut, cheburek and pies were examples of factories for the production of "chemical weapons" - fried butter, which was changed only occasionally, on occasion. Today it is a well-known fact that deep-fried oil is an extremely harmful product. During the frying process, changes occur in the chemical composition of the oil. Moreover, these changes are detrimental to the body. Oil is most harmful when food is fried at very high temperatures, when the oil is boiling for a long time.

Prolonged heating of the oil leads to the formation of chemically active compounds in its composition - acrolein, acrylamide, etc. It is these substances that are considered dangerous carcinogens that cause cancer.

When processed at high temperatures, normal fats are converted to trans fats. These compounds increase the concentration of cholesterol in the blood. They shorten the blood clotting time, causing an increased risk of thrombosis and ischemia of the heart muscle.

In the Soviet public catering, they did not think about this at all. All donuts and pasties, beloved by the people, were fried in this concentrate of carcinogens. I myself tell in the program that this oil has not changed, if not for years, then for months. It boiled away, was topped up from a can or added automatically from a container and continued to fry.

That this was the case with all the dishes at the table is an exaggeration of the journalists. For the patties and cutlets, the butter obviously changed every day. Simply because a new shift in the dining room would never accept a kitchen with unwashed dishes and pans. But with establishments where deep fat was used (in modern language), i.e. frying in a large amount of oil - everything was much worse there.

“There was no clear information that the oil of repeated frying was harmful,” says the veteran of Soviet trade, commodity expert Maria Nikolaeva. - And therefore this control was not exercised.

Indeed, even the “Instructions for deep-fried products frying in public catering establishments and control over the quality of deep-fat fats”, which emerged at the end of the USSR in 1990, established only minimal grounds for control. Here's what she recommended:

The instruction even includes a whole paragraph entitled "Procedure for the reuse of fats." He says that "Re-use of deep fat for frying is only allowed if it is of good organoleptic quality and degree of thermal oxidation." Needless to say, in reality, the oil could really be used for months, being only strained through cheesecloth. For cleaning from solid particles of burnt-on.

But about other statements of journalists I am ready to argue. I mean that housewives fried on very harmful margarine and lard. Margarine is God bless him. But I will stand up for lard. As for me, frying potatoes in vegetable oil is not comme il faut. On creamy - yes.

And fry the meat in ghee. Today's fashion for olive oil for frying, thank God, has passed us. Having visited Italy, and after talking there with not the last chefs, we understood. They are fried there on olive, ghee, and cream, depending on the product. And the fashion dictated to us for olive oil as a universal remedy is nothing more than a marketing device.

And, of course, about the fact that under the USSR "they fried more on harmful fats, and the health of Soviet citizens was better," I bet. "Cancer diseases were much less, people were slimmer …". - This is utter nonsense. There were fewer diseases for one simple reason - an effective system of early diagnosis and prevention. Oil has nothing to do with it.

But the fact that mortality from cancer in today's Russia is growing, and cancer is detected at advanced stages, and more often “only at the stage of death,” is solely the merit of the current thieving “getting up from your knees.” And that very window that “before the morning is burning in the Kremlin”, exhausted in caring for the common man.