At the Cafeteria Among Soviet Citizens

Soviet cafeterias provided the same sort of food that people cooked at home, with the same flavor accents that characterized Soviet cuisine, some of which still surprise tourists on menus to this day...

...such as the tendency to garnish almost all savory dishes with finely chopped dill. Other distinctive features are mayonnaise as a popular dressing for most cold appetizers (zakuski) and salads and a fondness for mashed potatoes and kompot. Scroll through the menu to learn more about its contents.

As the story goes, stolichny salad is the successor to the legendary Olivier salad. The recipe was simplified after the revolution and eventually arrived at its current ingredients: boiled chicken or some other fowl, hard-boiled eggs, boiled potatoes, pickles, mayonnaise. 

Versions with sausage, boiled tongue, beef, and other types of meat were usually called ‘meat salad.’ While there were a variety of takes on stolichny salad, Olivier salad, and meat salad prepared at home, food service recipes adhered to strict standards.  

Soviet housewives and cooks adored canned foods, because they could use them to stock up on provisions for a long time, and most canned foods could be served as appetizers on their own.

Two of the most popular types of vegetable caviar (vegetable spread) were zucchini caviar, which was more common, and eggplant caviar, which was less common but just as appreciated.

Lightly smoked sprats preserved in oil decorated the dinner table for celebrations as they were, still in the can. Cafeterias, cafés, and restaurants served them on rye bread or with lemon.

Borscht has a centuries-long history, but during the twentieth century, this hearty soup became a key element of cafe menus in several countries, including Russia.

Cookbooks featured different versions, including Ukrainian borscht (with ground salo, or fatback, and garlic), Moscow-style borscht (with assorted meat – bacon, sausages, boiled beef), and even flotsky (navy-style) borscht (with red pepper and smoked pork).

Chicken broth – the easiest soup, enjoyed by all – with vermicelli. This was how it was usually served in cafeterias, garnished with finely chopped dill. 

Restaurants added a boiled egg to the broth and served it with pirozhki, or buns with fillings.

It was around the same time that a version of okroshka made with kefir sparkling mineral water became widespread. While okroshka in the pre-revolutionary period did not feature potatoes, nowadays it does almost everywhere. 

It was always made with fresh sorrel and served with smetana and an egg.

This cake was invented as a way to use up leftover cake scraps at confectioneries and was named for its appearance. Kartoshka cake was a brown oblong cake made from sweet biscuit crumbs with cream, condensed milk, and chocolate, decorated with ‘shoots’ made out of cream. 

By the end of the Soviet period, kartoshka was being made with biscuits and margarine and was not healthy at all. The original form of this dessert is delightful and fits right in with the contemporary trend of food waste reduction.   

Sweet berry kisels that could be drunk were most likely the result of Polish influence, but the concept spread in the USSR like wildfire, and the 1970s even saw the production of a dried semi-processed product that could be diluted with water and boiled.

In the summer, it was made with fresh berries and fruit, and in the winter, the ingredients included dried fruit, usually dried apples or pears.

Everyone in the USSR enjoyed lemonades, or soft drinks, of which there was a huge variety. Price lists featured citro, dyushes, tarkhun, cream soda, Buratino, Sayany, Kolokolchik, and the Soviet answer to cola – Baikal.

Apart from bottled lemonades, there were also homemade soft drinks made with syrups from homemade jam and carbonation coming from a siphon and a tank of carbon dioxide. Streets in cities had vending machines selling sparkling water - three kopes if you wanted syrup, one kopek without.