Nowadays, you increasingly come across statements that during the USSR period this was better, sometimes tastier, sometimes fresher. But I remember how my mother-in-law and I met after work in 1989 on Tverskaya, maybe it was still Gorky Street then, and we “combed” all the stores where people “grabbed” cheese, milk, minced meat in the queues - we had to feed two hungry people men. With coupons - cigarettes, sugar. Sausage? I don’t really remember how or where they bought it. A couple of years earlier, in 1987, I worked in one of the capital’s editorial offices, and it was heaven there: meat in the store for employees, and any sausage in the buffet and pickles on the table in the dining room. My friends ordered me to buy something for the table for celebrations. For the holidays, in special stores, we were given a varied, full-fledged set - a couple of loaves of imported high-quality salami - cervelat, always very fresh red, white fish, caviar, of course, and a bunch of cans, the existence of which buyers of Soviet stores did not even suspect. It was a shame to receive these “bags” of food on May 9th. When our veterans were given 10 times less and meagerly. In the glorious Brezhnev years, 1975 - there was a grocery store in our house, and I don’t remember that the shelves were empty - two or three types of boiled sausage - “doctoral” - dietary, “amateur” with fat, veal - (sometimes) with tasty fat - they were definitely on sale, and boiled-smoked - “Armavir” and “Krakovskaya” were there. Not always, but very often. There were queues for the “Moscow”, “Tallinn” ones. However, they were always there in the USSR. Mom was friends with the manager, dad with the butcher. Everything was there. “From under the counter,” as they used to say - almost everyone. But - this is Moscow. And in the summer , I went to my grandmother at sea for 3 months, and they sent me a large box of meat and sausage. This was not the case in Crimea, or it was on the market - it was expensive. My father's friends came to us from Saratov, and the house smelled before they left. like in the sausage department. Sausage trains left Moscow for other cities of the USSR. In my desktop “Book about delicious and healthy food" - 1971 publication, 28 varieties of Soviet sausage are listed. There are names there that are not associated with anything in my memory - “chopped ham”, “glazed”, “puff”. But “Brunswick”, “servelat”, “delicacy”, “Soviet” - have crossed over from the USSR to our days. It helped me remember my beloved liver sausage, which was forbidden to me - they say, “dogs only eat that.” And it was delicious, like everything forbidden. Sausage in the USSR cost: 2.90, 2.20, boiled, and 3, there, with kopecks, boiled-smoked. In any case, the affordability of the price did not in any way affect its quality. They say that after the severe drought of 1972 and the death of livestock, for the first time changes were made to GOST for Soviet sausage and ingredients began to be added that outweighed the meat content in it. Our friends in the Baltics had a house and their own farm. That's how I tried it for the first time raw smoked sausage from home smokehouse, prepared according to a European recipe - the Spanish “fuet” is not even close. The secret of the “deliciousness” of sausage from the times of the USSR, as in the “psychotest”, is logical - there is a shortage, memories from the past are almost always tasty. And, besides, sausage was prepared for many decades only from fresh meat- chilled. From what - now - it’s scary to imagine. The future belongs to small sausage factories of cooperators. Expensive, but delicious.

For many years, “Doctor’s” sausage was one of the symbols of the well-being of the Soviet family. People lined up for it, it was added to everyone’s favorite “Olivier” salad, a solyanka recipe was unthinkable without “Doctorskaya”, sandwiches with this sausage were on display in the regional committee buffets. How did this truly legendary variety of sausage appear?

Just what the doctor ordered

The exact date of birth of the Doctor’s sausage (GOST 23670) is well known. This is April 29, 1936, it was then, by order of the People's Commissar Food Industry Anastas Mikoyan began its mass release. The sausage recipe was developed by the All-Russian Research Institute of Meat Industry, and was distinguished by its low fat content, despite the fact that the sausage contained a lot of protein.

The reason for the start of production of such a product was a sharp deterioration in the health of the country's population. After the abolition of the NEP policy and collectivization, famine began in the country, which affected entire regions. Lack of food, starvation - all this led to outbreaks of various diseases.

In the early thirties, Anastas Mikoyan visited the United States, where he visited meat processing plants in Chicago. Returning to the USSR, Mikoyan initiated the creation of the First Moscow Sausage Factory, which now bears the name of Mikoyan. It was here that the production of sausage began, intended, as it was said in documents of that time, for dietary nutrition people with somatic signs of the consequences of prolonged starvation - “... patients who have poor health as a result of the Civil War and tsarist despotism.” The wording, of course, is somewhat crafty, but the sausage recipe is quite honest, containing only natural products of the highest quality.

In accordance with GOST, for 100 kg of sausage it was necessary to take 25 kilograms of beef highest quality, 70 kilograms of lean pork, 3 kilograms of fresh chicken eggs, 2 liters of milk, salt, sugar, nutmeg or cardamom. The shelf life of this sausage was 72 hours.

The result is an excellent dietary product, very tasty, aromatic and healthy. This sausage fulfilled its task - to restore the strength of a person who has poor health. She was appointed as therapeutic nutrition doctors, which is why it received the name “Doctor’s”.

Doctorate? No, “chopped ham”

During the period of Soviet power, the following joke circulated in the academic community. Two candidates of science meet, one is dragging a bag containing something heavy. "Doctor's?" - his friend asks respectfully, meaning, of course, scientific work. “No, “chopped ham!”,” answers the first, meaning a type of sausage of a class lower than “Doctor’s”.

The anecdote quite accurately reflects the realities of that time. This sausage was not easy to find in stores, and it acquired the status of a scarce product. They fought the shortage in a simple Soviet way: by simplifying the recipe.

People of the older generation remember that back in the 70s, old people grumbled while cutting into slices a loaf of sausage bought with great difficulty: “Is this “Doctorskaya”? There used to be a “Doctor’s”! And this is nonsense, not sausage.” And they were right because classic recipe diet sausage, which remained unchanged until the end of the 50s, then began to degrade. The number of livestock in the USSR turned out to be not as large as we would like. In addition, pigs began to be fed waste from the fishing industry, which is why the meat acquired bad smell and taste. Gradually, it was allowed to add flour, melange instead of eggs, powdered milk instead of whole. By 1979 the same was allowed pork skin, egg powder and starch. They started wrapping the loaf in cellophane. The reputation of the product, beloved by generations of Soviet people, was dealt a final blow. “Doctor’s” sausage was equal in quality to other sausages that sometimes appeared in Soviet stores, such as “Chaynaya”, “Yazykovaya” and the same one, “Ham-chopped”.

Why "Doctor's"? Because I ate - and go to the doctor!

Nowadays, the GOST standards of the Soviet era have been safely forgotten. The Doktorskaya brand is used by all and sundry, producing sausages with a monstrous content of flavor and aroma enhancers, acidity regulators, antioxidants, stabilizers, emulsifiers and color fixatives. At the same time, many enterprises produce products based on specifications - technical conditions that make it possible to produce a product without meat at all, based on soy and corragens. Corragens are called thickeners, simulants food products. This is red powder seaweed. It's being flooded meat broth, mix and allow to harden. It turns out to be “almost real” sausage mince. Nevertheless, even today there are enterprises that produce goods strictly in accordance with GOST. It should be remembered that GOST 2011 allows the use of flour, starch, sodium nitrite in the recipe for “Doctor’s” sausage, and instead natural eggs and milk - dry substitutes.

The current “Doctoral” is no longer the same dietary product, which was developed in 1936 for the Mikoyan enterprise. That’s why, apparently, the joke was born: “Why is the sausage called “Doctor’s”? Because he ate - and go to the doctor!

Sausage from the Soviet period. She can rightfully be called legendary. True, representatives of different generations have their own “legend” associated with this product. Nowadays there are few people who remember the first GOST for sausage. It was introduced in 1936 by order of the People's Commissar of the Food Industry Anastas Mikoyan. He specifically flew to Chicago to get acquainted with the most advanced meat processing enterprises in the world at that time.

The composition of the first "Doctor's", for example, included beef premium without veins, lean pork shoulder, ice water, nitrite salt and table salt, whole cow's milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg ground nut, cardamom, black pepper.

GOST for this type of sausage remained unchanged until the 1970s. At that time, there was a shortage of meat in the country due to a decline in livestock farming. It was then that it was officially allowed to add two percent starch to sausage mince. None of the consumers even felt anything, but the savings in meat nationwide turned out to be impressive. In addition to starch, animal protein substitutes, so-called caseinates, were also allowed.

This allowed not only to increase production sausages, but also reduce their price. So, “Doctorskaya”, instead of two rubles and thirty kopecks, began to cost ten kopecks less. But its taste, like other sausages, has changed. Now, according to GOST 1979, they could be made from buffalo or yak meat. The composition could include trimmed pork and veal, as well as trimmed single-grade goat meat and lamb (frozen meat was not forbidden); raw pork and beef fat, side and back fat; processed offal, egg melange, dry cream and first grade flour.

Thus, for 100 kilograms of Lyubitelskaya sausage, 35 kilograms of first-grade trimmed beef, 40 kilograms of trimmed lean pork, and 25 kilograms of back fat were used. The additives included: salt (2.5 kg), sodium nitrite - 5.6 g, sugar - 110 g, black pepper - 85 g, nutmeg or cardamom - 55 g, spice mixture - 250 g.

But not all sausages were so meaty. For example, GOST for breakfast sausage allowed its production from sodium caseinate, wheat flour, potato starch.

Boiled Beef sausage"in addition to the beef itself, they added beef brains. "Moscow sausage" according to GOST 1986 consisted exclusively of trimmed beef and back fat. By the way, GOST 1986 was not very different from GOST 1979. The list of spices was slightly expanded, which now included garlic.

GOST standards for semi-smoked and smoked sausages appeared in 1941. This was due to the beginning of the war. There was a need for sausages that could be stored for a long time and would be satisfying. To make them, they took trimmed beef or pork (chilled, defrosted (thawed) or frozen). Added pork belly, pork fat, bacon or fatty pork trimmings, lamb fat, spices and certainly pure chemical nitrate. During the war, this GOST was changed several times. There was a period when it was possible to use animal bones, sinews, and other not entirely edible parts of animals ground into powder.

After the 1990s, GOSTs were abolished. TU appeared - technical specifications. They are not adopted at the state level; they are developed by each enterprise individually. Therefore, among the many varieties and types of sausages today there is great amount those that do not initially contain meat. Soy products natural meat has long been replaced, and the necessary taste is created by flavorings and emulsifiers.

IN Soviet times the sausage was perfect. Any technologist of any sausage production. Nowadays you won’t be able to get sausage of this quality, even if you try to make it without sparing money.
Reference: In 1990, 2,283 thousand tons of sausage were produced in the RSFSR, 15.4 kg per capita. In 2009, 2,238 thousand tons of sausage were produced in the Russian Federation, 15.7 kg per capita.

1958 Kyiv. Shop "Ukrainian sausages"
All Soviet sausages were made according to GOST. For example Doctoral:
According to GOST 23670-79 per 100 kg of sausage
premium trimmed beef - 25;
pork, trimmed, semi-fat - 70;
chicken eggs or melange - 3;
Whole or skimmed cow's milk powder - 2;
table salt - 2,090;
sodium nitrite - 0.0071;
granulated sugar or glucose - 0.2;
ground nutmeg or cardamom - 0.05.
There were no toilet paper, preservatives, flavor enhancers, dyes, carrageenans, vegetable, animal or milk proteins, or phosphates in the composition.

The fact that GOST was strictly observed and for the slightest violation the person responsible would have been imprisoned for a very long time, I hope you have no doubt?

Currently there are no such recipes. All of the above additives, which did not exist then but exist now, do not improve the quality of the sausage at all, but allow the sale of water and the use of low-quality meat (frozen, stale, of the wrong fat content).

Further. Let’s say for luxury stores they decided to make a classic Doctor’s, despite the price. Well, let’s say you even bought eggs and found nutmeg and cardomom not as part of functional mixtures. Where can I get meat? In Russia and Europe, cattle are now fed such things that even in terms of protein content they are fundamentally different from “normal” Soviet food. You can buy good meat (you can, but it’s expensive and they buy other ones) in South America. But it won’t be possible to deliver it chilled. And from frozen meat, which is now used by at least 90% of meat processing enterprises, it is impossible to make “correct” sausage. I’ll tell you a secret - you can’t cook anything good from frozen meat, and in stores, in the vast majority of cases, defrosted [thawed] meat is sold under the guise of chilled meat.

I talked at several enterprises with technologists who were trying to produce Soviet-quality sausage. Everyone said that it didn’t work out due to the inability to find high-quality meat raw materials. Even when purchasing raw meat from private traders in a live form, they are convinced that households are also fed “modern” feed, which does not have a very good effect on the meat.

Well, I’ll give you an example of a modern recipe that you like (I won’t write the specific names of spices and proteins):
Mechanically separated meat 45
Chicken skin 35
Animal protein 2
Water 18
Table salt 1.8
Spice mixture Combi 0.8
Dye 0.06
Milk flavor 0.06
Preservative freshener 0.3
Dry smoke 0.02
Emulsifier (sodium alginate) 0.5
Sodium nitrite 0.0075
Process water (ice) 8
Please note that out of 111 kg of sausage, they sold you only 45 kg of meat, and 26 kg of water, 40 kg of other nasty things, but according to statistics, all this will pass like meat. Eat, dear Russians.

What about toilet paper? About ten years ago, a technologist I knew took out the price lists of Western suppliers and said: “Well, the dream of toilet paper in sausage has come true - they are offering us edible cellulose for sausage products.”

By the way, how much of this sausage was made in the RSFSR?

In 1990 - 2,283 thousand tons, 15.4 kg per poor Soviet soul. This was very little, so there was a terrible shortage of sausage. People could drop everything they were doing and go on a trip to Moscow for a couple of days to bring a “Doctorskaya” stick and three “Krakovskaya” rings to starving children. Soviet men only took women as wives who had several such sausage walkers behind them...

But the terrible times of scarcity are over, the Great Sausage Revolution swept away the retrogrades from power, and the doors of freedom and abundance opened. In 2009, in the Russian Federation, having destroyed the livestock population and many totalitarian meat processing plants, with the help of thousands of small sausage factories and without any unnecessary livestock, using only naked entrepreneurial ingenuity, they produced as many as 2,238 thousand tons of sausage products, or 15.7 kg per free Russian soul . Today we can see sausage on every shabby counter, at any price from 60 to 1260 rubles per kilogram, and the new generation of Russians does not want to believe that someone could specifically go to hell for such crap. Before our eyes soviet sausage became a legend.

I continue to acquaint the reader with the history of Soviet sausage using the 1960 reference book (Konnikov A.G. Directory of sausage production and semi-finished meat products. 2nd ed., revised, supplemented. - M.: Pishchepromizdat, 1960). Today we will learn the composition and technological requirements for the production of Soviet boiled sausages. Did they add water and ice, pork rinds, soy fillers, crushed bones, preservatives, toilet paper and the blood of repressed dissidents to the sausage?

* * *

Moscow and sausage

Population of Moscow:

1912 - 1.617 million people
1915 - 1.817 million people.

Main meat. Statistical and economic reference book. - M.: Pishchepromizdat, 1936.

* * *

210 varieties of Soviet sausage and smoked meats.

List of all main varieties of sausages and deli meats, which were produced in 1960 at meat processing plants in the USSR. So, the assortment of Soviet sausages and smoked products according to the 1960 reference book (A.G. Konnikov, Directory for the production of sausages and semi-finished meat products. 2nd ed., revised, supplemented. - M.: Pishchepromizdat, 1960):

The food industry of the USSR in 1960 produced 1 million 351 thousand tons of sausage products, or 6.3 kg per capita.

As the memory of eyewitnesses suggests, by 1970 the situation with sausage in Soviet trade had worsened, obviously because Soviet industry produced 2 million 286 thousand tons of sausage products in 1970, or 9.4 kg per capita.

Not a single product in the USSR and after the USSR was the subject of so many legends, songs, epics and tales as about Soviet sausage. As a result, legends mixed with fairy tales, fairy tales with myths, and historical truth, as usual, in the end completely drowned in this abyss, like Atlantis. Is it now possible to extract it from this seabed? No you can not... :)
One of the beautiful legends, for example, says that the ancestor of all Soviet sausages was the People's Commissar of the Food Industry Anastas Mikoyan, who in April 1936 signed an order to produce new meat products: Doctor's, Lyubitelskaya, Tea, Veal and Krakow sausages, Milk sausages and Hunter's sausages. At the same time the name Doctor's sausage due to the fact that it was created specifically for “patients with poor health as a result of the Civil War and tsarist despotism.” The Doctor's recipe included: for 100 kg of sausage - 25 kg of premium beef, 70 kg of lean pork, 3 kg of eggs and 2 kg of cow's milk...
And this is a characteristic recollection of one of the bloggers about the taste of Soviet sausage: “I, like probably many others, associate sausage with the taste of childhood. I remember how after work my mother would bring a roll of paper with “Doctorskaya” - its aroma spread throughout the apartment. It didn’t sit in the refrigerator for a long time, it died that same evening. Oh, it was time!”
But the main question remains, which divides supporters and opponents of the USSR into two irreconcilably hostile camps: was there even sausage in the USSR? Or did she not exist, but there were only legends about her? Supporters of the USSR respond that there was sausage and present numerous photographs:

1949. Shop. Kyiv

1952. Moscow. Sale of sausages in the former Eliseevsky store

1958. Kyiv. Shop "Ukrainian sausages"

1960s Grocery store. Leningrad

1980. Sausage "Krakovskaya"

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Cooperative trade in the late USSR. Products in cooperation were sold at higher prices than in state trade

Perestroika. Prices in the cooperative store look prohibitively high, exceeding the state prices several times

Their opponents respond by presenting photos of empty counters and queues soviet stores"Sausages." It is reasonable to ask: if there was sausage, would people stand in lines for it? We wouldn't stand. Which means she didn't exist...

Consequently, all these photos of sausage abundance in the USSR are simply clever fakes (although there was no such word then) of Soviet propaganda.
They also post statistics on sausage production in the USSR now, and it turns out that now we eat less of them than then.

Anti-Soviet people counter that, as Mark Twain pointed out, there are three types of lies - just lies, blatant lies and statistics. Of course, the insightful writer meant Soviet statistics...
Thus, Soviet sausage turns out to be an analogue of Schrödinger’s cat in the world of gastronomy - it seems to exist and not exist at the same time. And this dispute has every chance to last a long time - years, and possibly decades. I think the only chance to resolve it is to conduct a historical experiment! Simply restore socialism and the USSR, and see whether there will be sausage in it or not...