The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

At the barakholka last Sunday I found a 1952 edition of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, heavy as a brick and smelling of dust and old glue. The plates are glossy propaganda: tables no ordinary kitchen ever saw, aspic catching the light, roasts lacquered into permanence, crystal that would have looked absurd in a Khrushchyovka. “Everything in it,” the seller said, tapping the cover, “we never once ate.” I paid what he asked and carried it home against my coat, in air that had not been above minus two all day. I chose one modest recipe and followed it exactly, no substitutions, no modern shortcuts. The result was edible and slightly plain, the flavours behaving as if they had been asked to stand up straight. I ate it at the table with the book open to the introduction, that steady voice explaining how the Soviet table ought to look, how abundance was both duty and reward. The sentences are sure of themselves. The food on my plate was smaller than the sentences.

I keep returning to cookbooks like this as archives of wish rather than fact. They record what the state wanted the evening meal to mean. Somewhere behind the plates were the women who cooked the real, thinner version: stretching, substituting, making do, feeding people who still had to rise the next morning. Their work rarely entered the record with their names attached. I finished the bowl, wiped the page where a drop of sauce had fallen, and felt the usual mixture of irritation and tenderness. The samovar was hot. I poured tea and let the book sit open beside me, a handsome witness to a table that never quite existed, and to all the tables that did.