Smoked products of meat-packing plants in the Soviet Union. What was added to the sausage made according to GOST in the USSR

Often, when we hear the word "history", we imagine the dusty shelves of archives and libraries, something distant and dilapidated. We rarely think about the fact that history lives in our house, in the most familiar everyday things and even in the food that we eat every day ... And it is some products that, having told the story of their birth, can tell the story of the whole country. Don't believe?

Then answer the question - what products from the table of the usual Soviet man can we meet now, on our table? That's right: Borodino bread, ice cream, soda "Baikal" and "Duchess", however, you can list for a long time. But, perhaps, the most honorable place will be taken by the "Doctor's" sausage - one of the most popular food products today, which has become a kind of symbol of the Soviet country and one of the most famous brands modernity.

But the history of the “Doctor’s” sausage is a reflection of almost the entire Soviet history with its twists and turns.

The 1930s of the twentieth century were both difficult and joyful for the USSR at the same time. The fratricidal Civil War is over, the national economy is being restored. Almost throughout the entire territory of the country, the unification of individual peasant farms into collective farms has been completed, the kulaks have been liquidated as a class. Great construction projects are underway, a powerful industry is being created, which in a decade will allow the country to win the Great War ...

Despite all the great plans, there is not enough meat in the country - the previous difficult years are affecting. And the health of the population must be restored and maintained - the builders of communism must be strong and healthy. Therefore, the idea arises to create a product with great content protein that could replace meat.

A special role in the creation and development of the food industry in the USSR and in the history of the "Doctor's" sausage will be played by Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, since 1934 the People's Commissar of the Food Industry of the USSR. It was he who had to create the country's food industry from scratch. Mikoyan chose the United States as a model, where this industry was already quite well developed. Thanks to the borrowing of "industrial" American food, several varieties of sausages and sausages, industrially processed milk, various canned food, ice cream appeared on the tables of Soviet citizens ...

Under the close personal supervision of Mikoyan, the construction of several large enterprises food industry - for the manufacture of milk, sausages, canned food.

April 29, 1936 A.I. Mikoyan signed a decree on the start of the production of several varieties of sausages, a special place among which was occupied by a sausage designed to "correct the health of people who had poor health as a result of the Civil War and suffered from the arbitrariness of the tsarist regime." It was assumed that this type of sausage would be intended for those treated in sanatoriums and hospitals.

The formulation of this product was developed by the best specialists of the country, doctors, employees of the All-Russian Research Institute of the Meat Industry. According to the recipe (GOST 23670-79) in "Doctor's Boiled Sausage premium» 100 kg of sausage had to contain 25 kg of premium beef, 70 kg of bold pork, 3 kg of eggs or melange and 2 kg cow's milk dry whole or fat free. Minced meat for sausage was made from fresh meat and had to go through a double cutting. As seasonings, a minimum of cooking was used. edible salt; granulated sugar or glucose; ground nutmeg or cardamom, spicy seasonings were excluded.

There is a legend that initially they wanted to give the name "" to this sausage. However, the authors of the recipe quickly realized that the combination "Stalin's sausage" could be misunderstood by the all-powerful NKVD and came up with a name that remained in history and well reflected the quality and purpose of this product.

Until the 1950s, the recipe and quality of the sausage was unchanged according to the standard. Of course, the sausages produced by different meat processing plants varied. It also depended on the quality of the raw materials supplied to the plant and on the experience of the employees. The sausage of the Mikoyanovsky Meat Processing Plant became an ideal and a model - the metropolitan giant, which supplied the nomenclature in the first place, purchased the most expensive and high-quality raw materials. At the same time, the sausage was by no means integral part special rations of representatives of the party and state elite - it could be bought in almost any grocery store.

Interestingly, the cost of "Doctor's" was significantly higher than its retail price. In the shops "Doctor" was sold at 2 rubles 20 kopecks. With this money in the mid-70s, you could buy, for example, 220 boxes of matches, 11 ice creams in a waffle cup, 10 packs of Belomorkanal cigarettes, i.e. the price of this sausage was quite acceptable for ordinary citizens.

Changes in the quality of sausages began only in the 70s and this was primarily due to the difficulties that the continuously reformed agriculture began to experience and, of course, the drought and crop failure in the early 70s. It was at this time that it was allowed to add up to 2% starch or flour to minced meat.

Cardinal changes in the fate of sausages - like all countries - will begin in the mid-80s. The composition of the feedstock will change, in 1997 a new GOST will appear, in accordance with which the name “doctoral” will turn into a brand.

But still, most of us, coming to the meat department of a supermarket and choosing a sausage, will first of all pay attention to the name "Doctor's" ....

Born in the USSR: Doktorskaya Sausage and Car "Kopeyka"

Soviet sausage. It can rightfully be called legendary. True, representatives of different generations have their own “legend” associated with this product. Now 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 flew to Chicago specifically 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 premium beef without veins, bold pork shoulder, ice water, nitrite salt and table salt, whole cow's milk, sugar, egg, ground nutmeg, 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 the decline in animal husbandry. Then it was officially allowed to add two percent starch to minced meat. None of the consumers even felt anything, but the meat savings across the country turned out to be impressive. In addition to starch, animal protein substitutes, the so-called caseinates, were also allowed.

This allowed not only to increase the production of sausages, but also to reduce their price. So, instead of two rubles and thirty kopecks, "Doctorskaya" began to cost ten kopecks less. But its taste, like other sausages, has changed. Now, according to GOST 1979, they could be made on the basis of 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, lard lateral and spinal; processed offal, egg melange, dried cream and flour of the first grade.

So, for 100 kilograms of "Amateur" sausage, 35 kilograms of trimmed first grade beef, 40 kilograms of trimmed low-fat pork, 25 kilograms of back fat were laid. As additives were: salt (2.5 kg), sodium nitrite - 5.6 g, sugar - 110 g, black pepper - 85 g, nutmeg or cardamom - 55 g, a mixture of spices - 250 g.

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

In boiled " beef sausage"In addition to beef itself, beef brains were added. "Moscow sausage" according to GOST 1986 consisted exclusively of trimmed beef and back fat. By the way, GOST 1986 did not differ much from GOST 1979. The list of spices was slightly expanded, which now included garlic .

GOSTs for semi-smoked and smoked sausages appeared in 1941. It was connected with the beginning of the war. They needed sausages that could be stored for a long time and would be satisfying. For their manufacture, trimmed beef or pork meat (chilled, defrosted (thawed) or frozen) was taken. added pork belly, pork fat, bacon or fatty pork trimmings, mutton fat, spices and certainly pure chemical saltpeter. During the war, this GOST changed several times. There was a period when it was possible to use powdered animal bones, tendons, and other not quite edible parts of animals.

After the 1990s, GOSTs were canceled. Technical specifications appeared. They are not accepted at the state level, they are developed by each enterprise separately. Therefore, among the many varieties and types of today's sausages, there are great amount those in which meat was not originally provided. soy products have long been replaced by natural meat, and necessary taste create flavors and emulsifiers.

I explain to citizens who 25 years ago wiped themselves with newspapers with toxic printing ink, and now yearn for Soviet sausage. There is less and less food, and more and more talk about it. There are even more myths about food. Especially, for some reason, it is fashionable today to recall Soviet sausage and damned Soviet GOSTs. Dear Soviet romantics, you have not read GOSTs. IN best case the one who read the first pages and breathed a sigh of relief told you about them: well, thank God, 99% of the meat was put in the canteen sausage!

You know, in the same “Tea” sausage that no one ate, according to GOST, they put 70% second-grade beef, 20% semi-fat pork and 10% side fat. Nevertheless, this sausage distinctly smacked of cardboard. Why? Yes, because the GOSTs contained extensive notes, which scrupulously described what and what could be replaced in production: meat mass for a mixture of boiled bones, starch and food plasma, emulsified vegetable fats in margarine and butter "Sandwich" - for mineral oil(remember how the butter in the pan exploded, leaving behind black spot and tar-smelling emptiness?). GOSTs were constantly edited, for some products - every season, depending on the slaughter rates, the level of milk yield, harvest, imports ...

Let's take the famous sausage and sausage GOST 23670-79 of 1979 as amended in 1980. In it we read, for example: ) blood, starch or wheat flour.

GOST and bookmark norms were for internal propaganda (say, calm down, dear citizens, at least we have real sausage) and throwing dust in the eyes of foreigners (here, our people only eat natural meat, fresh milk wash down, eat bread and butter). For real use, there were notes to GOSTs, which were printed directly in the document.

Soviet sausages, at best, corresponded to these notes to GOST. At worst, ground bones of goats were wrapped in a "cow tunnel", rancid flour and dead rats. And GOST itself was rather for a screen. I quote:

“2.6. Allowed in the production of boiled sausages, frankfurters, sausages and meat loaves apply:

egg powder in the amount of 274 g instead of 1 kg of melange or 1 kg (24 pcs.) of chicken eggs;

hemoglobin preparation or food blood in the amount of 0.5-1% by weight of the raw material;

extracts of spices and garlic instead of natural ones;

protein stabilizer to the mass of raw materials in an amount of up to 5% - for boiled sausages, sausages and meat loaves of the first grade and up to 6% - for boiled sausages and meat loaves of the second grade;

a mass of meat beef, pork or mutton, obtained by processing bones in saline solutions, in the amount of 4 kg instead of 1 kg of meat mass obtained by mechanical pressing, with a decrease in the mass of added water by 3 kg;

food plasma (serum) of the blood of slaughtered animals to the mass of raw materials in the following quantities:

up to 5% instead of added water in the production of boiled sausages, frankfurters, sausages and meat loaves of the highest grade;

up to 15% in return for added water in the production of boiled sausages, frankfurters, sausages and meat loaves of the first and second grade;

up to 10% instead of 2% trimmed pork meat and 8% water or 3% trimmed beef (or lamb) meat and 7% water

or up to 15% instead of 3% trimmed pork and 12% water or 4% trimmed beef (or mutton) and 11% water;

Instead of beef, pork, lamb, the joint use of a protein stabilizer, mass of beef or pork meat, or mutton, food blood plasma (serum), starch or wheat flour is allowed..

And if now some murzilka purrs to you that she studied at the Institute of the Food Industry and knows that the Soviet sausage was made only from meat, drive the murzilka in the neck: she is either lying, or she didn’t study at all, but from the first year she settled down sweetly in meat shop and instead of exams, she brought bales of first-class beef and bold pork to teachers. The one that, quite officially, according to GOST, was not in your sausage. And it was only in parties that were being prepared for special distributors and the nomenklatura. Some factories even had a special workshop, where everything was done according to the basic requirements of GOST, without any revisions. But this product was only for bureaucrats, thieves and ... inspectors. All sorts of SES, OBKhSS rolled out from checks with huge bags stuffed with meat, butter and Gost sausages. In one city in the Urals, an official carried a bribe on a pre-revolutionary sleigh, and with that sleigh he was crushed quite well. Gostovsky sausage chopped off full legs. But at least the guest ...

These are the norms of life. Notice I'm talking about rules. Not about shortages, theft, but only about norms. About the fact that even with a successful set of circumstances (for example, you snatched a sausage “thrown out” at 11 am, and this sausage was made according to GOST), instead of 99% of meat, you could get, quite legally, a mixture of bone meal, wood glue, plasma , starch and boiled bladder. And given the level of theft, slovenliness and unsanitary conditions, then your sausage was ... I don’t even know what it represented. Imagine a piece of cardboard soaked in the heat of blood. Represented? Approximately this is your sausage then represented itself.

Listen to the daughter of a Soviet merchandiser. The quality of Soviet products is a myth. The country was poor, there was a deficit all around - where could quality come from?

According to GOST, in sausages there was from 5% of meat (the rest was allowed to be replaced), sausages were flavored with saltpeter to preserve the color. Palm oil, by the way, and then imported. Preservatives, stabilizers, dyes were antediluvian and quite official. In production potato chips(long plates, “For obese” were called) frying oil was replaced every 8 months. Also according to GOST. Creamy ice cream was found only in megacities - the rest were content with milk ice cream. vegetable fat, at best it was of two varieties - in a glass and on a stick, sometimes chocolate or berry color (or in half, it was called "Fun"). In some cities - oh my! - ice cream was only "Tomato". They choked on the “Potato” cake and the “Log” cake, and sculpted them from the biscuit crumbs left on the conveyor, mixed with margarine and condensed milk. Note that the ingredients were not listed on the packaging. And all this rubbish was terribly expensive by those standards. The salary of a technical school teacher is 120 rubles, and a kilogram butter a/c 3 rub. 40 kopecks, premium sausage - also 3 rubles. 40 kopecks, and sweets in chocolate icing"Pilot", "Swallow", "Petrel" 3 rubles. 40 kop. Chocolate candies cost up to 15 rubles per kilogram and appeared a couple of times a year. The country had three price zones and special coefficients for each type of product: roughly speaking, the deeper into the forest, the higher the prices, and the less products.

So don't talk about GOSTs and quality. And about the Stalinist-Khrushchev times, too, do not crack.

First, I write about the 70s and 80s. Secondly, under Stalin with Khrushchev, at the time of the Book of Tasty and healthy food”, there were still products in the shops, but there was absolutely no one to eat them: all these balyks, butter, caviar were not available to the people. According to the testimonies of the sellers of that time, butter was bought at 30-50 gr., sweets - 100 gr., sausages - at most 300 gr. And not every day. Old women came for "butter" after retirement. “To feast on” ... When my mother, while doing an internship in a grocery store, asked at some meeting why they take 30 grams of oils, she was answered: “Very actual question comrade trainee! Our people want to eat fresh every day, so they come to the store every day for a new portion of butter and sausage.”

The country lived from hand to mouth. This was confirmed by the famous report of the Central Committee of the CPSU, compiled on the basis of research by the Central Research Economic Institute of the State Planning Commission of the RSFSR ... According to this report, 75% of the population were below the poverty line, and goods in the Union (from a motorcycle to sugar) were many times more expensive than in USA. What is in comparative, what is in absolute terms.

Now, of course, the comrades will sing that they lived poorly, but together, that they were healthier ... Well, yes, yes! Firstly, Soviet citizens were as fierce as dogs. Always frenzied, with clenched jaws. Secondly, the people were very sick. Very. By the way, they died from bowel cancer, ulcers, gastritis. These diseases were almost the leading causes of death, even with that level of medicine and underexamination (well, then who did a colonoscopy to diagnose rectal cancer?). People were overweight, edematous, with bad skin, monstrous teeth and thin hairs. At 50, women looked like old women (remember your grandmothers who took you to the garden). The constant slight hunger brightened up the situation a little - people did not overeat, which contributed to some preservation of health.

But after all, nostalgic comrades do not seriously offer to return the method of forced curative starvation to the country?

For me, like, probably, for many, sausage is associated with the taste of childhood. I remember how, after work, my mother would bring a roll of paper from the Doctor’s, and its aroma would spread throughout the apartment. She did not stay in the refrigerator for a long time, they were killed that same evening. Ah, there was a time! "What's so special about this vaunted 2.20 sausage?" - young people are surprised now, who did not find Soviet era. Yes, nothing special, a mere trifle - just sausage made from meat!

It is no secret to anyone that not a single product in Soviet society, especially, so to speak, in the late Soviet period, had such a social and cultural significance like sausage.

It was not just a product, but a kind of symbol of the Soviet system. A sign of well-being in the years of total scarcity, the reason and the most frequent reason for the nostalgia of several generations of emigrants, a full-fledged theme of various forms of folklore and even literary works.

We knew from childhood: our sausage is the most delicious! In a sense, Soviet sausage, the paradox of which consisted, firstly, in a strange discrepancy between cost and quality, when the second was much superior to the first, and secondly, in affordability and inaccessibility by ... the method of purchase, because behind the product itself, nothing for everyday use, I had to travel to other cities and stand in kilometer-long queues.

cheap food was needed by hungry Russia in the 1930s. To carry out the instructions of the party and the government, Anastas Mikoyan went to Chicago - there was the most advanced sausage production at that time. Soviet officials looked at the local meat processing plant and ordered the exact same one for themselves. True, the recipe for sausage was already developed in Moscow.

rebirth Russian sausages took place when Soviet power was already firmly established in Russia. Namely, in April 1936, the people's commissar of the food industry, Anastas Mikoyan, signed an order on the production of new meat products: Doctor's, Amateur, Tea, Veal and Krakow sausages, Milk sausages and hunting sausages.

Some of the recipes were developed anew, others restored from the old times. It is noteworthy that Doctor's sausage was specially created for "sick people with undermined health as a result of the Civil War and tsarist despotism."

Recipe for "corrections" public health”was verified to the smallest detail: 100 kg of sausage contained 25 kg of premium beef, 70 kg of bold pork, 3 kg of eggs and 2 kg of cow's milk.

For 70 years, GOSTs for this sausage have changed, and more than once: both the war and the Soviet deficit affected. The first varieties of Soviet sausage differed in the quality of meat. In "Amateur" and "Doctor's" it was of the highest grade, and somewhere - the first and even the second.

In the same years, more than 20 large meat processing plants were built - in Moscow, Leningrad, Semipalatinsk, Engels, Dnepropetrovsk, Sverdlovsk and other cities, equipped with the most modern equipment for that time. After all, it was not in vain that A. Mikoyan went to get acquainted with sausage production in USA!

During the war years, the total losses of the meat processing industry exceeded 1 billion rubles. Many meat processing plants were partially or completely destroyed. The resource base has also suffered. From the occupied territory of the USSR, the German army removed and slaughtered 17 million heads of cattle, 7 million horses, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats.

However, unprecedented measures were taken to preserve the livestock and provide the army and rear with meat products. Millions of heads of large and small cattle and horses were evacuated from the western territories.

In accordance with the requirements of wartime, the assortment was restructured towards the production of transportable products that are little susceptible to spoilage, such as corned beef, smoked meats and canned food, as well as semi-smoked and smoked sausages.

For the civilian population, many enterprises have established production bone broth And liver sausages. In the difficult war years, in the face of an acute shortage of raw materials, especially in besieged Leningrad, opportunities were sought to use all kinds of substitutes for meat raw materials, such as glycerin, albumin, gelatin, agar-agar, edible herbs and even the tops of garden crops.

When in January 1942 a flooded barge with peas was raised from the bottom of Ladoga, at a sausage factory in as soon as possible a technology was developed for the production of pea sausage with the addition of onions, cereals and flour. But this was only a forced concession to wartime. People worked for 12-14 hours, overfulfilling the plan and providing the army and rear with food, and, of course, they won!

From the moment of "birth" and until the end of the 50s, the main recipe for "Doctor's" remained practically unchanged. In the 1960s, animal fattening experiments began. This affected the sausage: it began to smell like fish, then chickens, and sometimes even a chemical plant that produces fertilizers.

The post-war restoration of the destroyed economy was followed by the era of technical re-equipment of meat processing plants, which coincided with the deterioration of productivity and insufficient growth in the number of livestock. The Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party in 1965 named the earlier policy in the field of animal husbandry as the reason for the decline in the quality of animals.

During the Brezhnev era, meat production began to decline in the USSR. Scientists began developing technologies for combined meat products: soy protein, milk protein, so-called blood products, and even such “indigestible” things as sodium casenate appeared in the sausage.

To legitimize the presence in "Doctor's", and other "cardboard" sausages, new GOSTs have appeared that take into account all these additives. For example, a boiled sausage called "For Breakfast" officially consisted of sodium casenate, wheat flour and potato starch.

Insufficient funding of animal husbandry associated with the arms race and other problems in agriculture led to a shortage of raw materials for food production. However, it was not until the 1970s that the first changes appeared in the sausage recipe. As a result of an unprecedented drought in 1972, due to lack of feed, hundreds of thousands of cattle had to be put under the knife.

In 1974, for the first time, some concessions were introduced into GOSTs. IN chopped meat it was allowed to add up to 2% of starch or flour or animal protein substitutes - milk or blood. None of the sausage consumers could feel any change. And the unfinished 2% of meat in the country gave huge savings. In addition, cosenates (substitutes) in comparison with the price of a kilogram of beef cost mere pennies.

In a word, by allowing supplements, in a way, we even took another step towards communism: we lowered the price per kilogram of Doktorskaya from 2.3 rubles. up to 2.2 rubles

However, temporary difficulties with raw materials proved to be permanent. There was such a thing as a deficit, when for sausages kilometer-long queues lined up, a Soviet phenomenon appeared - the so-called "sausage" electric trains (many still remember this joke: What is it? Long, green and smells of sausage? - Moscow electric train).

The state skillfully supported the demand for sausage by creating a mythical halo of mystery and legends, based primarily on original recipe cooking Soviet sausage. A planned economy that did not know marketing sometimes gave birth to real advertising masterpieces, as a result of which any sausage was simply swept away from the shelves.

So they said that the sausage "Member of the Politburo" would soon go on sale, on the cut of which Lenin's profile from the fat was visible. Or the Ostankinskaya sausage is made from the remains of the enemies of socialism. Although there were those who considered K. Simonov to be the author of her recipe. Remember, in the “Battle on the Ice”: “People, horses have already mixed up ...”

The deficit was replaced by a system of coupons for basic foodstuffs, then - a total deficit and, in the end, - the victory of market relations and the collapse Soviet Union.

It was then that the people poured from impoverished Russia to prosperous countries for a well-established life, for full counters, for good sausage. For domestic sausage began to be blamed for all sins - and toilet paper is allegedly added to it, and buttons / human nails / rat tails and other horrors are found in it, and in general they are made of who knows what.

And a stream of imported sausages poured into Russia. However, it turned out to be somewhat strange, unusual and even - scary to think - completely tasteless, in any case, our consumers expected more from it.

As it turned out, high tech allow the use of not the best raw materials in the sausage. Moreover, in the West, in general, even the first-class meat is not accepted for sausage, it is only for sale. Well, high-quality raw materials are not compatible with market relations! And it was precisely our sausages that foreigners highly appreciated, giving them their due when visiting the USSR.

And no wonder. After all, even the most popular and quite affordable boiled sausages Amateur and Doctoral consisted of meat, and the highest grade. That is, for 100 kg of boiled amateur sausage of the highest grade, 35 kg of top-grade trimmed beef, 40 kg of trimmed low-fat pork, and 25 kg of back fat were supposed to be.

Similarly, 25 kg of premium beef, 70 kg of semi-fat pork, 3 kg of eggs and 2 kg of cow's milk went for 100 kg of Doktorskaya. Sausages with this composition were indeed unique in quality and nutritional value! Unless, of course, part of the raw materials did not go “to the left” ...

If you believe the statistics, until 1990 in the USSR there were more than 40 kg of sausage per person per year. It turns out a paradox! The Soviet Union, the world leader in sausage production per capita, never had it. Sometimes the aforementioned was instantly swept away from the shelves, sometimes the sellers were held back under the threat of dismissal.

And some time later, when the swoons at the full foreign counters ended, the concept of "sausage emigration" was replaced by the concept of "sausage nostalgia." And there were stories about how some of the former compatriots supposedly set up the production of “the very same” sausages according to “the very same” recipes. And they had, as it were, unprecedented success in the West, especially among former compatriots.

And those who still didn’t get such a sausage were taken by Russian relatives and friends from Russia with domestic sausages as a gift. However, that - from childhood - Soviet sausage could not be returned, both the taste and the price became different. Or were those who suffered from the tsarist regime already cured by that time, and sausage as a healing agent lost its relevance, and therefore disappeared?

However, not only emigrants, but also residents of Russia are nostalgic for the sausages of the Soviet era. And, as you know, it is Soviet brands that are bought most of all - Doctor's, Amateur, Krakow, Moscow and, of course, Servelat.

The affordability of sausages reflected both the idea of ​​equality and the secondary role of the peasantry, whose labor was so modestly paid. And cheap sausage made from high-quality meat disappeared simultaneously with the disappearance of the Soviet Union.

However, it has not completely disappeared. After all, a modern GOST for sausages has been developed, which maintains continuity with the former, Soviet one. And although there is no “same” sausage and cannot be, everything changes - raw materials, technologies, packaging, Soviet brands live and prosper. But today, in order to buy Amateur from Moscow, you do not have to go to other cities or queue at six in the morning.

Today, for most Russians, sausage is the number one meat product, although it is more of an appetizer than a meal. "Doctor" and remains one of the most beloved and popular. Many enterprises produce sausage, and both according to GOST and TU - specifications developed by this company. Therefore, on the shelves you can often find several types of "Doctor's", and any other sausage, in different casings and at different prices.

Today, the technical conditions (TU) are approved not by the Council of Ministers of Russia, but by the enterprise itself, which operates on the principle: less meat- More substitutes. From the point of view of product quality, the most dashing time is considered to be the beginning of the 90s, when competition for sales markets was not for life, but for death. It happened that we ate sausage ... without sausage at all, that is, without meat! Manufacturers made a fat emulsion, added "taste" - and you're done.

On the great proletarian holidays, minced chicken was added to such a “sausage”. Today, the situation has not improved much - second-class sausages are 70% (!) Consist of soy and various chemical additives that have nothing to do with meat. Soy absorbs moisture very well; 1 kg of this powder requires 5-6 liters of water.

We believe: if up to 10 kg of soybeans are used per 100 kg of a single sausage, then up to 60 liters of water go there. Here you have 70 kg out of 100 not meat at all! Carrageenan is also widely used: a vegetable protein based on seaweed. It is very moisture-absorbing, when mixed with water already in the final product, it retains the density of the goods and its solidity well.

Soviet sausage will always be remembered with nostalgia. Grandparents - that in their youth it was real, made of meat. Their children - how difficult it was to get it in principle, and if it was possible - then the sandwich became a holiday. And how the coupons were redeemed. And today's youth is already used to coming to the store and choosing sausage according to their taste and wallet.

Remember these sayings:

“In the year of Gagarin’s flight into space, not only meat disappeared from sale (more than half of it was previously given by the personal farms of collective farmers), but also sugar, and cereals, and even there were shortages of bread.”

This whole program of building communism by 1980, even at the moment of its adoption in the same fateful 1962, caused deep skepticism and ridicule among the people like: “The meat is gone because we are moving towards communism with leaps and bounds, and the cattle are not keeping up with us.”

“Already since the mid-1960s, in most of the country, meat has disappeared from free sale. From now on, it can be bought only in cooperative trade or on the collective farm market at a much higher price than the state price.

What actually happened:

Consumption statistics show that meat and meat products were part of the diet of Soviet citizens, although in terms of the consumption of these products they lagged behind the inhabitants of a number of Western states. In 1984, the Soviet consumer ate 64 kg during the year. meat, USA - 108.2, UK - 69.5, Sweden - 57.7. In earlier periods of the “era of stagnation”, meat consumption was lower, and the gap with Western countries was greater, but meat never completely disappeared from the diet of citizens.

Erroneous and hypertrophied ideas about the consumption of meat in the USSR were formed under the influence of the specifics of its acquisition in trade. Meat in the USSR came to the table of citizens in five main ways:

1) Through the system of state stores(beef meat at 1.90 - 2.20). In fact, only Moscow, Leningrad, the capitals of the Union and Autonomous Republics, the army and some cities were massively supplied with this method (at the price of beef at 1.80-2.20 per kg. With an average purchase price of 85 years at 2.52 rubles for meat in carcasses. That is, after the delivery of cutting off the liver and butchering, this meat should have cost three to three fifty rubles. One and a half rubles was actually subsidized to the price. And by 1990, the average purchase in Russia was already 3 rubles 38 kopecks, that is, meat could not cost on sale for less than five rubles - and was already dated at three rubles per kilogram.) Therefore, the statement that this meat (at two rubles) “was not found anywhere else” is almost true. But this is not all Soviet meat, it is a smaller part of it, according to some estimates - no more than a third of all meat consumed by the population of the USSR.

2) The bulk of the meat consumed by the workers came through the system of canteens at enterprises. (For reference, about 350,000 canteens operated in the USSR - one for every several hundred people of the population, (170,000 of them in Russia) At the same time, over 20 million people could eat in canteens.) They are often forgotten, but huge volumes of meat comparable to all volumes of state trade in meat, including in the outback, where, according to the myth, "there has never been meat at the state price." Visitors to canteens regularly ate soup with meat and cutlet, basics or goulash at their place of work or study (among students, according to contemporaries, for some reason sausages were very popular). The usual price of lunch (first and second with meat) is from 40 up to 60 kopecks. For the minimum wage (70 rubles), one could have a hearty meal 150 times - five times a day. However, there was also a fish day. One per week. Everyone remembers and scolds him, forgetting that he was a fish only because the rest of the days in the USSR were meat. [In addition to canteens in the USSR, there were also dumplings, and dumplings also contained real meat.]

3) Through the cooperative trading system(beef meat at 3.00 - 3.50 per kg, semi-smoked sausage - six each). In rural areas and small towns, the co-optorg system was the main one who supplied the population with meat (after canteens). As a rule, there were no queues there, even in the late 80s.

4) Through the system of collective farm markets. (In 1985, 8,088 collective farm markets were constantly working in the USSR, with one and a half million trading places. And they were not empty.) In large and medium-sized cities, markets worked daily, in small ones - on weekends, usually in the morning. Prices throughout the country fluctuated greatly: from the cooperative level of 3-3.50 in the outback, up to five rubles in large cities, and up to ten in large markets in Moscow (Central, Cheryomushkinsky, etc.). However, Muscovites also had access to peripheral markets on the outskirts of the city.

5) Own production- of course in the countryside. A rare collective farmer did not have a piglet to fatten, or even two. A piglet grows up to 100-120 kg of live weight over the summer. This can explain that in the village there was never meat in the shops. However, in the spring, the markets were always organized for the sale of live chickens for the townspeople. In many places (according to the testimony of contemporaries, especially in the Russian south and the North Caucasus, on the server as who is less), people always grew two or three dozen chickens at the foot of the stern during the summer in their dachas. Sometimes geese (in the presence of a reservoir).

We do not take into account such things as hunting, although there are regions (North, rural Siberia) where it was the main source, and not from the time of Soviet rule, but from eternity - as a tradition of the local population. However, the father of one of the authors of the article, although a native Muscovite but an avid hunter, regularly brought home weighty parts of the carcasses of wild boars, elks, not to mention all sorts of ducks, black grouse and hazel grouse - they were generally not considered food. Yes, prank.

This is how the meat balance in the USSR was roughly formed. All Soviet statistics on the sale of meat to the population is the sum of three lines: state, cooperative trade and catering. Thus, in 1985, 12 million 359 thousand tons of meat were sold through these three channels - that is, with a population of 272 million people, 45 kg of meat per capita. Those who like to talk about the done up Soviet statistics would be better to shut up here, since for every kilogram sold, the trade organization was obliged to hand over money to the cashier. According to contemporaries, through the coop. trade then scrolled significant volumes of "left", unaccounted for meat, and the profits were put in your pocket. That is, the number 45 is underestimated. It also does not include any market trade, nor own production, nor hunting.

But the population's own meat production was also included in the statistics of meat consumption by the population. That is why the figure for meat consumption in the same 1985 is not 45, but 62 kilograms per capita on average in the USSR.

The consumption of meat by the population of the Russian Federation in 2000 fell to a historical minimum of 41 kilograms per capita. At present, it is about fifty kilograms per capita per year, of which only about 35 kilograms are produced in the country, and the rest is purchased abroad.

Outcome: There was meat in the USSR, there was a lot of it, there was more of it than now, and the “average worker” got it, and not only in Moscow. The average consumption of meat was 60 (75 in the late 80s), of which the USSR imported about 2 kg (but exported 10 kg of fish). This is seriously more than 54 kg in 2007 (of which ~10 kg is imported).

Due to my age, I have not yet forgotten how they broke my country during perestroika. They broke under the groans of some inhabitants about the impossibility of enjoying 100 varieties of sausage and cheese. For which these people received the contemptuous nickname of sausage anti-Soviet.

Also, due to my age, I Soviet time I managed to work at a meat processing plant as a graphic designer, where I happened to write sausage recipes. And remember that the varieties and types of sausages in Soviet GOSTs it was several dozen. Another question is that the most popular types of doctoral, Ostankino, dairy, Krakow, etc. were actually produced. An approximate assortment and prices can be estimated in the photo of the 80s, taken in an ordinary Perm store - grocery store No. 1, which is on Sibirskaya (Karl Marx). Now, by the way, the Pyaterochka shit is located there:

But let's go back to the beginning of time, to the emergence of GOSTs in the USSR in the 30s of the last century. To do this, I propose to familiarize yourself with the contents of the album approved by the People's Commissar Food Industry USSR for the enterprises of the People's Commissariat of Food Industry of the recipes "Sausages and smoked meats":


































As is clear from it, it contains 68 types of sausages and smoked meats from the cheapest liver sausages of the third grade to expensive extra and premium products. For every taste and financial opportunity.

Moreover, to deviate from the approved recipes was like death, since the "damned" Stalin introduced criminal liability for violating GOSTs, equated to sabotage with the risk of getting from 5 to 8 years:


Well, now that Stalin's "crimes" have been politically condemned, one can freely and legally not comply with GOSTs and make food from anything, receiving not a prison term, but a significant profit. With which I congratulate everyone.