Podcast
99% Invisible
It was a Stalinist cookbook that aimed to create a new Soviet food culture, focused on mass-produced, high-calorie, and industrially manufactured foods, with recipes and visual representations of food abundance.
Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was simply known as Kaniga, the book, because it was one of the only cookbooks to exist in the Soviet Union.
— Episode: The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
Episode: The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
It was a Stalinist cookbook that aimed to create a new Soviet food culture, focused on mass-produced, high-calorie, and industrially manufactured foods, with recipes and visual representations of food abundance.
Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was simply known as Kaniga, the book, because it was one of the only cookbooks to exist in the Soviet Union.
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food is peppered with glossy photographs of really lavish-looking spreads, and it's dense with text.
But this book was meant to do so much more than show people how to make certain dishes. It turns out, this was the cookbook of the Soviet Union. For decades. A Stalinist document that was created to address one of the most fundamental problems of the USSR. Hunger.
And so, in 1939, he decided to publish a book. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. The one that landed in my lap by way of Babushka.
In total, the book has over 1,400 recipes, spanning 400 pages. It also has descriptions of Mikhail's industrial progress and advice on things like proper food storage and table manners.