Eliseevsky Gastronom

Eliseevsky Gastronom

Moscow, Russia

Eliseevsky Gastronom opened on Tverskaya Street in Moscow in 1901, inside a building commissioned by the merchant Grigory Eliseev and decorated with stained glass, carved wood, and gilt chandeliers that made it unlike any food shop in Russia at the time. Under the Soviet system it became Gastronom No. 1, a state grocery store where the shelves held the best of what the planned economy could reliably produce, including Doktorskaya kolbasa, which was developed in 1936 specifically for distribution through stores like this one. The sausage was designed to be eaten cold, sliced from the counter, and Eliseevsky was where Muscovites came to buy it. The building has been a food hall in various forms ever since, and the colonnaded interior — part grocery, part monument — is still one of the more startling rooms in the city.

Click to activate map

Sausages served here

Doktorskaya Kolbasa

Doktorskaya Kolbasa

Moscow, Russia

The sausage of the Soviet Union. Doktorskaya Kolbasa (Doctor's Sausage) was created in 1936 under a government directive to produce a nutritious food for people recovering from illness, specifically those whose health had been ruined by tsarist deprivation. The name was not ironic. The People's Commissariat of Food Industry wrote the original GOST recipe: beef, pork, eggs, milk, salt, sugar, a touch of nutmeg and cardamom. No fillers. No fat scraps. A pale pink log of emulsified protein, smooth as paste, sold by the kilogram from behind glass counters in state gastronoms across eleven time zones. Every Soviet citizen ate it. Most ate it often. It was cheap, always available, and tasted of nothing offensive. Sliced cold on buttered black bread, it fed workers, schoolchildren, and pensioners alike. Decades of nostalgia are baked into every bite for anyone who grew up in the USSR or its successor states.

cookedemulsifiedrussian

Reviews

Loading reviews...