You can’t say that people in the USSR didn’t know what spinach was. But they had a very superficial knowledge of it — often just from pictures in their grandmothers’ cookbooks. We can’t remember a single spinach recipe from the Soviet period.
But before socialism, spinach was the Russian dream.
You might say your dream is as marvelous as the sunrise. Or rose petals. Our mountain peaks.
In the 19th century Russians compared everything to spinach.
We don’t understand it. In dozens of books and cooking manuals we’d find the phrase: “this can be subsituted for spinach.” They seemed to use everything in place of spinach. Even a cursory search gives a long list of substitutes: nettle, sorrel, chard, swede, and so on.
And it wasn’t just in the capital cities. Spinach was incredibly popular throughout the country and in every stratum of Russian society. It all started back with a private school botany textbook. "The young leaves of comfrey (Latin: Sýmphytum) are used instead of spinach, and when grown in the shade, its shoots are like asparagus."
The author of "Lexicon of the Urban and Rural Economy" (1838) wrote the same about sorrel: "its young leaves can be used instead of spinach."
The same year the collection "Country Homeowner" recommended using orache (a variety of quinoa called лебеда) instead of spinach: it is "used for sauces in place of spinach." Well, we don’t know about that. The last thing we’d use in sauces is the barely digestible orache.
Agriculture manuals add unexpected twists to the theme. "The leaves of chard are used like spinach," notes the 1895 edition of “A Manual of Growing Vegetables.”
And doctor's manuals advise even stranger substitutes: nettles. It’s not that we don’t like young nettle leaves, but again we see it can be used "for sauces in place of spinach." What is this strange obsession?
