“And it will not stop this long-standing hoax”

185 years ago, in 1838, the St. Petersburg police were ordered to bring to justice traders who sold Russian Koporye tea under the guise of expensive Chinese tea; Many other expensive foreign products popular in Russia, from Liverpool salt to truffles, were of purely domestic origin.

“Keeping their trade secret”

The experience of import substitution in pre-revolutionary Russia was considerable. Finding themselves, after retirement, far from the capitals and their luxurious grocery stores, the owners of noble nests, who fell in love with olives and capers, came up with a replacement for them. For example, unripe cherries were pickled. First, they were boiled in water until the berries lost their pungent taste, then simmered in vinegar. And, putting them in jars with bay leaves, pepper and spicy roots, they poured them with fresh, good vinegar. After a few days, the cherries became almost indistinguishable from olives in both color and taste.

The lack of olives was partly compensated for by salted plums, gooseberries and grapes.

Instead of capers, flower buds of elderberries, nasturtiums, marigolds, and spoon grass were prepared. They were boiled in Rhine vinegar and salt so that they did not lose their green color. After cooling and draining the liquid, the kidneys were placed in glass jars and filled with fresh vinegar.

The same vinegar and spices helped turn ordinary domestic herring into “delicacy Dutch”.

The cleaned fish was left for a day in water in the cellar, after which, after transferring it to the marinade, it was kept in a cold place for another week.

Instead of the famous Strasbourg pies (foie gras pates with truffles, game and spices), which arrived in the best colonial shops in Moscow and St. Petersburg from Europe, the Russians even got used to delighting themselves with beef liver pate, veal and game pies, adding to them truffles from the Moscow region.

Such truffles grew in particular abundance in the coniferous forests and birch groves surrounding the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and therefore the name “Trinity truffles” was assigned to them. These mushrooms, light brown or yellowish-white, had a faint, peculiar odor, although not at all similar to the highly prized aroma of real black French truffles. But when “translating” foreign recipes into the language of their native Aspens, much had to be sacrificed.

Truffles from the Moscow region were collected all summer.

“Before,” wrote in 1896, Doctor of Medicine, Professor of Moscow University, Actual State Councilor V. A. Tikhomirov, “for this purpose, in the vicinity of the Trinity, tame bears were usually used, which were very tasty for these truffles, and therefore very easily found them by instinct. Nowadays, when, as a result of the destruction of forests, as well as administrative orders, the driving of bears, so popular among the people, has ceased, they are replaced by hunting dogs trained to find our mushroom, usually setters and pointers, most often of more than dubious purity of the breed… In other cases, peasants, In general, those who keep their fishing secret, apparently manage without a dog, knowing certain places in the forest where, from year to year, truffles are constantly found, partly at an insignificant depth, and sometimes directly protruding from the ground.”

Trinity mushrooms in the shops of Moscow’s Okhotny Ryad often pretended to be French and Spanish truffles.

Canned food producers placed the Russian product in glass jars of dark green or black color, exactly repeating the shape of foreign jars with real truffles – in the form of a flask created by the German chemist Professor Emil Erlenmeyer. Illiterate labels in French showed that the goods were counterfeit.

“Who and where exactly,” wrote Professor V.A. Tikhomirov, “prepares for the Okhotny Ryad traders their counterfeit French and Spanish truffles, collected 60 versts from Moscow, of course, it is impossible to find out. The main supplier of Trinity truffle to Okhotny Ryad and the owners of not first-rate gastronomic and colonial shops and sausage establishments is, apparently, a certain Korkunov, a fairly well-known dealer in Moscow of various locally produced canned goods (greens, peas, etc.); To him, as I heard, the Trinity truffle is delivered to him by peasants in the vicinity of Sergiev Posad in a raw state in order to appear in the form of canned food later in the shops of Okhotny Ryad.”

At the end of the 19th century, a jar of canned Russian truffle cost 35 kopecks, and a jar of mushrooms supposedly of “the very first French variety” cost 4 rubles.

“I’ve never been to England”

This special kind of import substitution—the sale of domestic products under the guise of foreign ones—bloomed wildly in pre-revolutionary Russia.

For consumers who fancied themselves lovers of haute cuisine, Russian starch factories set up the production of “sago”. Real sago, brought in small quantities to Russia, was used to prepare delicate dishes: light soups, puddings, purees. Its grains were an even white or red brick color, it was very difficult to crush them with your fingers, they took a long time to cook and never became soft during cooking.

“Ordinary commercial sago, sold in most cases for real sago,” wrote E. A. Avdeeva, an experienced Russian housewife, author of many cookbooks, “consists simply of grains of potato starch, specially prepared for this purpose in a special way.

This potato sago, produced in huge quantities in Russia at potato and flour factories, is easy to distinguish from real sago.”

And yet, several generations of Russians ate only the imported product, although they were confident in its “purebred”.

But domestic goods sold under the guise of foreign ones were not always inferior in quality.

In the 1860s–1870s in St. Petersburg, the English Store and many of the best fruit shops sold high-grade table salt, passing off as Liverpool salt. It was sold for 25 kopecks. for a package that contained a little more than a pound, while a pound of Russian salt cost 3 kopecks.

“This product is sold in blue paper bags with a real English label,” it was reported in culinary collections of that time. “No one suspects that when buying this unusually white and delicate table salt, they are buying a salt that has never been in England, but there is real Russian salt, produced only in a special way using advanced refining methods known to a certain Mr. Sokolovsky (M. Ya. Sokolovsky, owner of a small factory in St. Petersburg.— “Story”)… It remains to be regretted that Mr. Sokolovsky, having achieved such high perfection in the preparation of this product, will not finally replace the foreign label he borrowed with a Russian one and will not stop this long-standing mystification of the public, which, unfortunately, is still greedy for everything foreign.”

But the hoax lasted for decades – other industrialists took up the baton from Sokolovsky. And in the 1910s, the best Russian salt in the capital’s stores was still sold under the guise of English salt.

“To be brought to trial and punished by criminal means”

The Russians were especially creative in replacing Chinese tea.

“Russia,” wrote economist and publicist A.P. Subbotin, “has made great progress in terms of tea substitutes, which, of course, is explained by the poverty of the majority of the population, who cannot drink real tea. Among these surrogates there are those that, while being cheap, deliver their share of taste pleasure and, at the same time, in terms of relative harmlessness, are much higher than counterfeit, tinted teas, which are fraudulently sold as real ones.”

The leaves and flowers of wild strawberries were collected and dried. This “strawberry tea” was prepared in such quantities that it was even sold at the Nizhny Novgorod fair. Bogorodskaya herb (thyme) was brewed with licorice root. Oregano tea was popular in some areas. At the end of the 1880s, so-called fruit tea appeared on the domestic market – a crumble of various dried fruits, fruit peels, crushed seeds, sometimes with the addition of chicory.

In many areas of Russia, so-called tea artisans appeared.

They bought the cheapest dried fruits, chopped them with hoees, like cabbage, and dried them in the oven – anyone could master such a primitive technology. Sales of this mixture began at 11 rubles. per pood, but gradually, with an increase in supply, the price dropped to 6 rubles.

“And in Moscow, in this center of domestic counterfeiting,” wrote A.P. Subbotin in 1892, “they also began to make fruit tea, which is similar to the real thing only in the color of the infusion. Nevertheless, a certain part of the patriotic press, inclined to see in any new domestic production, no matter how dubious, a manifestation of national progress, greeted fruit tea almost with delight… According to the medical council’s examination of samples of fruit tea taken from Moscow shops, it turned out that …no metallic or plant substances harmful to health were found in the examined sample; no traces of Chinese tea were found in it either. As a result of this recall, in 1888 the Ministry of the Interior issued a circular prohibiting the sale of fruit tea that had come into circulation under the name of tea.”

The inventors of another surrogate, similar in composition to the same compote mixture, took this ban into account and sold their products under the name “Divy honey”.

It was a brown mass rolled into a thick sausage.

Newspapers of the late 19th century praised him too. One stick of this “honey,” they reported, costs no more than 10 kopecks, but allows a poor man and his whole family to enjoy tea for a whole week.

The most famous substitute for Chinese tea in pre-revolutionary Russia – fireweed, or fireweed, which in taste and color of the infusion was similar to low tea varieties from China – was never sold legally, under its own name, but was always used by traders to mix teas from Celestial Empire. A pound of mixed tea cost 60-80 kopecks, and a pound of kopecks was bought from peasants in different years from 15 to 80 kopecks.

In turn, other dried plants were added to the fireweed, which further reduced the quality of the surrogate: leaves of lungwort, rowan, and lingonberry. And then this collection was called Koporye tea (koporka), after the place of its main production – part of the St. Petersburg province, which in the old days was called Koporye, and popularly began to be called Deep China.

Russian “tea growing” was also developed in the Moscow and Kazan provinces and beyond the Urals.

Tens of thousands of poods of Koporki were prepared per year.

Although back in 1838, when the St. Petersburg City Police was established, it was ordered that “the sellers of Koporye tea or Ivan tea should be put on trial and given criminal penalties, and this tea itself should be exterminated,” it was not possible to liquidate this branch of the domestic industry.

When in 1888, the St. Petersburg police took teas from a number of metropolitan tea shops for examination, it turned out that many of them contained coporka. In 80 out of 100 samples of inexpensive teas it was almost 50%. Sometimes there were varieties on sale with 90–100% fireweed.

Domestic technologies for the production of foreign delicacies turned out to be in demand during the First World War, when the import of expensive imported products was prohibited. But after the renunciation of the old world in 1917, most of them were forgotten. However, time will tell how many proven methods for producing “unfriendly” delicacies will be in demand in the new era of total import substitution.

Svetlana Kuznetsova