The recipe behind Ukraine’s beloved food chain Puzata Khata
If there is one institution in Ukraine impervious to the sweeping decommunization efforts of the last decade, it’s the Soviet-era canteen, or stolovaya as it’s usually referred to in Russian. An invention of the Soviet Union’s founding father Vladimir Lenin, the stolovaya (called yidalnia in Ukrainian) was meant to control scarce resources and “liberate” women from the kitchen by freeing them to pursue industrial occupations. Stolovayas were ubiquitous in the USSR, where recipes were standardized and dispersed across the union making dining in a stolovaya a nearly identical experience from Kyi...