Categories: Family

What did you cook before the war?

We had more cured pork fat. We ate more often. And sausages – we didn’t have them; we couldn’t make lots of sausages from the pork. When we had made them - we were eating them for a week, and later again, we ate everything up and had to wait for the whole year.

Did you bake bread yourself too?

Oh, I had been baking bread all the time. I was a child, was very small yet, so they had to make a special wooden deck for me. The dough dish was such a huge one (showing by her hands), because the family was large. We were eight in the family: there were lots of children, there were six of us. There were three of us, three ones of stepmother’s, and two parents themselves. So about bread, we baked it a lot. They cut off a wooden deck for me, so I was standing on that wooden deck and kneading and kneading, kneading by hand, when ready with kneading I had to smooth the dough over and put it into the oven. That’s about it.

We had such a seasoning, it was called fennelflower, bread seasoning: such black seeds, small ones, they had a good smell. They made the bread very tasty, with a good smell. Especially, when it started to bake, when you put it into the oven, and it was baking up, producing such a smell that you felt it at the whole house.

And how did you bake pies?

As for pies, we baked them only for Easter. And some people baked them for ‘Syomukha’ (Whitsun), but these were very few. Only for Easter. And for Christmas we made sausages, slaughtered a swine, for Easter we baked pies, boiled eggs.

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Researcher: Наталья Иващенко, кандидат исторических наук, ГрГУ им. Я. Купалы, Ксения Адасик, ГрГУ им. Я. Купалы