Soviet Waffle Cookies: or, Fun with new toys

I have no idea what current events could possibly put Russia on my mind.

Soviet Waffle Cookies

Recipe 1: (These are like waffle-iron pound cakes.) 3 eggs 1½ cups sugar 200 grams margarine or butter (1 cup minus about 1 tbsp) 250-300 grams sour cream (about 2-2¼ cups) 2 tsp bottled lemon juice, or juice of half a lemon Pinch salt About 3 cups flour ½ tsp baking soda Melt the margarine and set it aside cool off. Whisk eggs and sugar until very thoroughly beaten, about 1 or 2 minutes. Then beat in the sour cream and lemon juice. Mix in the flour and baking soda, adding enough flour to make it almost as thick as cookie dough. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Клуб кулинаров (Cooking Club)

Recipe 2: (These are firm and not so sweet. They make good breakfast waffles.) 4 eggs 100 grams sugar (½ cup plus an extra spoonful) Pinch salt 2 tsp vanilla 1 tbsp vinegar 100 grams butter (a smidge less than ½ cup) 2 tbsp cooking oil 100 grams sour cream (1 tablespoon less than ½ cup) 1 tsp baking soda or baking powder (if using baking powder, omit vinegar) 250 grams flour (2 cups) Melt the butter and set aside to cool off. Thoroughly beat eggs, sugar, salt, vanilla, and vinegar. Slowly pour in the melted butter and the oil, beating the whole time. Add flour and baking soda. Mix well. It should be about the consistency of very thick sour cream. Let stand for 5 minutes. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Olesya Real Life

Recipe 3: (These are very crisp on the outside and extra-fluffy in the middle, but are best when very fresh.) 3 eggs 180 grams sugar (1 cup plus a heaping tablespoon) 2 tsp vanilla pinch salt 100 grams butter (a smidge less than ½ cup) 70 grams cooking oil (scant ⅓ cup) 1 tsp baking powder 140 grams flour (about 1 cup plus 2 tbsp) Melt the butter and set aside to cool off. Thoroughly beat the eggs, sugar, vanilla, baking powder, and salt. Slowly pour in the butter and oil, beating as you go. Sift in the flour. It should be about the consistency of cake batter. Let stand for 5 minutes. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Olesya Real Life

I don't know how I ended up watching Russian cooking videos when I can't even type Cyrillic letters to find them. But sometimes it's nice to watch people cook at home in a language you don't understand, so you don't even have to keep up with the words.

As I mentioned when we first bid goodbye to cheap eggs, a box with Ukrainian postage arrived on our doorstep earlier this year. Apparently in Ukraine, exporting Soviet bric-a-brac is a small-scale national fundraising effort. Ukrainians have discovered that a lot of people abroad will pay for old Soviet crap. A lot of them sell and ship it to us foreigners who are bizarrely fascinated by how weird the Soviet Union looked. 

I opened our trans-Atlantic delivery box, carefully unwrapped a very well-done packing job (seriously, you could have thrown this off the balcony and the goods would have been safe), and found a new waffle iron. Well I say I "found" it, but to be honest I ordered it because we all have our splurges.

 

I love how Soviet waffle irons look like somebody described one to someone else without any pictures, and then commanded them to start a factory by next week or they'd end up in Siberia. A lot of them are more like stovetop 3D cookie molds than waffles. If you search online, you will find a lot of Soviet bunnies, walnuts, squirrels, mushrooms, and other whimsical shapes instead of boring grids. There is a certain grimness to all the designs that really speaks to me these days. (For those in the US, think cheaply-made 1970s kids' cartoons.) I didn't get one that makes little bears or oak leaves. I got one that looks like this.

I was really curious about what passed for a treat for well-behaved Soviet children. For my first attempt, I made this person's recipe because I always trust videos that are clearly someone cooking at home while their husband/wife/child/friend/whoever holds the camera. (A lot of the slicker-production videos are from content farms that use trick editing to hide recipes that cannot work.) I am not saying this is the definitive recipe, but it is definitely a recipe.

At this point, I have to give Google credit. They may be turning the entire internet into a network of spybots, ads, and AI trash, but YouTube's voice-processing and language translation is amazing. Even with the occasional misfires and gibberish, I could understand almost all of what these people were saying. And after enough videos (I watched a lot), I started to pick out the occasional word of Russian. First it was soundalike words like "margarine" and "soda" (baking, not drinking). Then I learned that "smetana" is sour cream, "masla" is probably butter, and I think "pichinya" is cookies. I may not be able to ask for directions in Saint Petersburg, but I can at least point at sour cream and name it.

On a brief cross-cultural note, I find it interesting how recipes always get adapted to local packaging sizes. In the US, we tend to use butter by the quarter-pound stick or a tidy fraction of it. Over in Russia, butter is apparently sold by the hectogram. As a result, all the recipes I saw called for either 100 grams of margarine or some easy portion of it. 

All right, enough preliminary remarks, it's time for waffles. Like making pizzelles, we started by beating eggs and sugar. In another bowl, we had already melted and cooled off our butter, which we then poured into the bowl in a thin stream. The butter sank to the bottom of the bowl, leaving only a few golden curlicues behind. 

I still sometimes forget that we have a dishwasher and therefore don't need to fret about washing the parts of an electric mixer.

And now, we add the sour cream! The Pan American Airways book of recipes from around the world has a chapter on Russia. The seven-pararagraph introduction (from which I learned all I know about Russian cooking) says that Russians use sour cream in nearly everything.

Apparently in eastern Europe, they use little packets of vanilla powder instead of bottles of extract. But I wasn't about to go out of my way to import ingredients for a recipe I had never made.

Meanwhile, the waffle iron was perched on a hot burner. I thought about trying to strip and clean the outside, but I have a certain respect for grease deposits that might be older than me. 

As the iron heated up, I could smell many years of dust burning off of it. But this wasn't just a smell, it was a presence. Imagine going into an abandoned house in the bleak midwinter, stepping over petrified breakfast cereal, broken ceramic knicknacks, and old magazines that had fallen to the floor as various shelves failed. Now, imagine that you turned on the central heating for the first time in at least twenty years. As the air blows through the vents, the smell of burning furnace dust mixes with moldering odor already in the room and the sharp scent of ice coming through the cracked windows. (You'll have to pretend that in all this time, no one ever cut off the utilities.) 

That is just about what was emanating from over the burner. This iron didn't just put out a musty smell, it put out an aura of faint yet heavy despair, the kind that you don't notice in the background of your life but you definitely feel when it hits you for the first time.

By the time most of the Soviet dreariness had burned off our iron, we had a thick batter that looked just like what we saw in the video. It's always nice when your cooking comes out the same as the guide you're following. When I tried a spoonful, it tasted like it could become a really good pound cake. (I think it was the sour cream.) 

As a recipe note, a lot of people in videos mixed the baking soda and the vinegar (or lemon juice) in a small spoon and then quickly stirred it in while it fizzed. I added them separately so they would fizz in the batter rather than over it. 

It's also worth noting that no one in any video I saw got out a nice, precise set of measuring spoons for their waffles. (Though some people had kitchen scales). Instead, people used spoons from the cutlery drawer without any thought to "level measurements." It reminded me of watching my aunt the night before Thanksgiving, measuring everything with random glasses and whatever spoon was at the top of the drawer.

With great excitement, I brushed shortening onto the iron and prepared to experience dessert behind the Iron Curtain. Now, everyone in the various videos kind of awkwardly smeared the batter onto the iron. I thought I might do a better job of batter distribution until I attempted it myself.

When I tried to open the iron a few minutes later, the top and bottom would not part. With a grim suspicion of what waited inside, I forced the iron open and saw... this.

I think we can say "Das vedanya" to this one.

I had suspected this would happen. The first waffle is always for the fairies. Always.

I made a few attempts to clean the mess off because I knew things would harden as the iron got cold. But I only got a few tiny shreds of batter and several burnt knuckles.

So now, my freshly-imported Soviet iron was out of commission and most of the batter was still in the bowl. If only I had a spare Soviet waffle iron in case of emergency...

People in Soviet days probably had to wait half a lifetime to get just one of these; I got two with combined shipping.

This one has a feature that I'm surprised doesn't turn up in a lot more stovetop waffle irons: little pegs and sockets that interlock and prevent any wiggling. I guess you just can't beat that communist build quality.

This time, I remembered the advice from Fante's website about seasoning the iron. I brushed both sides with shortening while it was still cold. Then I flipped it every minute or so as it heated up. As a result, the first waffles didn't stick quite as badly. With a bit of patience, I got these off almost completely intact.

For the second round of waffles (if you exclude the ones that ruined the first iron), I dared to put on a lot more batter, which filled the pan properly as it expanded and cooked. You can see where it overflowed the pan a bit, but it didn't ooze all over the stove.

 

These waffles didn't fall right out of the pan, but they didn't fight to stay in it either. They only needed a gentle suggestion from a spatula. 

I have learned by now that with stovetop waffles, you need to squeeze the iron shut until the batter is at least mostly set. But I didn't realize how much force a foaming waffle exerts. I could see our Soviet steel handles flexing and bending as the batter pushed them apart at one end and I white-knuckled them together at the other. I started to fear that I'd have have to take this to a welding shop after a few batches.

Worries about Soviet metallurgy aside, the waffles got better with each successive splot of batter. Our next batch dangled off the iron when we held it over the rack, then all the little hearts fell into a mound without any prodding.

After our initial stuck-on disaster (which was still waiting for me to clean up), I was so glad that we got this recipe to work. Look how many of these came out of the iron without ruining themselves! And that doesn't include the ones that got eaten while our wafflery was underway.

I am always surprised when I make a recipe and it comes out just like the pictures. Usually that can't happen without a lot of behind-the-scenes food stylists. But these looked just like the ones I watched people make online.

These were like a good pound cake, but with an extra-crispy golden crust all over. I'm not throwing out this recipe. Or the waffle iron.

Now, I hate to give a recipe that involves ordering utensils from a war zone. And so, I put the last of the batter into a normal waffle iron. You know, the kind you either have in your house or can find in any thrift store. Because this particular one does not clamp shut, the waffle puffed upward a lot instead of expanding across the entire iron. You can really see the difference if we put it next to one of the Soviet-cooked waffles.

So yes, you can make these on the sort of waffle irons that you can get from nearly any garage sale. (I mean, that should have been obvious. I just felt like getting out this waffle iron.) But if you're out shopping for a waffle iron just so you can try these Soviet delights, I suggest you get the kind where you lock the top and bottom together after you've poured in the batter (usually by twisting a handle).

Anyway, I decided to try another recipe very soon thereafter. After all, when you're culinarily venturing into an extinct country, you don't stop after one batch of waffles. And so, we landed on this video which has two recipes.

 

Even though I don't speak Russian, it was helpful to see how these should look as I'm making them. And she typed both ingredient lists in the video description, so I was able to run that through Google Translate and follow along. 

 As a lot of these Soviet waffle recipes seem to, we start by beating together sugar and eggs while our freshly-melted butter cools off on the countertop. The recipe used a lot of cooking oil, which makes it great for those weeks when you can only get margarine if you have personal connections in Moscow. We also added a bit of cinnamon because it just seemed right.

This time, we had more of a pourable batter than the first ones we made. 

 

We are told to let the batter stand for 5 minutes, after which I could pile it in a big mound instead of pouring it on.

The batter thickened a lot when we let it stand 5 minutes.

These waffles had a extra-crispy texture that almost made them seem like they were deep-fried. On the first day, they were almost-but-not-quite crunchy on the outside, delicately fluffy in the middle, and nearly impossible to stop eating.

But on day two, they were like hardened foam. So I would definitely recommend the recipe, but not making them ahead. With that said, I just know that they'd make an amazing trifle if I soaked enough sherry into them. They were the right kind of stale. 

Not long after that, I tried the other recipe in the same video. She said it was not as sweet as the first (which is why I let the recipe wait a bit), but that they had a much nicer consistency. I like how with every one of these I have made, you basically get everything into a bowl and start stirring. Time is money, and I'm pretty sure both were tightly rationed in the USSR.

Unlike the previous two recipes, the iron opened without any gentle cajoling or shaking it to loosen things up in there. They fell right out as soon as I opened the iron over the cooling rack.

I loved how the you could see visible mottling on the waffles. The batter got golden immediately on contact with the hot iron, then more of the batter burst out from inside it as it kept puffing up and spreading out. I should note that I sent a picture of these to a friend of mine who said "Oooooo, Dalek waffles!"

These weren't sweet cookies like all the others were. But they were really good breakfast waffles. They were just firm enough to hold their own against a deluge of syrup, and had just enough of a crispy, toasty flavor to be good on their own.

Naturally, you can make any of these recipes without having a waffle iron shipped in from over the sea. I'm going to recommend the first recipe at the top if you want a sweet dessert, and the second one if you wanted something for breakfast. The third recipe is really good, but only the day you make them.