Lend-Lease Food.

[CtahhR]

The "lend-lease" during the war usually conjures up thoughts of Thompsons, Shermans or Willies but the really important supply to the Soviet Union was food. Over one million tonnes of SPAM alone was sent to the USSR. Does anyone out there have and uneaten lend-lease food in their collection?

I have a 1943 tin of US powdered eggs for British consumption and a 1945 tin of British chocolate biscuits for Dutch "winter hunger" consumption but I've not found any food prepared for the Soviets yet. Can someone show us what the Soviets were eating?

If anyone out there has ever eaten powdered egg you'll realise why the tin I have survived.....

[Al-muell]

There was an article on that re-published on Englishrussia.com some years ago:
Russian American Canned Stew | English Russia

From memoirs it seems that this "Svinnaya Tushonka" was very popular and considered much better than Soviet-made food.

Btw. One of the veterans of the Polish Army in the East in his book attached a poem he wrote about Lend-lease canned food for the unit's news wall. A funny thing is that common legend among the Polish soldiers serving there was that the Americans used monkey meat to produce "svinnaya tushonka" (which tells us something about the education level in pre-war Poland), thus those cans were nicknamed "małpina"- "monkey meat". The name was retained after the war, and until 1990's Polish soldiers called the canned pork that way.