There was already some inflation, it actually never stopped, and the state worked on reigning it in, by means of various half-measures. On one side it saw to protecting the ruling class, workers, from the assault on its standard [of living], and on the other side it didn't dare seriously oppose the attackers, because the attackers were the self-managed enterprises, under the rule of workers again, who made a living in them. Because the market... And the workers in power and workers in enterprises weren't the same ones, they had their interests each.
One of such half-measures was freezing the prices, of base necessities first, food, energy, transportation. A regulation was issued, or maybe even a law, and of course everybody took to reading it thoroughly and finding loopholes in it The main loophole was called „new product“. And it wasn't done by Bek alone, every meat processor in any kombinat did just the same, by somply ceasing to manufacture the sausages and salamis by traditional recipes and went on with new ones. They took care to keep it plain to understand which old product was replaced with each new, and their names were also related. So the salami which replaced the tirolian was now called alpska (alpine), it looked exactly the same and tasted almost the same. The raw materials were of somewhat lower quality, which implied that the price of it should be higher, alpska was thus more expensive than tirolska, but tirolska wasn't made anymore. Likewise, the bačka was replaced with novosadska (of Novi Sad), šunkarica (ham salami) with tightized (not tightened aka (com)pressed, i.e. not stisnuta but stišnjena, which is a passive form of a nonexistent verb), the debrecina (sausage of Debrecén), kranjska (of Kranj) vanished completely and were replaced with who knows what.
I'm writing this because nowadays nobody remembers this, [bet] two beers that everyone thinks that alpska, novosadska and stišnjena are recipes from a hundred years ago. Well they aren't.
The franks (viršle) snuck through somehow, they're still called viršle (and nobody ever called them hrenovke* for real, the expression was for the sole use of comics translators), and the materials composition was... not even close, sister. Around pašteta there was a bit of a tug, guess they renamed it from just pašteta to „liver pašteta“, as if it wasn't made of liver so far. But then they got lucky when they invented the small can, of a bit thicker foil, which would roughly cover to slices of bread, just 42 grams. The so-called kids' [pašteta], which was very popular.
Around this time, give or take a couple of years, I figured out that if the cars are made so that in a crash the front crumples and consumes the kinetic energy, something similar must occur when knocking a boiled egg. And I started experimenting with doing it against my brow. And I was right. If I don't hit it strongly enough, it hurts. If the egg breaks, it doesn't hurt at all, the energy goes into crumpling the shell. So I did it often for a few years, to amuse the present company. Then the gimmick wore out, I got bored too.
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* no idea why 'hrenovke' - (h)ren is horseradish, but nobody ever served them with it, it was mustard, even in the times before mustard was commercially manufactured and sold; the street vendors somehow always had mustard. Horseradish was always available, but was never served with viršle, it goes with butkice or pihtije.
14-XI-2025 - 19-I-2026