History of pyshki in St. Petersburg: from Leningrad 1958 to today

Hot, with a crisp crust and a soft, airy middle, buried in a cloud of powdered sugar: pyshki, St. Petersburg’s hot yeast rings dusted with powdered sugar, have become as much a part of the city as its drawbridges and white nights, and one of the first things to try in St. Petersburg. Yet they have not been around forever. The pyshka has an exact date of birth, a specific address and even named creators. Here is the story of pyshki in St. Petersburg, from the first pyshki café of 1958 to the machines that are still frying them today.

When pyshki appeared: post-war Leningrad in the 1950s

To find out when pyshki first appeared, we need to go back to Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was called in Soviet times) in the mid-1950s. The city was recovering from the wartime siege and the war itself. The people rebuilding whole neighbourhoods and working at factory lathes needed food that was simple, filling, cheap and quick, something you could eat on the go without spending much time or money.

The answer was the pyshka. It was invented by quite specific people: the recipe was developed by food technologists at the Leningrad Trust of Canteens and Cafés, the body in charge of public catering in the city. That gave the pyshka an institutional author and a starting point.

The first pyshki café: Leningrad 1958, 25 Zhelyabova Street

The story of pyshki in Leningrad is usually counted from 1958. That was the year the first pyshechnaya, a pyshki café, opened at 25 Zhelyabova Street. Today the street is called Bolshaya Konyushennaya, and a pyshki café still operates on that very spot. So you can still walk into the place where it all began: the address itself has stayed put, only the street name on the map has changed.

The format caught on instantly. A counter, hot pyshki, coffee with condensed milk in a faceted Soviet glass: that turned out to be enough, and pyshki cafés began opening all over the city. Within a few years they were part of everyday life in Leningrad.

The recipe and the Soviet pyshki machine: why a pyshka is not greasy

The secret of the pyshka lies in how it is made. The dough drops into hot oil and “seals” itself within the first few seconds: a firm crust forms on the surface, and very little oil gets inside. In effect, a pyshka bakes like bread. That is where its lightness comes from. It never sits heavy in your stomach, unlike donuts, which are made differently and soak up the oil.

Pyshki were made on special machines, and these machines have a history of their own. The first ones were built in the 1950s by Soviet military plants: under a conversion programme, factories used to defence orders were told to produce peaceful machinery. Later, production moved to a plant in Kyiv. In 1991 the manufacture of pyshki machines stopped completely and has never resumed. Today you cannot buy or order a new machine, because nobody makes them any more. Every working machine is a surviving artefact of a bygone era.

A cultural phenomenon: a place where social lines disappeared

The pyshki café quickly became more than a fast-food stop. It was one of the few places where social boundaries stopped meaning anything. A student and a professor, a factory worker and an engineer, a schoolchild and a pensioner all ended up at the same counter. Everyone stood in the same queue, ate the same pyshki and warmed up with the same coffee.

In a city where life was far from easy, the pyshki café offered a few minutes of warmth and simple human company, with no status and no ceremony. That is why, for many people from St. Petersburg, the pyshka holds a whole layer of memories: of their youth, of the city, of the people around them. The pyshka became one of the details by which people recognise both Leningrad and St. Petersburg.

Those few minutes had their own unwritten ritual. You took several pyshki at once, added a coffee with condensed milk in a faceted glass, and ate standing at a tall counter instead of sitting down. Powdered sugar settled on your fingers and sleeves, the queue moved fast, and conversations started all by themselves. It was this ordinary, unadorned everyday scene that fixed the pyshka in the city’s memory more firmly than any advertising could. And it is exactly this lively, everyday feeling that we want to bring back to the modern city.

Decline in the 1990s: the tradition nearly vanished

In the 1990s the tradition almost came to an end. The economy was changing, familiar places were closing, and pyshki cafés disappeared one after another. On top of that, machine production had stopped in 1991, so reopening a closed café from scratch became almost impossible: there was simply no equipment to be had.

Of the dozens of pyshki cafés in Leningrad, essentially one survived: the one on Bolshaya Konyushennaya, on the site of the first pyshki café of 1958. It made it through that decade and remains a living monument to the tradition. We hold it in great respect: it is the city’s first and legendary pyshki café, and it would be unfair to argue with its history.

The pyshki tradition returns to St. Petersburg

Today pyshki are everywhere in St. Petersburg again, and both locals and tourists go looking for them. Truly reviving the tradition, though, has proved far from easy. It takes a recipe, and it also takes the very machines that have not been made since 1991.

That is what we do. Pyshki iz Detstva® (“Pyshki from Childhood”) makes no claim to have invented anything or to own someone else’s history. We see ourselves as restorers who carry the tradition on. We search the country for original Soviet machines from those same military plants of the 1950s and from the later Kyiv plant, buy them and painstakingly bring them back into working order. On each one we keep the factory nameplate with the year of manufacture and the serial number: it is the document that proves the machine is genuine. We rebuilt the original recipe through dozens of trial batches, and it was confirmed by people who remember the real taste: older guests, one of whom once worked on a machine like this himself.

Our machine stands in plain view in the café: anyone can watch the dough drop into hot oil and, a minute later, ride down the chute (a little slide) as a finished pyshka. That is the shortest proof there is: authenticity you can see with your own eyes. And so the history of pyshki in St. Petersburg carries on as a living place people come back to.

Try pyshki in St. Petersburg yourself

History is best tasted: hot, right by the machine. We have three cafés in central St. Petersburg. Take one pyshka, but don’t wander off too far: you will be back for more.

Choose a café and see how to get there →