Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

By Anya von Bremzen

This is possibly one of the hardest reads that I've done in the last two years. It was interesting to go on the journey with the author and her family but I find Russian/ Soviet politics difficult. Have done ever since school. But don't let that put you off, I was one of the only people in my book club who did not care for this book. So it might be something you are right into, especially if you enjoy the food and historical nature of such works... наслаждаться

Synopsis

I had to return this book before I could accurately copy the synopsis from the back. Alternatively I have copied the synopsis from GoodReads ... I really hope they don't mind.

A celebrated food writer captures the flavors of the Soviet experience in a sweeping, tragicomic, multi-generational memoir that brilliantly illuminates the history and culture of a vanished empire.

Proust had his madeleine; Narnia's Edmund had his Turkish delight. Anya von Bremzen has vobla-rock-hard, salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Lovers of vobla risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack, but for Anya it's transporting. Like kotleti (Soviet burgers) or the festive Salat Olivier, it summons up the complex, bittersweet flavors of life in that vanished Atlantis called the USSR. There, born in 1963 in a Kafkaesque communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at her school, and, like most Soviet citizens, longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy-and, finally, intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother. When she was ten, the two of them fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.

These days Anya lives in two parallel food universes: one in which she writes about four-star restaurants, the other in which a simple banana-a once a year treat back in the USSR-still holds an almost talismanic sway over her psyche. To make sense of that past, she and her mother decided to eat and cook their way through seven decades of the Soviet experience. Through the meals she and her mother re-create, Anya tells the story of three generations-her grandparents', her mother's, and her own. Her family's stories are embedded in a larger historical epic: of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II hunger and survival, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's anti-alcohol policies, and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of it is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia, and piercing observations.

Author

Anya von Bremzen is a three-time James Beard Award-winning culinary writer. She was born in 1963 in Soviet Russia, and her works include The New Spanish Table, The Greatest Dishes: Around the World in 80 Recipes, and Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook.

Other books by the author

Please to the Table (1990)
Terrific Pacific Cookbook (1995)
 Fiesta (1997)
The Greatest Dishes! Around the World in 80 Recipes (2004)
New Spanish Table (2006)
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (2014)
Paladares (2018)