Name: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
ISBN: 9780307886811

Anya Von Bremzen

Evokes a mid-20th-century Soviet experience, as the author traces her upbringing by an anti-Soviet mother, her witness to the political events surrounding the empire's collapse, and her parallel food universes that included both simple and sumptuous fare.

A Memoir of Love and Longing

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR . In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. Her narrative is embedded in a larger historical epic: Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II starvation, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's disastrous anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of this is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia and piercing observations. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses.

A Memoir of Food and Longing

Lisa Miller

More than a food memoir this is a fascinating insight into life in the USSR from the early Bolshevik years through to recent years under Putin. The early decades are focused on her grandparents experiences and tales and so while interesting lacked coherency and depth. The final two thirds which draws upon her mother's (still very much alive) and her own experiences is where the book really took off for me and I couldn't put it down. It's an engrossing blend of political and social history combined with the everyday oddities and absurdities which also casted an ominous shadow. The author emigrated from the USSR with her mother in the 70's when she was 10 and was unable to return for 15 years at which point so much had changed - she is as much an outsider as an insider and the feeling of otherness is felt throughout the book.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking A Memoir of Love and Longing

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