logo
Wrong email address or username
Wrong email address or username
Incorrect verification code
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing - Anya Von Bremzen
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
by: (author)
4.19 40
A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations   With startling beauty and sardonic wit, Anya von Bremzen tells an intimate yet epic story of life in that vanished empire known... show more
A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations   With startling beauty and sardonic wit, Anya von Bremzen tells an intimate yet epic story of life in that vanished empire known as the USSR—a place where every edible morsel was packed with emotional and political meaning.      Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.      Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, in its full flavor, both bitter and sweet, Anya and Larisa, embark on a journey unlike any other: they decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience—turning Larisa’s kitchen into a "time machine and an incubator of memories.” Together, mother and daughter re-create meals both modest and sumptuous, featuring a decadent fish pie from the pages of Chekhov, chanakhi (Stalin’s favorite Georgian stew), blini, and more.      Through these meals, Anya tells the gripping story of three Soviet generations—masterfully capturing the strange mix of idealism, cynicism, longing, and terror that defined Soviet life. We meet her grandfather Naum, a glamorous intelligence chief under Stalin, and her grandmother Liza, who made a perilous odyssey to icy, blockaded Leningrad to find Naum during World War II. We meet Anya’s hard-drinking, sarcastic father, Sergei, who cruelly abandons his family shortly after Anya is born; and we are captivated by Larisa, the romantic dreamer who grew up dreading the black public loudspeakers trumpeting the glories of the Five-Year Plan. Their stories unfold against the vast panorama of Soviet history: Lenin’s bloody grain requisitioning, World War II hunger and survival, Stalin’s table manners, Khrushchev’s kitchen debates, Gorbachev’s disastrous anti-alcohol policies. And, ultimately, the collapse of the USSR. And all of it is bound together by Anya’s passionate nostalgia, sly humor, and piercing observations.     Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.
show less
Format: hardcover
ISBN: 9780307886811 (0307886816)
ASIN: 0307886816
Publisher: Crown
Pages no: 352
Edition language: English
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite
Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite rated it
4.0 Masting the Art of Soviet Cooking, by Anya von Bremzen
For the past two weeks, I’ve been having Kathleen Gati read me to sleep with Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing. Von Bremzen was born in Moscow in the early 1960s and left in 1974 with her mother, emigrating to New York. Since the day she left, von B...
Maven Books
Maven Books rated it
3.0 Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen
Interesting at first, but it wasn't quite the food memoir I was expecting from the descriptions. It was nice to have the historical context, but this often overtook the more interesting stuff about food and the author's experiences and family, and I felt like I had to slog through a lot of dull his...
Reflections
Reflections rated it
5.0 Fascinating history in a family food memoir--everyday Soviet life and meals from revolution to glasnost
Part memoir and part family history, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a fascinating, affectionate, irreverent, and for me surprising inside account of everyday life during successive eras of the Soviet Union, from revolution through Stalin and Khrushchev to glasnost, paying particular attenti...
Other editions (1)
Books by Anya Von Bremzen
On shelves
Share this Book
Need help?