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Biography & Autobiography. Cooking & Food. History. Nonfiction. HTML: 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 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, naively joyous, and 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, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. Includes a bonus PDF of recipes from the book… (more)
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It is NOT a cookbook, obviously (though it does have nine recipes at the end - all to be tried out by
The book is written with a bitter-sweet sense of humor and with just enough superbly worded healthy dose of sarcasm to be able to relive the disappointments of the Soviet regime. It has to be said that there are no "empty" phrases in this memoir: the expressions simply jump out at you with their sharp veracity, each and every sentence is loaded with meaning expressed by powerful and ingenious choice of words, thus unveiling a very talented writer and not just an author of a memoir and award winning cookbooks.
It's impossible to quote from this book - one would be compelled to quote from every single page. And yet, I will try to single out a quote or two.
The Stalin years have been disclosed in many memoirs by now, so I won't dwell on that, but here, for instance, the author describes her childhood in Soviet Union: "The State of my childhood had been a creaking geriatric machine run by a cartoonish Politburo that inspired nothing but vicious political humor. With fossilized lump of Brezhnev as Leader, it was, at times, rather fun." Later she sums it up rather vividly: "A popular Stagnation-era gag sums up what historians dub the Brezhnevian social contract. Six paradoxes of Mature Socialism: 1) There is no unemployment, but nobody works; 2) no one works, but productivity goes up; 3) productivity goes up, but stores are empty; 4) stores are empty, but fridges are full; 5) fridges are full, but no one is satisfied; 6) no one is satisfied, but everyone votes yes".
And here is what happened when Gorbachev came to power. At first, news now was "openly devoured on the bus, on the metro. People read in lines and at tram stops; they read as they walked, drunk on the new outpouring of truths and reassessments". But..."in trying to reform the creaking, rustling wheel of centralized Soviet system, Gorbachev had loosened the screws, dismantled a part here, a part there, and ultimately halted the wheel - with nothing to replace it".
And so it happened: "The finis, the official, irrevocable curtain falling on our fairy-tale communal life, the utopian social experiment for which millions of lives had been brutally sacrificed - now signing off in the most undramatic fashion imaginable" - by Gorbachev's 10 minute speech on TV. And what came next (through a debaucher Yeltzin, at first) - is Putin. An American observer (the author's boyfriend) having visited Moscow under Putin called it "Dubai with Pushkin statues".
The memoir is interspersed with food talk, also referring to the proclaimed Soviet "cuisine of nations" (of Soviet republics), each so unique, but, presumably so "happy" to be part of the "great nation". Yet finally, under Gorbachev and then Yeltzin, "cuisine of nations became not a friendship buffet but a witches' brew of resentment stirred up by glasnost".
All in all, I sincerely applaud Ms. von Bremzen for such a clear-headed take on history. A fabulous book.
The author begins cleverly, paraphrasing the famous passage from Russian literature with her assertion that “All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy after their own fashion.”
She has written some award-winning cookbooks, and so it is only natural that she uses food as a focal point. But she has a further rationale:
"For any ex-citizen of a three-hundred-million-strong Soviet superpower, food is never a mere individual matter. In 1917 bread riots sparked the overthrow of the czar, and seventy-four years later, catastrophic food shortages helped push Gorbachev’s floundering empire into the dustbin. In between, seven million people perished from hunger during Stalin’s collectivization; four million more starved to death during Hitler’s war.”
She observes that food and drinking and the rituals associated with them have been an abiding theme of Soviet political and cultural history. Food, she says, quoting one academic, “defined how Russians endured the present, imagined the future, and connected to their past.”
Her goal, she states, is to show the “epic disjunction,” the “unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths” that made up the Soviet Union, and she does a splendid job achieving this aim.
She personalizes the story by making it into a memoir of her own family's experiences for the duration of the Soviet Union, starting with the 1910’s, and proceeding by decade increments to the present. This, to me, is the real value of the book, because there are plenty of Soviet histories around, but von Bremzen provides anecdotes about what it was really like for the non-elites who lived through those times. She talks about food a lot, and I admit, most of it is food I wouldn’t want to eat. But most of the time, ordinary citizens in the USSR didn’t have much choice, and the author tells us just how they managed to make do with what they could find.
They used as their bible The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food (or as she calls it “a totalitarian Joy of Cooking"). What is interesting about this book is that the content changed with each new regime. It was first published in 1939, and included didactic commentaries and ideological sermonizing as well as recipes, many of which involved food that none of the proletarian masses could hope to obtain. Von Bremzen writes:
"The wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and its absence in shops made [the book’s] myth of plenty especially poignant. Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled down the deception; long-suffering H. sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, an artistic doctrine that insisted on depicting reality ‘in its revolutionary development’ - past and present swallowed up by a triumphant projection of a Radiant Future.”
This paragraph is an excellent summary of what von Bremzen makes her theme, and her goal, in highlighting the contradictions of life in the USSR.
At the end of the book, the author includes one recipe for each decade she covered. The recipes are preceded by very entertaining anecdotes.
Discussion: I love the understated cynicism and humorous sarcasm so common to many who survived the Soviet period, especially among the samizdat writers. If you have read other remembrances of that time, you will recognize this tone, so distinctive to those who daily lived and breathed the hypocrisy of their so-called socialist state. This passage, in which von Bremzen writes of Stalin’s involvement in food policy is a perfect example of her style:
"When [Stalin] wasn’t busy signing execution orders or censoring books or screening [the movie] Volga-Volga], the Standardbearer of Communism opined on fish (‘Why don’t we sell live fish like they did in the old days?’) or Soviet champagne.”
Similarly, her ironic names for the leaders of the USSR are endlessly entertaining as well as revealing, from one of many for Stalin, “The Best Friend of All Children” to “the fossilized lump of Brezhnev,” to Putin: “an obscure midget with a boring KGB past” who established a “petrodollar kleptocracy.”
Evaluation: Although this book wasn’t what I thought it would be, it was actually much better. If you are looking for more of a cookbook, there are certainly many that feature foods of the Russian continent. This book is much more than that, and yet, the subject of food is central to the story.
*Cautionary note: This is just my very-humble opinion) I
Anya’s grandfather worked in Soviet intelligence, and through devout loyalty managed to not get arrested when regimes changed, rules morphed, and history was rewritten. Her mother on the other hand was a self-styled cultural exile and dissident, still actually living within the country but refusing as much as possible to be part of it, so Anya had a wide variety of experiences, from the nauseating privilege of a kindergarten curriculum that included daily doses of caviar to the difficult negotiations of cooking in a crowded communal kitchen. She queued in food lines and ran a black market business selling sticks, or sometimes just a few flavorful chews, of Juicy Fruit gum to her school mates.
Eventually Anya and her mother immigrated to the United States and when an injury ended her musical career she became a food writer--food being a natural obsession for someone who grew up in a country where getting enough could be a challenge. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is not a cookbook but there are a few recipes in the back of the book, including for Salat Olivier, a potato/carrot/canned peas/egg/apple/pickle salad that I can’t picture and have to try.
The book is also a tribute to the author's mother, the independent-minded, indomitable Larisa, who tested the recipes along with her daughter.
I was a little disappointed in the ending (the book reaches the Putin years then just sort of fizzles out), but I enjoyed the author's clever writing style, sharp observations, and unusual approach to her subject.
Importantly, with food and family as the centralizing thing, von Bremzen is able to sublimate abstract Soviet history and policy changes into narratives that are accessible and relatable to any reader. I recommend this book to history buffs, foodies and Russophiles alike, as you will not be disappointed by von Bremzen's incisive vignette into life behind the Iron Curtain.