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A review by pattydsf
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen
3.0
“It was my mother, my frequent co-conspirator in the kitchen and my conduit to our past, who suggested the means to convey this epic disjunction, this unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths. We would reconstruct every decade of Soviet history - from the prequel 1910s to the postscript present day - through the prism of food. Together, we'd embark on a yearlong journey unlike any other: eating and cooking our way through decade after decade of Soviet life, using her kitchen and dining room as a time machine and an incubator of memories.
When I was growing up, the Soviet Union was our enemy. It took me a long time to figure out the connections between Russia and the USSR (history wasn’t my strong suit). When I was in high school, dissent literature was trickling out of the Soviet Union and I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward and it confirmed my vague ideas about the evil Soviet regime. I learned about other countries, but I was never very interested in this one. Even after the Berlin Wall came down and the Eastern Bloc fell apart, I didn’t spend much time thinking about that part of our globe.
It is amazing what I will read when food is involved. I really like reading about people and their relationship to cooking, meals, gardening – anything about food. So when someone suggested I might like this book, I checked it out of my public library. I found Bremzen’s food reminisces really interesting.
I was not expecting, however, to learn a lot about Soviet history along with their food. That was foolish on my part because food is part of history. If a country has an abundant food supply, it is very different from one with scarce resources. Major parts of any country’s culture is based around food.
So, once again, I had found a way to learn a lot from a story. I got to learn about Bremzen’s life, but also, I learned about her culture and her country’s history. I had a lot of fun doing it.
When I was growing up, the Soviet Union was our enemy. It took me a long time to figure out the connections between Russia and the USSR (history wasn’t my strong suit). When I was in high school, dissent literature was trickling out of the Soviet Union and I read Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward and it confirmed my vague ideas about the evil Soviet regime. I learned about other countries, but I was never very interested in this one. Even after the Berlin Wall came down and the Eastern Bloc fell apart, I didn’t spend much time thinking about that part of our globe.
It is amazing what I will read when food is involved. I really like reading about people and their relationship to cooking, meals, gardening – anything about food. So when someone suggested I might like this book, I checked it out of my public library. I found Bremzen’s food reminisces really interesting.
I was not expecting, however, to learn a lot about Soviet history along with their food. That was foolish on my part because food is part of history. If a country has an abundant food supply, it is very different from one with scarce resources. Major parts of any country’s culture is based around food.
So, once again, I had found a way to learn a lot from a story. I got to learn about Bremzen’s life, but also, I learned about her culture and her country’s history. I had a lot of fun doing it.