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A review by purplemuskogee
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.25
"All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy after their own fashion".
This was a delightful memoir about the author's childhood and family history in the USSR. In New York with her mother - having emigrated in 1974 -, they set up to cook "food from home" and to explore the history of their homeland through its cuisine. They start with a lavish Czar-inspired 1910s dinner with friends, and work their way through each decade until the 1980s.
There are many family stories - her great-great-great-grandmother who was a feminist, her grandfather who was an intelligence officer who believed in the Party, her mother who has always dreamed of living. Men appear - her grand-father, her father - but the women of her families are what makes the book. Food is the thread that links it all together - "Food anchored the domestic realities of our totalitarian state, supplying a shimmer of desire to a life that was mostly drab, sometimes absurdly comical, on occasion unbearably tragic, but just as often naively optimistic and joyous".
A lot of the book is about history and it is well-documented. I studied the history of Russia and the USSR at school but a lot of the "popular history" facts were unknown to me: the hunger that lasted for decades, the coupns, the long queues to get food. The ideology behind food promoted by the Party, "utilatarian fuel, pure and simple", is well described - the philosophy of frugality and simple food as a rejection of the Czars and the imperialist past -, and then later foreign influences imported from the US. The story of Mikoyan, the chef and manager of the food supply, who was paid by the USSR to spend two months in the US in 1937 to explore its food industry, and brought back ketchup, ice-cream, and kornfleks, was extraordinary!
The end of the book became slightly less interesting: the author, having published a cookbook of Soviet recipes, returns in the 1990s to visit family, and later in the 2010s; cooks some more, meets relatives - still struggling, in 1991, to get enough food on the table and still using coupons -, talks about "an obscure midget with a boring KGB past" who becomes Russia's president, and about the new Russian billionaires. It was interesting too but felt less personal and slightly less interesting.
Bonus points for the recipes at the end!
This was a delightful memoir about the author's childhood and family history in the USSR. In New York with her mother - having emigrated in 1974 -, they set up to cook "food from home" and to explore the history of their homeland through its cuisine. They start with a lavish Czar-inspired 1910s dinner with friends, and work their way through each decade until the 1980s.
There are many family stories - her great-great-great-grandmother who was a feminist, her grandfather who was an intelligence officer who believed in the Party, her mother who has always dreamed of living. Men appear - her grand-father, her father - but the women of her families are what makes the book. Food is the thread that links it all together - "Food anchored the domestic realities of our totalitarian state, supplying a shimmer of desire to a life that was mostly drab, sometimes absurdly comical, on occasion unbearably tragic, but just as often naively optimistic and joyous".
A lot of the book is about history and it is well-documented. I studied the history of Russia and the USSR at school but a lot of the "popular history" facts were unknown to me: the hunger that lasted for decades, the coupns, the long queues to get food. The ideology behind food promoted by the Party, "utilatarian fuel, pure and simple", is well described - the philosophy of frugality and simple food as a rejection of the Czars and the imperialist past -, and then later foreign influences imported from the US. The story of Mikoyan, the chef and manager of the food supply, who was paid by the USSR to spend two months in the US in 1937 to explore its food industry, and brought back ketchup, ice-cream, and kornfleks, was extraordinary!
The end of the book became slightly less interesting: the author, having published a cookbook of Soviet recipes, returns in the 1990s to visit family, and later in the 2010s; cooks some more, meets relatives - still struggling, in 1991, to get enough food on the table and still using coupons -, talks about "an obscure midget with a boring KGB past" who becomes Russia's president, and about the new Russian billionaires. It was interesting too but felt less personal and slightly less interesting.
Bonus points for the recipes at the end!