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A review by mburnamfink
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen
5.0
Food has always been foremost in the Soviet mind, from the desperate aftermath of the Russian Civil War and the crude markets of "war communism", to Stalin's Holodomor genocides, through utopian schemes to make an Earthly Worker's Paradise, to the basic communal reality of the breadline. Anya von Bremzen and her mother, who emigrated to the US in 1974, walk through their family's past and the Soviet experience by the means of a meal-a-decade, walking the bitter-sweet paths of nostalgia.
This is an astounding picture of ordinary life in the Soviet Union. Anya and her mother were relatively lucky as dissident intelligentsia, their main crime that of constructing a small fantasy away from the grim reality of cramped communal housing, with the multiple families shoved into one set of apartment, and substandard food that hovered just above absolute starvation. Anya recalls being a junior black marketeer, selling scraps of foreign capitalist candy for kopeks at Kindergarten. Soviet cuisine, a mass of yeasty dough, suspicious sausages, and things which were once vegetables, transforms into sublime symbols in the loving hands of the right chef.
This is an astounding picture of ordinary life in the Soviet Union. Anya and her mother were relatively lucky as dissident intelligentsia, their main crime that of constructing a small fantasy away from the grim reality of cramped communal housing, with the multiple families shoved into one set of apartment, and substandard food that hovered just above absolute starvation. Anya recalls being a junior black marketeer, selling scraps of foreign capitalist candy for kopeks at Kindergarten. Soviet cuisine, a mass of yeasty dough, suspicious sausages, and things which were once vegetables, transforms into sublime symbols in the loving hands of the right chef.