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A review by joaniemaloney
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen
5.0
What a fascinating memoir.
As Anya Von Bremzen and her mother attempt to cook dishes to represent each decade of the past century of Soviet history, they rekindle more than mere feasts but mountains of memories. Both touching and painful, the reader is taken on a journey through the generations of stories in this family, from the last Czar to present-day Putin, connected through food. It's a thread powerful enough to raise or topple leaders, change the course of history with how hunger is managed in the nation.
It's really more than just a memoir or a cookbook. Every recipe, every food, every drink, described in here is intertwined with a part of history, a part of culture, and a part of Anya's family history. There's a great sense of familiarity somehow: Naum's boisterous personality and his luck, Sergei's struggle to stay committed, Larisa's toska, to name a few - and I found myself caring very much about her family. These individuals are voices that ring loud and clear, full of personality and life through the generations. Just as incredible was to see historical almost larger-than-life characters through the food lens: what they ate, what they banned or allowed citizens to eat, what was available, how tastes changed over the years and through the different regimes, how interior and exterior influences molded the diet, etc.
It's such a delicate balance to have all these ingredients without making a mess of it all - either stray too far into family history without providing historical context for those unfamiliar or cover only the history like a dry textbook - and this book has achieved it. It isn't all heartbreak and terror, all fear and propaganda, as told in these stories - as difficult as life could be, there was joy, love and humour to be found. And oh, what humour indeed.
To try a newly learned comparison (and despite not having tried these dishes yet but they sound marvelous), this book was as sensational as Larisa's awe-inspiring kulebiaka combined with Sergei's uber-borshch.
A masterpiece.
As Anya Von Bremzen and her mother attempt to cook dishes to represent each decade of the past century of Soviet history, they rekindle more than mere feasts but mountains of memories. Both touching and painful, the reader is taken on a journey through the generations of stories in this family, from the last Czar to present-day Putin, connected through food. It's a thread powerful enough to raise or topple leaders, change the course of history with how hunger is managed in the nation.
It's really more than just a memoir or a cookbook. Every recipe, every food, every drink, described in here is intertwined with a part of history, a part of culture, and a part of Anya's family history. There's a great sense of familiarity somehow: Naum's boisterous personality and his luck, Sergei's struggle to stay committed, Larisa's toska, to name a few - and I found myself caring very much about her family. These individuals are voices that ring loud and clear, full of personality and life through the generations. Just as incredible was to see historical almost larger-than-life characters through the food lens: what they ate, what they banned or allowed citizens to eat, what was available, how tastes changed over the years and through the different regimes, how interior and exterior influences molded the diet, etc.
It's such a delicate balance to have all these ingredients without making a mess of it all - either stray too far into family history without providing historical context for those unfamiliar or cover only the history like a dry textbook - and this book has achieved it. It isn't all heartbreak and terror, all fear and propaganda, as told in these stories - as difficult as life could be, there was joy, love and humour to be found. And oh, what humour indeed.
To try a newly learned comparison (and despite not having tried these dishes yet but they sound marvelous), this book was as sensational as Larisa's awe-inspiring kulebiaka combined with Sergei's uber-borshch.
A masterpiece.