num_pages: 339
description: A celebrated food writer captures the flavors of the Soviet experience in a sweeping tragicomic multi-generational memoir that brilliantly illuminates the history and culture of a vanished empire.Proust had his madeleine; Narnia's Edmund had his Turkish delight. Anya von Bremzen has vobla-rock-hard salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Lovers of vobla risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack but for Anya it's transporting. Like kotleti (Soviet burgers) or the festive Salat Olivier it summons up the complex bittersweet flavors of life in that vanished Atlantis called the USSR. There born in 1963 in a Kafkaesque communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen Anya grew up singing odes to Lenin black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at her school and like most Soviet citizens longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd drab naively joyous melancholy-and finally intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother. When she was ten the two of them fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.These days Anya lives in two parallel food universes: one in which she writes about four-star restaurants the other in which a simple banana-a once a year treat back in the USSR-still holds an almost talismanic sway over her psyche. To make sense of that past she and her mother decided to eat and cook their way through seven decades of the Soviet experience. Through the meals she and her mother re-create Anya tells the story of three generations-her grandparents' her mother's and her own. Her family's stories are embedded in a larger historical epic: of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning World War II hunger and survival Stalin's table manners Khrushchev's kitchen debates Gorbachev's anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of it is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit passionate nostalgia and piercing observations.This is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.
language: English
title: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
publisher: Crown