Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
Anya Von Bremzen
Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR .
In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. Her narrative is embedded in a larger historical epic: Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II starvation, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's disastrous anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of this is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia and piercing observations. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses.
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About Anya Von Bremzen
Reviews for Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
Niki Segnit
The Sunday Times
Heartbreakingly poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. This is an important book, a must read!
Heston Blumenthal
Vastly entertaining... A real treat.
Woman & Home
By turns funny, tragic and nostalgic, this is a wonderful, fascinating volume, which puts a human face on the grim pages of the history books
The Lady
This poignant memoir is an education in the richness of eastern European cuisine, and the story of Soviet communism, through the lens of family experience.
Observer
wry, provocative, genre-busting...
Wall Street Journal
Absorbing... a social history of the Soviet Union cast through the prism of food
Jewish Chronicle
Rollicking and heartrending
Time
You will read few better books about food, family, exile or the Soviet tragedy—and none, I'll bet, which combines all those themes this magically. Funny, angry, ingenious and moving.
AD Miller, author of 'Snowdrops'
The culinary memoir has lately evolved into a genre of its own... But Anya von Bremzen is a better writer than most of the genre's practitioners, as this delectable book, which tells the story of postrevolutionary Russia through the prism of one family's meals, amply demonstrates… von Bremzen moves artfully between historical longshots...and intimate details. The descriptions of meals are delightful...
New York Times