“Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a monumental but deeply human book that reads like a great Russian novel, filled with dark humor and nostalgia. It opens up an entire universe, teaching us about the many deep meanings of food: cultural, political, social, historical, personal.”
“A fascinating, colorful, and at times oddly tender look at the history of the former Soviet Union as seen through Anya von Bremzen’s intimate recollections of food—including foods never eaten or never to be sampled again. Von Bremzen does a soulful job of capturing Russians’ ‘complicated and even tortured relationship with food.’ What emerges is her own complicated yet loving relationship to the culture she and her mother willingly left behind, but could never quite abandon.”
“Anya von Bremzen describes the foods of her past powerfully, poetically, and with a wicked sense of humor. Anyone can make a fancy layer cake sound delicious. To invoke an entire culture and era through an intimate story about a salad or soup—that’s taking food writing to a whole different level.”
“Here’s a surprise: a wry account of how the Soviet Union tasted. The author’s mother, the brilliantly resourceful daughter of a top military intelligence officer, appears to come straight out of Russian literature—only to become an émigré, a Pathmark shopper, and her daughter’s co-conspirator in Soviet food nostalgia and self-discovery. A wink, a laugh, a transgression, a sweet sad life over the generations that throws an epic history into a new light.”
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Anya von Bremzen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Selected recipes originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Saveur and Food & Wine magazines, Please to the Table by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 1990), and in The Greatest Dishes! by Anya von Bremzen (New York: William Morrow, 2004).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Von Bremzen, Anya.
Mastering the art of Soviet cooking : a memoir of food and longing /
Anya von Bremzen.—First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Von Bremzen, Anya. 2. Food writers—United States—Biography. 3. Women cooks—Soviet Union—Biography. 4. Cooking, Russian—History—20th century. 5. Food habits—Soviet Union. 6. Soviet Union—Social life and customs. 7. Russia (Federation)—Social conditions—1991– 8. Russian Americans—Biography. 9. Moscow
(Russia)—Biography. I. Title.
TX649.V66 2013
641.5947—dc23 2013007787
eISBN: 978-0-307-88683-5
Jacket design by Lisa Horton
Jacket illustration by Claudia Pearson
Author photograph by John von Pamer
Photograph on opening page for Part IV courtesy of John Welchman
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