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Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
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About Mastering The Art Of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir Of
Product Description A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return. Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. Review A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2013A Christian Science Monitor Best Nonfiction Book of 2013"The culinary memoir has lately evolved into a genre of its own, what is now known as a 'foodoir.' 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 (minefields being cleared 'by sending troops attacking across them') and intimate details, like her schoolgirl mother’s lunch ration of podushechka, a candy the size of a fingernail...The descriptions of meals are delightful." —New York Times Book Review "Von Bremzen ladles out a rich, zesty history of family life in the USSR conveyed through food and meals."—Entertainment Weekly "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking turns a bittersweet eye and an intelligent heart on Soviet history through food...Beautifully told."—Los Angeles Times"Von Bremzen knows how to tell a story – poignant, funny, but never lacking."—Chicago Tribune"Brilliant...a lyrical memoir and multifaceted reflection on Soviet (and American) cultures."—Philadelphia Inquirer"An ambitious food memoir that is also a meticulously researched history of the Soviet Union...a meditation on culinary nostalgia." —Julia Moskin, New York Times"Anya von Bremzen's saga of growing up in a superpower always on the verge of starvation is both rollicking and heartrending." —Time "A delicious narrative of memory and cuisine in 20th-century Soviet Union. In Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, [von Bremzen] follows in the footsteps of Nigel Slater's Toast and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: memoirs about life, love and food that linger long after the last page is turned. Her tale is a nostalgia-laden compendium of madeleine moments...A banquet of anecdote that brings an entire history to life with intimacy, candor and glorious color."—Ellah Allfrey, NPR’s All Things Considered"Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a painstakingly researched and beautifully written cultural history but also the best kind of memoir: one with a self-aware narrator who has mastered the art of not taking herself entirely seriously...A breathtaking balancing act...Von Bremzen is as much a virtuoso in her writing as her mother is in her cooking." —Masha Gessen, New York Review of Books"One-of-a-kind...A nostalgically anti-nostalgic tribute to 20th-century life and food in the land once known as the Soviet Union...Breathtaking feats of raconteurial skill...Mastering
