Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing in Around the World

May 17, 2015 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reread, read2015, international-book-club, ebooks

I read this back in 2013, and my review at the time still holds true. I reread it for a book club and I'm looking forward to our discussion, and might add more afterwards.

What I found really striking this time through is the concept of nostalgia and how we can long for and idealize things or people or times that weren't necessarily good but they were known or our experience. In Soviet Russia, maybe this is the only thing to cling to. ;) ...more

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Jul 23, 2013 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read2013, location-russia, foodie, biography-memoir, around-the-world

Ever since I read the starred review of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking in the 24 June issue of Publishers Weekly, I knew I had to get my hands on this book! I was lucky to come across it in NetGalley, which gave me a copy for review.

"Inevitably, a story about Soviet food is a chronicle of longing, of unrequited desire."

Anya Von Bremzen was born in the USSR and later emigrated to the United States with her mother. Her James Beard award winning cookbook, Please To The Table: The Russian Cook Ever since I read the starred review of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking in the 24 June issue of Publishers Weekly, I knew I had to get my hands on this book! I was lucky to come across it in NetGalley, which gave me a copy for review.

"Inevitably, a story about Soviet food is a chronicle of longing, of unrequited desire."

Anya Von Bremzen was born in the USSR and later emigrated to the United States with her mother. Her James Beard award winning cookbook, Please To The Table: The Russian Cookbook, was published in 1990, so her knowledge of the food of Russia is not to be disputed. Instead of the regional focus that her cookbook had, this memoir is divided into decades of Soviet Russia. Each chapter takes a decade and discusses the historical events, the food, and how each impacted her personal story - her family, her ancestors, her memories - from 1910s into the twenty-first century.

When I got to the end of the chapter on the Czars and there were no recipes, I panicked. Surely I couldn't move on from this book without a chance to make Kulebiaka! She quotes Chekhov's description of the dish from "The Siren" and then goes on to talk about the significance of the dish in her own family. I wanted to try it immediately! Thankfully, Part V of the book features recipes from each chapter, removed to the end for the sake of a continual narrative.

Even the decades of Communism-driven scarcity create a sort of nostalgia for Soviet sausages and dense bread that I was surprised to be feeling along with her. The comparison she makes between those foods and the only food they could afford right after entering the country - hot dogs and Wonderbread - I had to wonder if they really are so different?

From reading how Lenin had a fondness for apple cake to the puzzling "luxury" of Salat Olivier, I enjoyed reading about the very Russian foods and stories. Highly recommended!

Here is a bit that made me giggle - a poster from the 1920s when housewives were being encouraged to stop cooking for their families, and families were being forced to live communally. The translation is "Down with Kitchen Slavery!"

...more

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Aug 16, 2013 Daisy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites-of-all-time, russia-ussr, aroundtheworld2013, food, east-bloc-memoir, food-memoir-with-recipes

This book should be taught in school history courses. It is an exceptional resource for Soviet history, it's well-written and well-researched. But most of all, it's accessible, nostalgic without being cloying or overly-sentimental, and it's touching. It happens to cover some of the subjects that interest me most: food, Russian/Soviet history, mother-daughter relationships. This book could've been written for me. I first took it out from the library, but I saw immediately I wanted to own it.

Each ...more

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Jan 18, 2020 Andrea rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, food, around-the-world-2020, city-library, group-read, personal-challenge-2020

So much more than the memoir of its title; this is part family history, part socio-political history, part cookbook. The author traces the rise and fall of the USSR by decade, from the 1910s to the 2010s, using food as the milestone markers of the journey. Von Bremzen's writing has an engaging, fairly irreverent style, allowing her to deliver both the tragedy and the comedy of the era in such a way that the reader can choose whether to laugh or cry. I am in awe of how much I learned from reading ...more

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Dec 05, 2016 K rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoirs, expat-reads, feminism-reads, food-writing

This was a very fun read about the history of the Soviet Union as experienced through what people ate in each decade of the Soviet Union's history. It started with a meal fit for the Tsars for contrast, and then explained how people ate and prepared meals in communal kitchens under communism.

Two things Anya von Bremzen does particularly well in this book is explain Gorbachev from the Soviet point-of-view at the end of the Soviet Empire. Westerners celebrate the end of the rivalry (short-lived, i ...more

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