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    Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
    Unavailable
    Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
    Unavailable
    Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
    Audiobook12 hours

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

    Written by Anya von Bremzen

    Narrated by Kathleen Gati

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 17, 2013
    ISBN9780804128322
    Unavailable
    Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
    Author

    Anya von Bremzen

    Anya von Bremzen is the winner of three James Beard Awards for her books and journalism. She is the author of six acclaimed cookbooks and a memoir - Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking - which won the Guild of Food Writers 2014 Food Book of the Year in UK. She has written for Food & Wine, Travel+Leisure, Saveur, the New Yorker, and the Guardian among other publications. She was born in Russia to Ukrainian parents, and emigrated to the USA as a child. When not on the road Anya divides her time between New York and Istanbul.

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    Reviews for Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Wonderful book, very easy and tasty recipes
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. In fact I took far longer to read it than I ought to have because I didn't want to be done with it. I am not sure I want to make fish pie any time soon, or any of the other foods the author describes and provides recipes for, but after reading her anecdotes about these foods and the Russian and Soviet history that gives them their context, I am tempted to at least try a few traditional Russian dishes at some point. I really enjoyed the cultural history that this book presents, a side of Russian and Soviet life that does not often appear in any history textbook.
    • 5/5
      Anya Von Bremzen details her life against the history of Russia during the last century. Excellent
    • 4/5
      Very interesting. I always thought that if I could teach history I would do it through books like these- a food book in a way, but more than that it is a thoughtful and wrenching look at life in Soviet Russia, including the breakup of the USSR. Much more compelling and immediate than any history book could ever be.
    • 4/5
      If you want a Russian cookbook, choose her 'Please to the table...' This is a memoir. Very informative and amusing.
    • 5/5
      Good grades for authenticity. I can attest to that as I am of the same age and have similar to the author background. Got this book mostly because we have Anya von Bremzen's Russian cookbook, which has excellent recipes and commentaries. I can't say author is a very good writer though. It's more about her story and experience that resonates so well. It should also be very interesting for readers not intimately familiar with life during Soviet/Russian times.
    • 5/5
      I loved this memoir! Possibly because I lived there back when it was the USSR, possibly because it was my major decades ago, or quite possibly because Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Any Von Bremzen is a beautiful memoir with the added bonus of exceptional recipes, which I strongly suggest trying.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which was more memoir than food writing. The author digs back into her ancestry at the start, which feels a bit strained, but when she starts in on her memories the book gathers strength and became very engaging. Most writing out of the USSR, at least what I have read, has focused on the gulag and the extremes of life so it was fascinating to discover how an 'average' family lived and survived during this time. The visits after immigration were very insightful and compelling.
    • 5/5
      Award winning food writer and cookbook author Anya Von Bremzen interprets a tumultuous century of Russian history (from the fall of the Nicholas II to the rise of Putin) through the lens of food. She is interested in what people ate, how they prepared it, and what they had to do to get it. This book is most conveniently classified as a personal or family memoir, but it touches upon several genres, including history, travel and food writing. Americanized recipes for Soviet-era delicacies, such as kotleti (meat or vegetable patties) and the ubiquitous Salat Olivier, are included. The book is also a tribute to the author's mother, the independent-minded, indomitable Larisa, who tested the recipes along with her daughter.I was a little disappointed in the ending (the book reaches the Putin years then just sort of fizzles out), but I enjoyed the author's clever writing style, sharp observations, and unusual approach to her subject.
    • 5/5
      What a ride through history... A hundred years of it ingeniously compressed into a normal size volume. I was so overwhelmed by this book that I had to say to myself: wait, gather your thoughts...It is NOT a cookbook, obviously (though it does have nine recipes at the end - all to be tried out by yours truly, of course...). It's a memoir, one of the most excellent ones I've ever read. The title is ironic - one really has to be a "master" of cooking to be able to produce sumptuous dishes (like most Soviet women did; and I should know - my mother was one of them...) during Soviet years of constant food shortages. But mainly it's a memoir of Soviet life, starting in 1910s (leading towards the Revolution of 1917) and ending in post-Soviet days, as recent as 2011... The author was born in 1963, so she draws a lot from the reminiscences of her grandparents and her parents, especially her mother.The book is written with a bitter-sweet sense of humor and with just enough superbly worded healthy dose of sarcasm to be able to relive the disappointments of the Soviet regime. It has to be said that there are no "empty" phrases in this memoir: the expressions simply jump out at you with their sharp veracity, each and every sentence is loaded with meaning expressed by powerful and ingenious choice of words, thus unveiling a very talented writer and not just an author of a memoir and award winning cookbooks.It's impossible to quote from this book - one would be compelled to quote from every single page. And yet, I will try to single out a quote or two.The Stalin years have been disclosed in many memoirs by now, so I won't dwell on that, but here, for instance, the author describes her childhood in Soviet Union: "The State of my childhood had been a creaking geriatric machine run by a cartoonish Politburo that inspired nothing but vicious political humor. With fossilized lump of Brezhnev as Leader, it was, at times, rather fun." Later she sums it up rather vividly: "A popular Stagnation-era gag sums up what historians dub the Brezhnevian social contract. Six paradoxes of Mature Socialism: 1) There is no unemployment, but nobody works; 2) no one works, but productivity goes up; 3) productivity goes up, but stores are empty; 4) stores are empty, but fridges are full; 5) fridges are full, but no one is satisfied; 6) no one is satisfied, but everyone votes yes".And here is what happened when Gorbachev came to power. At first, news now was "openly devoured on the bus, on the metro. People read in lines and at tram stops; they read as they walked, drunk on the new outpouring of truths and reassessments". But..."in trying to reform the creaking, rustling wheel of centralized Soviet system, Gorbachev had loosened the screws, dismantled a part here, a part there, and ultimately halted the wheel - with nothing to replace it".And so it happened: "The finis, the official, irrevocable curtain falling on our fairy-tale communal life, the utopian social experiment for which millions of lives had been brutally sacrificed - now signing off in the most undramatic fashion imaginable" - by Gorbachev's 10 minute speech on TV. And what came next (through a debaucher Yeltzin, at first) - is Putin. An American observer (the author's boyfriend) having visited Moscow under Putin called it "Dubai with Pushkin statues".The memoir is interspersed with food talk, also referring to the proclaimed Soviet "cuisine of nations" (of Soviet republics), each so unique, but, presumably so "happy" to be part of the "great nation". Yet finally, under Gorbachev and then Yeltzin, "cuisine of nations became not a friendship buffet but a witches' brew of resentment stirred up by glasnost".All in all, I sincerely applaud Ms. von Bremzen for such a clear-headed take on history. A fabulous book.
    • 5/5
      "Food defined how Russians endured the present, imagined the future and connected to their past". In this memoir, Anya von Bremzen serves up a repast that is every bit as rich as the Czarist kulebiaka created in her mother's kitchen in Queens. More than just your run of the mill culinary writing, von Bremzen manages to fuse family history with that of the Soviet empire and adroitly explain how food became a semiotic landscape for cultural and personal expression in times of widespread oppression. Although this may sound overly ambitious, like borscht with far too many ingredients, readers of this memoir are able to sample and savor every element of her experience.Importantly, with food and family as the centralizing thing, von Bremzen is able to sublimate abstract Soviet history and policy changes into narratives that are accessible and relatable to any reader. I recommend this book to history buffs, foodies and Russophiles alike, as you will not be disappointed by von Bremzen's incisive vignette into life behind the Iron Curtain.
    • 5/5
      Marvelous! This is fascinating, touching, and eye-opening. The title is a bit misleading, since the “art of Soviet cooking” here is more a matter of resourcefulness than of culinary technique. The subtitle, however, captures the gist of the story very well, with von Bremzen, a renowned food writer, following changes in Soviet ideology through changes in the foods consumed by the leadership and the ordinary people. Mainly, though, this is a family memoir, in which the author, who, with her mother, left the Soviet Union at the age of eleven in 1974, traces the history of the Soviet Union through her family's story, from her great-great grandmother, Anna Alexeevna, a “Bolshevik feminist” who joined the Communist Party in 1918, through her own visits back to Russia in the Putin years. Food and recipes provide a unifying theme, as Anya and her mother cook decade-themed dinners together in her mother's New York kitchen, inspiring family reminiscences. The problems of acquiring food, as well as other challenges of life in the Soviet Union, are faced by Anya's family and their compatriots with ingenuity, humor, and resilience. Anya's love for her rodina (homeland) and its people, despite her recognition of its problems and flaws, gives her telling a tone of affectionate warmth that a more detached history of the period could never convey. More than by food, the story is tied together by recurring family bonds – the ties between parents and children, husbands and wives – bound in patterns of disappointments, misunderstandings, love, hope, and forgiveness. The story ends on a really lovely note which touched me as both a mother and a daughter. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Unlike what you might expect from the title, this book is more of a memoir and a history of the Soviet Union than a guide to cooking, but it is organized around the subject of getting and preparing food, which was a central concern in Soviet Russia. It takes its inspiration from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, with his theme of the images and memories evoked by the taste and smell of food.The author begins cleverly, paraphrasing the famous passage from Russian literature with her assertion that “All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy after their own fashion.”She has written some award-winning cookbooks, and so it is only natural that she uses food as a focal point. But she has a further rationale:"For any ex-citizen of a three-hundred-million-strong Soviet superpower, food is never a mere individual matter. In 1917 bread riots sparked the overthrow of the czar, and seventy-four years later, catastrophic food shortages helped push Gorbachev’s floundering empire into the dustbin. In between, seven million people perished from hunger during Stalin’s collectivization; four million more starved to death during Hitler’s war.”She observes that food and drinking and the rituals associated with them have been an abiding theme of Soviet political and cultural history. Food, she says, quoting one academic, “defined how Russians endured the present, imagined the future, and connected to their past.”Her goal, she states, is to show the “epic disjunction,” the “unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths” that made up the Soviet Union, and she does a splendid job achieving this aim.She personalizes the story by making it into a memoir of her own family's experiences for the duration of the Soviet Union, starting with the 1910’s, and proceeding by decade increments to the present. This, to me, is the real value of the book, because there are plenty of Soviet histories around, but von Bremzen provides anecdotes about what it was really like for the non-elites who lived through those times. She talks about food a lot, and I admit, most of it is food I wouldn’t want to eat. But most of the time, ordinary citizens in the USSR didn’t have much choice, and the author tells us just how they managed to make do with what they could find. They used as their bible The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food (or as she calls it “a totalitarian Joy of Cooking"). What is interesting about this book is that the content changed with each new regime. It was first published in 1939, and included didactic commentaries and ideological sermonizing as well as recipes, many of which involved food that none of the proletarian masses could hope to obtain. Von Bremzen writes:"The wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and its absence in shops made [the book’s] myth of plenty especially poignant. Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled down the deception; long-suffering H. sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, an artistic doctrine that insisted on depicting reality ‘in its revolutionary development’ - past and present swallowed up by a triumphant projection of a Radiant Future.”This paragraph is an excellent summary of what von Bremzen makes her theme, and her goal, in highlighting the contradictions of life in the USSR.At the end of the book, the author includes one recipe for each decade she covered. The recipes are preceded by very entertaining anecdotes.Discussion: I love the understated cynicism and humorous sarcasm so common to many who survived the Soviet period, especially among the samizdat writers. If you have read other remembrances of that time, you will recognize this tone, so distinctive to those who daily lived and breathed the hypocrisy of their so-called socialist state. This passage, in which von Bremzen writes of Stalin’s involvement in food policy is a perfect example of her style:"When [Stalin] wasn’t busy signing execution orders or censoring books or screening [the movie] Volga-Volga], the Standardbearer of Communism opined on fish (‘Why don’t we sell live fish like they did in the old days?’) or Soviet champagne.”Similarly, her ironic names for the leaders of the USSR are endlessly entertaining as well as revealing, from one of many for Stalin, “The Best Friend of All Children” to “the fossilized lump of Brezhnev,” to Putin: “an obscure midget with a boring KGB past” who established a “petrodollar kleptocracy.”Evaluation: Although this book wasn’t what I thought it would be, it was actually much better. If you are looking for more of a cookbook, there are certainly many that feature foods of the Russian continent. This book is much more than that, and yet, the subject of food is central to the story.
    • 4/5
      What better way to tell the story of Soviet life for the past one hundred years than through the food of the time? Anya Von Bremzen brilliantly intermingles stories of her family with food stories and recipes to create this excellent book.**Cautionary note: This is just my very-humble opinion) I didn’t see a single recipe, unfortunately, that I wanted to try or even copy down. Lots of food that was as bleak as the gray Soviet lives.
    • 5/5
      Part memoir and part family history, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a fascinating, affectionate, irreverent, and for me surprising inside account of everyday life during successive eras of the Soviet Union, from revolution through Stalin and Khrushchev to glasnost, paying particular attention to the food that was available and how it was acquired, prepared, and served. Having grown up in Cold War America reading it was like looking out at the world through the reverse side of a mirror. Anya’s grandfather worked in Soviet intelligence, and through devout loyalty managed to not get arrested when regimes changed, rules morphed, and history was rewritten. Her mother on the other hand was a self-styled cultural exile and dissident, still actually living within the country but refusing as much as possible to be part of it, so Anya had a wide variety of experiences, from the nauseating privilege of a kindergarten curriculum that included daily doses of caviar to the difficult negotiations of cooking in a crowded communal kitchen. She queued in food lines and ran a black market business selling sticks, or sometimes just a few flavorful chews, of Juicy Fruit gum to her school mates. Eventually Anya and her mother immigrated to the United States and when an injury ended her musical career she became a food writer--food being a natural obsession for someone who grew up in a country where getting enough could be a challenge. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is not a cookbook but there are a few recipes in the back of the book, including for Salat Olivier, a potato/carrot/canned peas/egg/apple/pickle salad that I can’t picture and have to try.