Von Bremzen’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents weathered the Revolution, the Civil War, the Purges, World War II, Stalin’s last mass deportations, Krushchev’s Thaw, and Brezhnev’s Stagnation. Even though most Soviet citizen couldn’t actually get much of the fancier ingredients in the Kniga (The Book), the book was a signal that food and its pleasures could be enjoyed once more. By the end of the decade, Mikoyan had traveled all across the United States and Europe and produced The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. Anastas Mikoyan, von Bremzen tells us, was tasked by Stalin to bring some happiness back into Soviet lives through good food and drink. It wasn’t until the 1930s when food started to become pleasurable again. Anything decadent was counterrevolutionary.

From the heights of the early twentieth century, von Bremzen shows us how communism-especially in its harshest eras-completely changed how an entire nation ate.Īfter the Revolution, food become fuel. This meal is our entree into the world of Russian and Soviet cooking. They did hours of research to find out how pre-Revolution restaurants constructed their multi-layered kulebiaka, fish pies. They scoured ethnic grocery stores across the city to find the right kids of fish and other hard-to-find ingredients. Some of their dinner guests could remember life before the 1917 Revolution, so it was vitally important that von Bremzen and her mother, Larissa, got their Tsarist dinner just right. Food lines come later, but von Bremzen begins with a meal she and her mother created for a few other Russian emigres in New York. The introduction to Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking displaced that image for me.

I’m sure most people have one image that immediately leaps to mind when the topic of food in the Soviet Union comes up: food lines. (I listened to the book on Scribd and decided that I needed a print edition for my library.) This book is delicious. Like many food memoirs I read, I wish that this one came with scratch and sniff sections or a gift basket that came with the copy of the book I ordered. In this memoir, von Bremzen writes the entire history of her post-Revolution family from the 1910s through the fall of the USSR. Since the day she left, von Bremzen has been chasing memories of her Soviet youth through food. Von Bremzen was born in Moscow in the early 1960s and left in 1974 with her mother, emigrating to New York. For the past two weeks, I’ve been having Kathleen Gati read me to sleep with Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.

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