Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. 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.

To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. 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. 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. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy-and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. 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. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses.A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generationsīorn in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. Title details for Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen - Available. And all of this is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia and piercing observations. Her narrative is embedded in a larger historical epic: Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II starvation, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's disastrous anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen 4,123 ratings, 4.

It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West.

Mastering the art of soviet cooking