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

Evokes a mid-20th-century Soviet experience, as the author traces her upbringing by an anti-Soviet mother, her witness to the political events surrounding the empire's collapse, and her parallel food universes that included both simple and sumptuous fare.

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A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Book of 2013
A 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 the Art of Soviet Cooking is not only a magic tablecloth, it's a magic carpet that revisits the roads and lanes of the former Soyuz, surveying the tales of hardship and hardwon joys of von Bremzen's relatives and the Russian people."
-Liesl Schillinger, The Daily Beast

"Russian treasures! You never know when they're going to pop up. My heart gladdened at the sight of Anya Von Bremzen's book. This is history at a personal level, the kitchen table."
- Martin Cruz Smith, The Wall Street Journal

"Splendid...[Von Bremzen] describes the U.S.S.R. with the eyes of a betrayed lover-alternately despairing, dismayed, aghast and yet, somehow...with love."
-Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times

"At once harrowing and funny as hell, an epic history told through kotleti (Soviet hamburgers) and contraband Coca-Cola."
- James Oseland, Saveur

"There is no book quite like Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking ...Through all of this lovely and moving memoir's good humor, bittersweet reminiscences, and gorgeous evocations of food, there hangs the 'toska,' the Russian nostalgic 'ache,' of Anya and Larisa's conflicted feelings about the past."
-Christian Science Monitor

"[T]his is no simple food memoir. Von Bremzen situates every dish she mentions in its historical, cultural and literary context, sim

Product details

• Authors: Anya von Bremzen, Anya von Bremzen
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 24.09.2013
• EAN: 9780307886811
• ISBN: 978-0-307-88681-1
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 240 mm x 32 mm
• Series: Crown Books
• Subjects: Guides > Food & drink > International cuisine; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Sowjetunion (ehemalige) : Berichte, Erinnerungen