![]() ![]() Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses. ![]() 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. An award-winning food writer, von Bremzen is also the author of Please to the Table (1990), a cookbook featuring the various cuisines of the former Soviet Union. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. This poignant memoir is an education in the richness of eastern European cuisine, and the story of Soviet communism, through the lens of family experience. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. ![]() 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. ![]()
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