Anya Von Bremzen - Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

This is much more than a memoir or an extended meditation on food and longing: this is history at its best, accessed through the kitchen door. Written with verve and seasoned with perfect doses of that irony that communist societies excel at cultivating, this book is a rare and delightful treat, as much of a page-turner as the best of novels and as enlightening an introduction to Soviet history as one could ever hope to find.

Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a monumental but deeply human book that reads like a great Russian novel, filled with dark humor and nostalgia. It opens up an entire universe, teaching us about the many deep meanings of food: cultural, political, social, historical, personal.

Ferran Adri, chef-proprietor, El Bulli

A fascinating, colorful, and at times oddly tender look at the history of the former Soviet Union as seen through Anya von Bremzens intimate recollections of foodincluding foods never eaten or never to be sampled again. Von Bremzen does a soulful job of capturing Russians complicated and even tortured relationship with food. What emerges is her own complicated yet loving relationship to the culture she and her mother willingly left behind, but could never quite abandon.

Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

Anya von Bremzen describes the foods of her past powerfully, poetically, and with a wicked sense of humor. Anyone can make a fancy layer cake sound delicious. To invoke an entire culture and era through an intimate story about a salad or soupthats taking food writing to a whole different level.

David Chang, chef-founder, Momofuku

Heres a surprise: a wry account of how the Soviet Union tasted. The authors mother, the brilliantly resourceful daughter of a top military intelligence officer, appears to come straight out of Russian literatureonly to become an migr, a Pathmark shopper, and her daughters co-conspirator in Soviet food nostalgia and self-discovery. A wink, a laugh, a transgression, a sweet sad life over the generations that throws an epic history into a new light.

Stephen Kotkin, professor of history, Princeton University; author of Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization

Copyright 2013 by Anya von Bremzen

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Selected recipes originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Saveur and Food & Wine magazines, Please to the Table by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 1990), and in The Greatest Dishes! by Anya von Bremzen (New York: William Morrow, 2004).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Von Bremzen, Anya.
Mastering the art of Soviet cooking : a memoir of food and longing /
Anya von Bremzen.First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Von Bremzen, Anya. 2. Food writersUnited StatesBiography. 3. Women cooksSoviet UnionBiography. 4. Cooking, RussianHistory20th century. 5. Food habitsSoviet Union. 6. Soviet UnionSocial life and customs. 7. Russia (Federation)Social conditions1991 8. Russian AmericansBiography. 9. Moscow
(Russia)Biography. I. Title.
TX649.V66 2013
641.5947dc23 2013007787

eISBN: 978-0-307-88683-5

Jacket design by Lisa Horton
Jacket illustration by Claudia Pearson
Author photograph by John von Pamer
Photograph on opening page for courtesy of John Welchman

v3.1

For Larisa

W henever my mother and I cook together, she tells me her dreams. So rich and intense is Moms dream life, shes given to cataloging and historicizing it: brooding black-and-white visions from her Stalinist childhood; sleek cold war thrillers laced with KGB spooks; melodramas starring duty-crushed lovers.

In a nod, I suppose, to her Iron Curtain past, Mother gets trapped in a lot of her dreamsalthough now, at seventy-nine years of age and after nearly four American decades, she tends to get trapped in pretty cool places. Deep, for example, in a mazelike, art-filled palace, one much resembling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, having retired as a schoolteacher, she works as a docent. In this dreams Technicolor finale, an orange balloon rescues Mom from her labyrinth and deposits her at the museums sumptuous caf. Whereupon she gorges on cream puffs.

But its one dream of hers from long ago, one I remember her telling me of many times, thats most emblematic. Here she is, skinny, short-haired, tiptoeing into my bedroom as I awake to the hopeless darkness of a Soviet socialist winter. Were in our minuscule flat in a shoddy Khrushchev-issue stained-concrete prefab on the outskirts of Moscow. Its 1968; I am five. Soviet tanks have just rolled into Prague, my dad has abandoned us recently, and weve moved here from a Kafka-esque communal apartment near the Kremlin where eighteen families shared one kitchen. Mom, in her robe with faded blue cornflowers, sits on my bed, presses a reassuring kiss to my forehead. But in her eyes I see such toska (that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul), such desperate longing, I know right away shes been visited once more by that dream.

Listen, listen, Anyuta, she murmurs. Yet again Im transformed into a lastochka (a swallow) I escape from Russia, flying across the Soviet border, and somehow no one asks me for documents. And suddenly Im in Paris! In Paris! I circle over the ocher-colored streets, I recognize them from Utrillo paintings. On a tiny rueits called Street of a Cat Who FishesI notice an enchanting caf. I speed down to the impossibly colorful awning, Im dizzy from the delicious smell of the food, everything inside me is aching to taste it, to join the people inside

At this point my mother always woke up. Always on the wrong side of the entrance. Always ravenous, overwhelmed by yearning for a world beyond the border she was never destined to see. By nostalgia for flavors that would forever elude her.

All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy after their own fashion.

Mom and I both grew up within a triumphalist, scarlet-blazed fairy tale of socialist abundance and glorious harvests. Our experiences, though, featured no happy kitchens enveloped in an idyllic haze of vanilla, no kindly matriarchs setting golden holiday roasts on the table. Tea cakes rich in bourgeois butter? I do have such a memory Its of Mom reading Proust aloud in our Khrushchevian slum; me utterly bored by the Frenchmans sensory reveries but besotted with the idea of the real, edible cookie. What did it taste like, that exotic capitalist madeleine? I desperately wanted to know.

Inevitably, a story about Soviet food is a chronicle of longing, of unrequited desire. So what happens when some of your most intense culinary memories involve foods you hadnt actually tasted? Memories of imaginings, of received histories; feverish collective yearning produced by seventy years of geopolitical isolation and scarcity