Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longingby Anya von Bremzen
A Review of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen
“It was my mother, my frequent co-conspirator in the kitchen and my conduit to our past, who suggested the means to convey this epic disjunction, this unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths. We would reconstruct every decade of Soviet history - from the prequel 1910s to the postscript present day - through the prism of food. Together, we’d embark on a yearlong journey unlike any other: eating and cooking our way through decade after decade of Soviet life, using her kitchen and dining room as a time machine and an incubator of memories. ”
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen (2013). Published by Crown.
Soviet cooking has been on my radar for a hot minute now, ever since I started deep diving into what exactly made Russian cuisine. A lot of people don’t seem to realize is that when the Russian Empire was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and then Stalin took over, even recipes were standardized to be the same for everyone. The Soviets lost all artistry in their cooking, and thus the great chefs were limited in their creativity because they had to follow the same recipes as everyone else, down to the exact measurements and whatnot.
If you also know me in real life, you know that I’m obsessed with the events leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Romanovs are my jam when it comes to historical bread and lore—I’m absolutely fascinated with them, and, how, they were essentially set up to be doomed.
And so when I found this book, I was really curious about the premise. The title alone is what got me: a memoir? Food writing? Digging deeper into the gastronomy culture of the Soviet Union? They had me sold almost immediately. And so I downloaded a copy for my Kindle, and, on a rainy night that had a lot of thunderbolts, I sat down to read it after watching a Wong Kar Wai movie.
Let’s break down what makes this book so special.
Content
I knew nothing about this book coming into it, and, so, I thought it was going to be more memoir-like when it came to recalling the Soviet Union and what it was like living there. I was completely wrong in that expectation and was actually blown away by what I was reading. She infuses this historical notion of what Russia was; e.g. she describes how food in the czarist regime was, giving in-depth and critical insights into what the gastronomy culture was throughout the decades.
I also really liked this book because of how it connects her childhood in Moscow to her current life in the United States. In one scene, she describes how her mother set out to make this one Romanov era dish that was lost when Russia became the Soviet Union, and they have a house party of fellow ex-USSR people and a random couple from Brooklyn. As they all sit around trying this dish, they proclaim how Russia couldn’t have left behind such a dish, how it was left in the throes of history. Then there’s the non-Russian couple there being like “What happened in Russia?” and are the ones asking the important questions for the reader.
And that, in a way, is what this memoir is about: what happened? von Bremzen traces what happened, about how a flourishing culinary tradition that was just starting to innovate was snuffed out and replaced with starvation, standardized cooking, and just widespread suffering. This memoir also holds a hint of nostalgia for the past, despite the sadness that came with growing up in the USSR. Despite von Bremzen getting out and her mother and her emigrating to the United States, the food she had dreamed about on the other side was actually quite disappointing once she tasted it in the US.
We also get great descriptions of the mother-daughter relationship throughout; there are little tidbits I found myself to be really enjoying, especially how they tried to recreate the food of their past.
Overall Thoughts
I also had no idea who Anya von Bremzen was before reading this book, and now I’m finding out she’s won the James Beard Award three times for her food writing. Evidently, she knows how to write food well, which I’m quite impressed with! I’ll definitely be keeping her works out on my radar in the near future as I explore food media as a potential career.
This isn’t a cookbook at all, that’s the first warning I’m giving. It digs deep into her family’s history and the memoir aspect, then the historical aspect of the Soviet Union by decade, and the politics of the region. We hear a lot about how the West was depicted, as well as the failures of certain USSR leaders and the Romanovs themselves, despite their tragic fate. I think this is definitely worth picking up if you’re vaguely interested in Russia, the USSR, food writing, and/or food memoirs. All in all, I genuinely loved it and will purchase a real copy for myself one day.
