Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Chapter One

1910s: The Last Days of the Czars

My mother is expecting guests.

In just a few hours in this sweltering July heat wave, eight people will show up for an extravagant ­czarist-­era dinner at her small Queens apartment. But her kitchen resembles a building site. Pots tower and teeter in the sink; the food processor and blender drone on in unison. In a shiny bowl on Mom s green ­faux-­granite counter, a porous blob of yeast dough seems weirdly alive. I m pretty sure it s breathing. Unfazed, Mother simultaneously blends, sautés, keeps an eye on Chris Matthews on MSNBC, and chatters away on her cordless phone. At this moment she suggests a plump ­modern-­day elf, multitasking away in her orange Indian housedress.

Ever since I can remember, my mother has cooked like this, phone tucked under her chin. Of course, back in Brezhnev s Moscow in the seventies when I was a kid, the idea of an extravagant czarist dinner would have provoked sardonic laughter. And the cord of our antediluvian black Soviet telefon was so traitorously twisted, I once tripped on it while carrying a platter of Mom s lamb pilaf to the low ­three-­legged table in the cluttered space where my parents did their living, sleeping, and entertaining.

Right now, as one of Mom s ancient émigré friends fills her ear with cultural gossip, that pilaf episode returns to me in cinematic slow motion. Masses of yellow rice cascade onto our Armenian carpet. Biddy, my ­two-­month-­old puppy, greedily laps up every grain, her eyes and tongue swelling shockingly in an instant allergic reaction to lamb fat. I howl, fearing for Biddy s life. My father berates Mom for her phone habits.

Mom managed to rescue the disaster with her usual flair, dotty and determined. By the time guests ­arrived ­with an extra four ­non-­sober ­comrades ­she d conjured up a tasty fantasia from two pounds of the proletarian wurst called sosiski. These she d cut into ­petal-­like shapes, splayed in a skillet, and fried

Anya von Bremzen is one of the most accomplished food writers of her generation: the winner of three James Beard awards; a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure magazine; the author of six acclaimed cookbooks, among them The New Spanish Table, The Greatest Dishes: Around the World in 80 Recipes, and Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook (coauthored by John Welchman); and the author of two other works of nonfiction, including National Dish. She also contributes regularly to Food & Wine and Saveur and has written for The New Yorker, Departures, and the Los Angeles Times. She divides her time between New York City and Istanbul.

Delightful . . . The culinary memoir has lately evolved into a genre of its own, what is now known as a oodoir. 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 and intimate details. The 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

Beautifully told . . . Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking turns a bittersweet eye and an intelligent heart on Soviet history through food. 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. The Philadelphia Inquirer

An ambitious food memoir that is also a meticulously researched history of the Soviet Union. . . . A meditation on culinary nostalgia. Julia Moskin, The New York Times

Both rollicking and heartrending. Time

Breathtaking . . . 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. Masha Gessen, New York Review of Books

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