Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
A Memoir of Food and Longing
A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations
“Delicious . . . A banquet of anecdote that brings history to life with intimacy, candor, and glorious color.”—NPR’s All Things Considered
Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy—and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political…
$22.00
September 16, 2014
Anya von Bremzen is one of the most accomplished food writers of her generation: the winner of three James Beard awards; a contributing writer at AFAR magazine; and 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 with John Welchman). Her memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, has been translated into nineteen languages. Anya has been a contributing editor at Travel+Leisure and Food & Wine, and has written for Saveur, The New Yorker, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. Her work has been anthologized in several editions of Best Food Writing and in The Best American Travel Writing.…
National Dish
Anya von Bremzen