Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

Born in 1963, Anya von Bremzen grew up in a communual Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy--and, finally, intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother. When Anya was 10, the two of them fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return. Now Anya lives in two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life in its full flavor, both bitter and sweet, Anya and her mother, Larisa, decide to cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, Anya tells the story of three Soviet generations, including her grandfather Naum, a glamorous intelligence chief under Stalin; her hard-drinking, sarcastic father, Sergei, who abandons the family shortly after Anya is born; and Larisa, the romantic dreamer who grew up dreading the black public loudspeakers trumpeting the glories of the Five-Year Plan. Their stories unfold against the panorama of Soviet history and, ultimately, the collapse of the USSR. Bound together by Anya's passionate nostalgia, sly humor, and piercing observations, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking stirs our souls and our senses.