What's cooking in the Kremlin : from Rasputin to Putin, how Russia built an empire with a knife and fork

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Title:

What's cooking in the Kremlin : from Rasputin to Putin, how Russia built an empire with a knife and fork

Author:

Szabłowski, Witold, 1980- author.

Uniform Title:

Rosja od kuchni. English

ISBN:

9780143137184

Physical Description:

xxi, 357 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm

General Note:

"First published in Poland as Rosja od kuchni: Jak zbudować imperium nożem, chochlą i widelcem by Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal, Warsaw"--Title page verso.

Contents:

Preface -- Introduction -- The last tsar's chef -- Lenin's cook -- The great famine -- A meeting in the mountains: Stalin's eating habits -- Beauty and Beria: Stalin's cook and his wife -- A baker in besieged Leningrad -- Exhumation: cooking in wartime -- The feast at Yalta -- Gagarin's cook -- The Kremlin chef -- The cook from the Afghan War -- The first return of Viktor Belyaev -- The fairy-tale forest: cooking at Chernobyl -- The second return of Viktor Belyaev -- Wild boar goulash, or the Soviet Union's last supper -- The sanatorium cook -- Crimean Tatar cuisine -- The third return of Viktor Belyaev.

Subject Term:

Cooks -- Russia (Federation) -- Interviews.

Cooking -- Political aspects -- Russia (Federation)

Food habits -- Russia (Federation)

Cooking, Slavic.

Geographic Term:

Russia -- History.

Soviet Union -- History.

Russia (Federation) -- History.

Genre:

Cookbooks.

Added Author:

Lloyd-Jones, Antonia,

Summary:

"A high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power and propaganda through food"--

Holds:

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake)	641.509247 SZA	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	641.509247 SZA	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

A New York Times Editors' Choice

"Entertaining . . . A heady mix of propaganda and paranoia . . . [Szabłowski writes] sensitively . . . not just about food but also its terrible absence." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Riveting--a delicious odyssey full of history, humor, and jaw-dropping stories. If you want to understand the making of modern Russia, read this book." --Daniel Stone, bestselling author of The Food Explorer

A high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power through food, by an award-winning Polish journalist who's been praised by both Timothy Snyder and Bill Buford

In the gonzo spirit of Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S. Thompson, Witold Szabłowski has tracked down--and broken bread with--people whose stories of working in Kremlin kitchens impart a surprising flavor to our understanding of one of the world's superpowers.

In revealing what Tsar Nicholas II's and Lenin's favorite meals were, why Stalin's cook taught Gorbachev's cook to sing to his dough, how Stalin had a food tester while he was starving the Ukrainians during the Great Famine, what the recipe was for the first soup flown into outer space, why Brezhnev hated caviar, what was served to the Soviet Union's leaders at the very moment they decided the USSR should cease to exist, and whether Putin's grandfather really did cook for Lenin and Stalin, Szabłowski has written a fascinating oral history--complete with recipes and photos--of Russia's evolution from culinary indifference to decadence, famine to feasts, and of the Kremlin's Olympics-style preoccupation with food as an expression of the country's global standing.

Traveling across Stalin's Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chornobyl, and even to a besieged steelworks plant in Mariupol--often with one-of-a-kind access to locales forbidden to foreign eyes, and with a rousing sense of adventure and an inimitable ability to get people to spill the tea--he shows that a century after the revolution, Russia still uses food as an instrument of war and feeds its people on propaganda.

Author Notes

Witold Szabłowski is an award-winning Polish journalist and the author of How to Feed a Dictator ("an outright pleasure to read" --Bill Buford) and the New York Times Editors' Choice Dancing Bears ("mix[es] bold journalism with bolder allegories" --Timothy Snyder). When he was twenty-four he had a stint as a chef in Copenhagen, and at age twenty-five he became the youngest reporter at one of Poland's largest daily newspapers, where he won awards for his features on the issue of immigrants flocking to the EU and the 1943 massacre of Poles in Ukraine. He lives in Warsaw.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Szablowski (How to Feed a Dictator) serves up a culinary travelogue infused with dark and savory legends from Russia's kitchens, dachas, cafeterias, and canteens. He interviews the great-granddaughter of one of Czar Nicholas II's cooks to find out what the czar and his family ate in their final days before Bolshevik guards executed the whole family, including their chef; evaluates Lenin's diet of fried eggs, raw milk, and boiled buckwheat for its revolutionary health benefits (and risks); muses on how Stalin's love for his native Georgian food brought a "genuine gastronomic revolution" to the U.S.S.R.; and relays firsthand accounts from survivors of the 1930s famine in Ukraine and the 1941--1944 Siege of Leningrad about eating soups made from pinecones and breads baked with ground tree bark. Among those he spotlights are Faina Kazetska, the Star City cook who prepared meals for Yuri Gagarin and other Soviet cosmonauts; the dozen young women from Pripyat who cooked for the cleanup crews after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl; and Kremlin chef Viktor Belyaev, whose lavish feasts dazzled delegations of Western leaders including Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon. Szablowski's account is enriched with recipes gathered during his travels throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and several ex-Soviet republics. Readers will be satiated by this easily digestible gastronomic history. (Nov.)

Kirkus Review

Penetrating the secrets of the Kremlin through delightful chronicles of the long-suffering chefs who catered to Russian leaders. In an original work of social history, Polish journalist Szabłowski, the author of How To Feed a Dictator and Dancing Bears, alternates narrative with interviews (and recipes) to delve into some recondite and often apocryphal stories of the people who cooked for the Russian elite, from Ivan Kharitonov, the chef executed with Tsar Nicholas II in 1918; to Polina Ivanovna, who cooked "the Soviet Union's last supper." What the author learned can be summed up in two sentences of Russian propaganda: "It doesn't matter if a story is true. What matters is that people believe it." Case in point: Vladimir Putin's grandfather, Spirodin, cooked in various Russian sanitoriums, but claiming that he served Russian leaders from Rasputin to Stalin was great propaganda when Putin was campaigning for office. Over years, Szabłowski has tracked down many of his elusive subjects, and he tells a wide variety of entertaining stories about this colorful cast of characters, including longtime Kremlin chef Viltor Belyaev, who relates detailed, chilling, and priceless stories about cooking for Brezhnev and Gorbachev; the devoted cook who created food in tubes for cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's mission to space in 1961; and the doomed kitchen staff assembled for the clean-up crew after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The author includes horrific eyewitness accounts of Ukrainians surviving the Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 ("Every seven minutes someone in Ukraine died of starvation"), as well as those who suffered during the two-year German siege of Leningrad. Szabłowski also relates the saga of the intrepid "Mama Nina," who cooked for a Soviet airbase in Afghanistan, with little understanding of the nature of the war. The author closes with a poignant, timely look at the tenuous culinary culture of the Tatars, who were nearly eliminated from Crimea. A bitter history lesson taught with humor and grace. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Preface	xi
Introduction	xv
I The Last Tsar's Chef	1
II Lenin's Cook	20
III The Great Famine	41
IV A Meeting in the Mountains: Stalin's Eating Habits	64
V Beauty and Beria: Stalin's Cook and His Wife	72
VI A Baker in Besieged Leningrad	92
VII Exhumation: Cooking in Wartime	114
VIII The Feast at Yalta	125
IX Gagarin's Cook	135
X The Kremlin Chef	164
XI The Cook from the Afghan War	190
XII The First Return of Viktor Belyaev	221
XIII The Fairy-Tale Forest: Cooking at Chernobyl	241
XIV The Second Return of Viktor Belyaev	281
XV Wild Boar Goulash, or the Soviet Union's Last Supper	286
XVI The Sanatorium Cook	310
XVII Crimean Tatar Cuisine	321
XVIII The Third Return of Viktor Belyaev	343
Afterword	348
Acknowledgments	350
Bibliography	351
Photo Credits	358

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Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

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