Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 921 VONBREMZEN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
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
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 repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.
Now Anya occupies 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, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.
Author Notes
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 magazi≠ and the author of five 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). 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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Author of several international cookbooks, Moscow-born von Bremzen immigrated to U.S. shores with her mother in 1974. Here, she unlocks conflicted memories of her Soviet upbringing through reminiscences of certain dishes that became her very own "poisoned madeleines." The period covered by the book begins with the fall of the czar in 1917 and ends with the triumphant return of the mother-and-daughter duo to "Putin's mean petro-dollar capital" in 2011 in order to do their very own TV cooking show. Each decade is represented by foods that evoke emotional volumes: the fussy, decadent pre-Revolution aristocrat's diet of burbot liver and viziga gave way to Lenin's culinary austerity, exemplified by a spartan apple cake; the labor-intensive gefilte fish made by the author's Jewish grandmother in Odessa was deemed unpatriotic and was replaced by utilitarian kotleti (Russian hamburgers); and food shortages and the rationing of the 1940s prompted "sham" foods for the starvation diet. The fluctuating political winds of the Soviet state were harnessed in successive editions of the totalitarian culinary bible, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, where American and Jewish ingredients were unceremoniously deleted during the 1950s Cold War. Corn, caviar, mayonnaise, and vodka: for both von Bremzen and her mother, a teacher, these were the subjects of intense longing, as they endured living in a communal apartment with 18 other people and being abandoned by von Bremzen's father, as well as regimented schooling and harassment as Jews. Recipes included. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Most Westerners imagine Stalinist Russia as a food desert: politics dictating taste, failed agricultural policies yielding shortages and famines, muddled distribution systems spawning interminable queues, and black markets supplying forbidden goods. Although this view has plenty of truth, it lacks nuance and humanity, as von Bremzen reveals so eloquently in this memoir. Arriving at age 10 in Philadelphia with her mother and a couple of suitcases, she found herself in a new culinary world that she ultimately embraced. Nevertheless, she pined for some of the great prerevolutionary Russian dishes, such as kulebiaka, the famous salmon pie that so defines classic Russian cooking. Von Bremzen, disdaining czarist Russia as much as the Soviet Union, shows the personal side of Soviet life, recounting the terror of war and secret police as well as the power of human resilience. Thanks to some recipes, American home cooks may summon up for themselves the tastes and smells the author evokes.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
the culinary memoir has lately evolved into a genre of its own, what is now known as a "foodoir." 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. The author and her mother arrived in Philadelphia in the winter of 1974, stateless refugees with no warm coats. They were also, von Bremzen says, "thoroughly gentrified Moscow Jews," abandoned some years earlier by the infant Anya's father. But to tell their story, von Bremzen goes back to her maternal grandparents in the 1920s, interspersing historical material with flash-forwards and commentary as she works her way to the present. When, for example, von Bremzen returns to Moscow in 1987, the reader is offered a disquisition on Russia's "long-soaked, -steeped and -saturated history with vodka" - or, failing vodka, with politura ("wood varnish"). An award-winning food writer, von Bremzen is also the author of "Please to the Table" (1990), a cookbook featuring the various cuisines of the former Soviet Union. To confect this latest volume, she and her mother (now 79) used their overheated American kitchen and dining room "as a time machine and an incubator of memories." Deploying the hallowed 1939 "Book of Tasty and Healthy Food," known to Soviet citizens simply as "the Book," they recreate old dissident get-togethers, preparing a Stalin's Deathday Dinner and even brewing their own kvass. Not surprisingly, there's much that's harrowing in "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking," especially the sections dealing with World War II. Here von Bremzen moves artfully between historical longshots (minefields being cleared "by sending troops attacking across them") and intimate details, like her schoolgirl mother's lunch ration of podushechka, a candy the size of a fingernail. More amusingly, the chapter on the 1950s includes a short essay on living in a culture of perpetual shortages: "Your average Homo sovieticus spent a third to half of his nonworking time queuing for something." A bit later, von Bremzen reaches her own birth, in 1963, a year also remembered for one of the worst crop failures in post-Stalin history. The descriptions of meals are delightful, despite the anomaly at the heart of her book: during the Soviet period, there was almost nothing decent to eat, unless you were a party official. After the revolution, she explains with characteristic elegance, "in just a bony fistful of years, classical Russian food culture vanished." Inevitably, therefore, "a story about Soviet food is a chronicle of longing." But von Bremzen makes the best of her material, conjuring the whiff of fermenting sauerkraut in an enameled bucket, the sight of sinews and fat glistening in a cheap goulash "with an ivory palette" and the sharp and creamy taste of the ubiquitous salat Olivier in the "kitschy, mayonnaise-happy '70s." The gunky Olivier, she writes, "could be a metaphor for a Soviet émigré's memory: urban legends and totalitarian myths, collective narratives and biographical facts, journeys home both real and imaginary - all loosely cemented with mayo." When the Soviet Union implodes, von Bremzen is tucking into wild duck with a fiery sauce in the rebellious Georgian subrepublic of Abkhazia. The 21st-century chapter, excruciatingly titled "Putin on the Ritz," is brief, and she rounds off the book with a collection of recipes, one per decade. In homage, I made her version of kulebiaka (fish, rice and mushrooms in pastry). As she says, "the sour cream in the yeast dough . . . adds a lovely tang to the buttery casing." Priyatnogo appetita. SARA WHEELER is the author of "O My America! : Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World."
Kirkus Review
Travel + Leisure contributing editor and three-time James Beard Awardwinning cookbook author von Bremzen's (The New Spanish Table, 2005, etc.) nostalgia for a prickly Soviet childhood brings memories of food both delectable and biting. Toska, "that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul," periodically stalks the author and her mother, Larisa Frumkin, who emigrated together from the Soviet Union to Philadelphia in 1974, when the author was 10. Although daily existence back in the Soviet Union had been harsh--anti-Semitic harassment, little support from a philandering father, and rough living conditions, including a lack of privacy, food shortages and lines for basic items--mother and daughter have found in food and cooking a way to capture their essential "Soviet homeland," even if it's more the idea of it than the way it ever really was. The author and her fervently dissident mother have re-created, in their tiny kitchen, certain foods that seem emblematic of each decade of the Soviet saga, from the pre-revolution time through the Stalinist era, World War II deprivations, Cold War classics and the "mature Socialist" period of the author's upbringing. For example, the impossibly decadent czarist fish pastry Kulebiaka delineated so seductively by Chekhov and Gogol marks the 1910s; Gefilte fish is the "poisoned Madeleine" of Larisa's childhood in Odessa, encapsulating a time of anti-religious fervor and familial bitterness; a Georgian dish called Chanakhi celebrates Stalin's death and the era touted for its "totalitarian joy"; the ersatz ingredients fondly remembered in the 1970s converge happily in the Salat Olivier, smothered with the ubiquitous Soviet mayonnaise Provansal. With anecdotes, history and recipes, the author delivers a lively, precisely detailed cultural chronicle. With a wink and a grimace, von Bremzen vividly characterizes the "Homo sovieticus."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
While the title suggests a massive volume of recipes, this work is actually a memoir of life in Soviet Russia. The book is -subdivided by decade, and von Bremzen (contributing editor, Travel + Leisure; The New Spanish Table) weaves her own memories together with stories from her grandmother and mother, beginning in 1910. The common denominator-and recurring touchstone-is food. The author vividly describes foods such as the kulebiaka, a towering pastry of fish, rice, and mushrooms, and salat Olivier, a French chef's extravagant creation that underwent a Soviet reformation, swapping carrots for crayfish and chicken for grouse and putting potatoes and canned peas at the forefront before the entire dish was smothered in mass-produced mayonnaise. Von Bremzen concludes with nine recipes. VERDICT A poignant history of everyday life in Soviet Russia and the author's personal journey to the United States, this volume is more likely to appeal to history buffs looking for a personal account than to foodies seeking a guidebook. For Russian cooking, see von Bremzen's James Beard Award-winning Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook.-Rosemarie Lewis, Georgetown Cty. Lib., SC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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 up with eggs. Her creation landed at table under provocative blood-red squiggles of ketchup, that decadent capitalist condiment. For dessert: Mom's equally spontaneous apple cake. "Guest-at-the-doorstep apple charlotte," she dubbed it. Guests! They never stopped crowding Mom's doorstep, whether at our apartment in the center of Moscow or at the boxy immigrant dwelling in Philadelphia where she and I landed in 1974. Guests overrun her current home in New York, squatting for weeks, eating her out of the house, borrowing money and books. Every so often I Google "compulsive hospitality syndrome." But there's no cure. Not for Mom the old Russian adage "An uninvited guest is worse than an invading Tatar." Her parents' house was just like this, her sister's even more so. Tonight's dinner, however, is different. It will mark our archival adieu to classic Russian cuisine. For such an important occasion Mom has agreed to keep the invitees to just eight after I slyly quoted a line from a Roman scholar and satirist: "The number of dinner guests should be more than the Graces and less than the Muses." Mom's quasi-religious respect for culture trumps even her passion for guests. Who is she to disagree with the ancients? And so, on this diabolically torrid late afternoon in Queens, the two of us are sweating over a decadent feast set in the imagined 1910s--Russia's Silver Age, artistically speaking. The evening will mark our hail and farewell to a grandiose decade of Moscow gastronomy. To a food culture that flourished at the start of the twentieth century and disappeared abruptly when the 1917 revolution transformed Russian cuisine and culture into Soviet cuisine and culture--the only version we knew. Mom and I have not taken the occasion lightly. The horseradish and lemon vodkas that I've been steeping for days are chilling in their cut-crystal carafes. The caviar glistens. We've even gone to the absurd trouble of brewing our own kvass, a folkloric beverage from fermented black bread that's these days mostly just mass-produced fizz. Who knows? Besides communing with our ancestral stomachs, this might be our last chance on this culinary journey to eat really well. "The burbot liver--what to do about the burbot liver?" Mom laments, finally off the phone. Noticing how poignantly scratched her knuckles are from assorted gratings, I reply, for the umpteenth time, that burbot, noble member of the freshwater cod family so fetishized by pre-revolutionary Russian gourmands, is nowhere to be had in Jackson Heights, Queens. Frustrated sighing. As always, my pragmatism interferes with Mom's dreaming and scheming. And let's not even mention viziga, the desiccated dorsal cord of a sturgeon. Burbot liver was the czarist foie gras, viziga its shark's fin. Chances of finding either in any zip code hereabouts? Not slim--none. But still, we've made progress. Several test runs for crispy brains in brown butter have yielded smashing results. And despite the state of Mom's kitchen, and the homey, crepuscular clutter of her book-laden apartment, her dining table is a thing of great beauty. Crystal goblets preen on the floral, antique-looking tablecloth. Pale blue hydrangeas in an art nouveau pitcher I found at a flea market in Buenos Aires bestow a subtle fin-de-siècle opulence. I unpack the cargo of plastic containers and bottles I've lugged over from my house two blocks away. Since Mom's galley kitchen is far too small for two cooks, much smaller than an aristocrat's broom closet, I've already brewed the kvass and prepared the trimmings for an anachronistic chilled fish and greens soup called botvinya. I was also designated steeper of vodkas and executer of Guriev kasha, a dessert loaded with deep historical meaning and a whole pound of home-candied nuts. Mom has taken charge of the main course and the array of zakuski, or appetizers. A look at the clock and she gasps. "The kulebiaka dough! Check it!" I check it. Still rising, still bubbling. I give it a bang to deflate--and the tang of fermenting yeast tickles my nostrils, evoking a fleeting collective memory. Or a memory of a received memory. I pinch off a piece of dough and hand it to Mom to assess. She gives me a shrug as if to say, "You're the cookbook writer." But I'm glad I let her take charge of the kulebiaka. This extravagant Russian fish pie, this history lesson in a pastry case, will be the pièce de résistance of our banquet tonight. "The kulebiaka must make your mouth water, it must lie before you, naked, shameless, a temptation. You wink at it, you cut off a sizeable slice, and you let your fingers just play over it. . . . You eat it, the butter drips from it like tears, and the filling is fat, juicy, rich with eggs, giblets, onions . . ." So waxed Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in his little fiction "The Siren," which Mom and I have been salivating over during our preparations, just as we first did back in our unglorious socialist pasts. It wasn't only us Soviet-born who fixated on food. Chekhov's satiric encomium to outsize Slavic appetite is a lover's rapturous fantasy. Sometimes it seems that for nineteenth-century Russian writers, food was what landscape (or maybe class?) was for the English. Or war for the Germans, love for the French--a subject encompassing the great themes of comedy, tragedy, ecstasy, and doom. Or perhaps, as the contemporary author Tatyana Tolstaya suggests, the "orgiastic gorging" of Russian authors was a compensation for literary taboos on eroticism. One must note, too, alas, Russian writers' peculiarly Russian propensity for moralizing. Rosy hams, amber fish broths, blini as plump as "the shoulder of a merchant's daughter" (Chekhov again), such literary deliciousness often serves an ulterior agenda of exposing gluttons as spiritually bankrupt philistines--or lethargic losers such as the alpha glutton Oblomov. Is this a moral trap? I keep asking myself. Are we enticed to salivate at these lines so we'll end up feeling guilty? But it's hard not to salivate. Chekhov, Pushkin, Tolstoy--they all devote some of their most fetching pages to the gastronomical. As for Mom's beloved Nikolai Gogol, the author of Dead Souls anointed the stomach the body's "most noble" organ. Besotted with eating both on and off the page--sour cherry dumplings from his Ukrainian childhood, pastas from his sojourns in Rome--scrawny Gogol could polish off a gargantuan dinner and start right in again. While traveling he sometimes even churned his own butter. "The belly is the belle of his stories, the nose is their beau," declared Nabokov. In 1852, just short of his forty-third birthday, in the throes of religious mania and gastrointestinal torments, Nikolai Vasilievich committed a slow suicide rich in Gogolian irony: he refused to eat. Yes, a complicated, even tortured, relationship with food has long been a hallmark of our national character. According to one scholarly count, no less than eighty-six kinds of edibles appear in Dead Souls, Gogol's chronicle of a grifter's circuit from dinner to dinner in the vast Russian countryside. Despairing over not being able to scale the heights of the novel's first volume, poor wretched Gogol burned most of the second. What survives includes the most famous literary ode to kulebiaka--replete with a virtual recipe. "Make a four-cornered kulebiaka," instructs Petukh, a spiritually bankrupt glutton who made it through the flames. And then: "In one corner put the cheeks and dried spine of a sturgeon, in another put some buckwheat, and some mushrooms and onion, and some soft fish roe, and brains, and something else as well. . . . As for the underneath . . . see that it's baked so that it's quite . . . well not done to the point of crumbling but so that it will melt in the mouth like snow and not make any crunching sound. Petukh smacked his lips as he spoke." Generations of Russians have smacked their own lips at this passage. Historians, though, suspect that this chimerical "four-cornered" kulebiaka might have been a Gogolian fiction. So what then of the genuine article, which is normally oblong and layered? To telescope quickly: kulebiaka descends from the archaic Slavic pirog (filled pie). Humbly born, they say, in the 1600s, it had by its turn-of-the-twentieth-century heyday evolved into a regal golden-brown case fancifully decorated with cut-out designs. Concealed within: aromatic layers of fish and viziga, a cornucopia of forest-picked mushrooms, and butter-splashed buckwheat or rice, all the tiers separated by thin crepes called blinchiki--to soak up the juices. Mom and I argued over every other dish on our menu. But on this we agreed: without kulebiaka, there could be no proper Silver Age Moscow repast. When my mother, Larisa (Lara, Larochka) Frumkina--Frumkin in English--was growing up in the 1930s high Stalinist Moscow, the idea of a decadent czarist-era banquet constituted exactly what it would in the Brezhnevian seventies: laughable blue cheese from the moon. Sosiski were Mom's favorite food. I was hooked on them too, though Mom claims that the sosiski of my childhood couldn't hold a candle to the juicy Stalinist article. Why do these proletarian franks remain the madeleine of every Homo sovieticus? Because besides sosiski with canned peas and kotleti (minced meat patties) with kasha, cabbage-intensive soups, mayo-laden salads, and watery fruit kompot for dessert--there wasn't all that much to eat in the Land of the Soviets. Unless, of course, you were privileged. In our joyous classless society, this all-important matter of privilege has nagged at me since my early childhood. I first glimpsed--or rather heard--the world of privileged food consumption during my first three years of life, at the grotesque communal Moscow apartment into which I was born in 1963. The apartment sat so close to the Kremlin, we could practically hear the midnight chimes of the giant clock on the Spassky Tower. There was another sound too, keeping us up: the roaring BLARGHHH of our neighbor Misha puking his guts out. Misha, you see, was a food store manager with a proprietary attitude toward the socialist food supply, likely a black market millionaire who shared our communal lair only for fear that flaunting his wealth would attract the unwanted attention of the anti-embezzlement authorities. Misha and Musya, his blond, big-bosomed wife, lived out a Mature Socialist version of bygone decadence. Night after night they dined out at Moscow's few proper restaurants (accessible to party bigwigs, foreigners, and comrades with illegal rubles), dropping the equivalent of Mom's monthly salary on meals that Misha couldn't even keep in his stomach. When the pair stayed home, they ate unspeakable delicacies-- batter-fried chicken tenders, for instance--prepared for them by the loving hands of Musya's mom, Baba Mila, she a blubbery former peasant with one eye, four--or was it six?--gold front teeth, and a healthy contempt for the nonprivileged. "So, making kotleti today," Mila would say in the kitchen we all shared, fixing her monocular gaze on the misshapen patties in Mom's chipped aluminum skillet. "Muuuuusya!" she'd holler to her daughter. "Larisa's making kotleti!" "Good appetite, Larochka!" (Musya was fond of my mom.) "Muuusya! Would you eat kotleti?" "Me? Never!" "Aha! You see?" And Mila would wag a swollen finger at Mom. One day my tiny underfed mom couldn't restrain herself. Back from work, tired and ravenous, she pilfered a chicken nugget from a tray Mila had left in the kitchen. The next day I watched as, red-faced and teary-eyed, she knocked on Misha's door to confess her theft. "The chicken?" cackled Mila, and I still recall being struck by how her twenty-four-karat mouth glinted in the dim hall light. "Help yourself anytime--we dump that shit anyway." And so it was that about once a week we got to eat shit destined for the economic criminal's garbage. To us, it tasted pretty ambrosial. Excerpted from Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Poisoned Madeleines | p. 1 |
Part I Feasts, Famines, Fables | |
1 1910s: The Last Days of the Czars | p. 9 |
2 1920s: Lenins Cake | p. 33 |
Part II Larisa | |
3 1930s: Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for Our Happy Childhood | p. 61 |
4 1940s: Of Bullets and Bread | p. 87 |
5 1950s: Tasty and Healthy | p. 117 |
Part III Anya | |
6 1960s: Corn, Communism, Caviar | p. 147 |
7 1970s: Mayonnaise of My Homeland | p. 175 |
Part IV Returns | |
8 1980s: Moscow Through the Shot Glass | p. 209 |
9 1990s: Broken Banquets | p. 241 |
10 Twenty-first Century: Putin on the Ritz | p. 271 |
Part V Mastering the Art of Soviet Recipes | p. 299 |
Author's Note | p. 329 |
Acknowledgments | p. 331 |
Selected Sources | p. 333 |