Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen

“This is a work of non-fiction, woven from family anecdotes and historical facts spanning ten decades”, the author’s note begins.  Von Bremzen’s family was diverse, including Muslims and Jews, a Turkistan feminist, a preservationist at Lenin’s tomb, a dissident, and a spy.

The Soviet Union was also wildly diverse, a group of nations and ethnicities forced together: “Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the [1990s].”

Von Bremzen’s mother brought her to the U.S. at the age of 11, long before the fall of the Soviet state.  They arrived in 1974 thanks to American-Jewish sponsors.  Today she is a travel and cookbook writer who visits Russia and other former Soviet republics regularly.  Von Bremzen decided to cook a meal to represent each decade of the Soviet Union and this forms a framework for her book.  She heard family tales from her mother as they cooked together.  Recipes for each decade are included in the back of the book, except for the 1940s, which is represented only by a war-time ration card.

Mother and daughter begin their cooking with the final decade of the czarist era.  The main course is a fish dish: a rich, multi-layered pie of fish liver, sturgeon, onions, eggs, giblets, mushrooms, and dilled rice, all dripping with butter.  Von Bremzen compares it to the Soviet version she remembered as a child in Moscow: a loaf of bread with a thin layer of ground meat or cabbage inside.  This is typical of the book.  Although organized by decade, Von Bremzen uses an informal, personal style and moves backwards and forwards through her own memories, family stories, and Soviet history. Continue reading →