A Family History of the Soviet Union

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mastering soviet cookingMastering 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 →

Indian Giver

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Pbs.org recently posted an article that included this:

[A] strange old phrase, “Indian giver.” Surely the phrase bespeaks a problem of cross-cultural understanding. The earliest record of this expression dates to Thomas Hutchinson’s 1764 history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony where a footnote explains that an Indian gift “is … a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” We still use this, of course, and in an even broader sense, we call those friends “Indian givers” who are so uncivilized as to ask us to return the gifts they’ve given.

Word Detective agrees, though the site dates the phrase to the early 19th century.  The Phrase Finder cites 1765 for Hutchinson’s history.

Straightdope.com refers back to the PBS source and wanders into politics – Cecil is always fun.

Constitutionality of Obamcare

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President Obama admitted at the health care summit he convened in 2010 that there would be people who would lose their existing health insurance coverage. He admitted that when he was challenged by Eric Cantor that some people would not be able to keep the policies they had selected, and he casually dismissed the question. The following is a transcript of that exchange:

Eric Cantor said, “Because I don’t think you can answer the question in the positive to say that people will be able to maintain their coverage, people will be able to see the doctors they want, in the kind of bill that you are proposing.”

Mr. Obama’s response was, “Since you asked me a question, let me respond. The 8 to 9 million people you refer to that might have to change their coverage — keep in mind out of the 300 million Americans that we are talking about — would be folks who the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office,  estimates would find the deal in the exchange better — would be a better deal. So, yes, they would change coverage because they got more choice and competition.” Continue reading →

Great Empires, An Illustrated Atlas

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I found this National Geographic book in the local library while searching for information about the Ottoman Empire. I read only that chapter and the one titled “Byzantium and the Arab World.” I did thumb through to look at the many colorful pictures and illustrations. The book presents a high level overview and often with little explanation. My interests in learning more about the Ottoman Empire were frustrated by the closing sentence that the “…once great empire had lost its way. But from its wreckage emerged a new nation, Turkey…” Nothing more is provided to explain what happened except for the closing lines that “…a democratic society that reached out to its old foes in Europe and forged close bonds with the West.” There is no mention of the fascinating story of how Mustafa Kemal and his supporters succeeded at ending the Empire to make the new country called Turkey. Continue reading →

Cold Turkey

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The Word Detective writes that the phrase probably evolved from the American idiom “to talk turkey,” meaning “to speak directly and frankly, without beating around the bush.” An early form of the phrase was “to talk cold turkey,” and using “cold turkey” probably was “…a simple, uncomplicated meal, as a metaphor for simple, unadorned, direct speech.” Talking cold turkey came to mean “give it to me straight; tell me the unvarnished truth. “Cold turkey” came to mean “quit suddenly, with no tapering off…”

Put a Sock in It

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A recent article on theatlantic.com says “Throughout the ‘20s, records progressively became louder to take advantage of the proliferation of gramophones that had no volume knob. The phrase “put a sock in it” actually references cramming a sock into the horn of a gramophone to stifle the sound on louder recordings.”

A reader on The Word Detective asked about this phrase, writing that the gramophone origin “just sounds too, well, cute.”  The Word Detective responded that “Several word-origin books … assert [the gramophone story] as established truth, which it isn’t…. the first print citation for “put a sock in it” found so far comes from 1919.”  In that publication, the term was defined, which suggests it was recently coined.  The Phrase Finder agrees.

Word Detective goes further, using the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, which “pegs ‘put a sock in it’ to early 20th century military slang use, and ties it, significantly, to another phrase popular at the time, ‘put a bung in it’ (‘bung’ being a very old English word for ‘stopper’ or ‘cork’ of the type used to seal bottles). Both phrases meant simply ‘stop talking’.”