Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

321 Pages·2013·2.28 MB·English

by  Anya Von Bremzen

MORE PRAISE FOR
MASTERING THE ART OF SOVIET COOKING
“This is much more than a memoir or an extended meditation on food
and longing: this is history at its best, accessed through the kitchen door.
Written with verve and seasoned with perfect doses of that irony that
communist societies excel at cultivating, this book is a rare and
delightful treat, as much of a page-turner as the best of novels and as
enlightening an introduction to Soviet history as one could ever hope to
find.”
—Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana
“Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a monumental but deeply human
book that reads like a great Russian novel, filled with dark humor and
nostalgia. It opens up an entire universe, teaching us about the many
deep meanings of food: cultural, political, social, historical, personal.”
—Ferran Adrià, chef-proprietor, El Bulli
“A fascinating, colorful, and at times oddly tender look at the history of
the former Soviet Union as seen through Anya von Bremzen’s intimate
recollections of food—including foods never eaten or never to be
sampled again. Von Bremzen does a soulful job of capturing Russians’
‘complicated and even tortured relationship with food.’ What emerges is
her own complicated yet loving relationship to the culture she and her
mother willingly left behind, but could never quite abandon.”
—Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
“Anya von Bremzen describes the foods of her past powerfully,
poetically, and with a wicked sense of humor. Anyone can make a fancy
layer cake sound delicious. To invoke an entire culture and era through
an intimate story about a salad or soup—that’s taking food writing to a
whole different level.”
—David Chang, chef-founder, Momofuku
“Here’s a surprise: a wry account of how the Soviet Union tasted. The
author’s mother, the brilliantly resourceful daughter of a top military
intelligence officer, appears to come straight out of Russian literature—
only to become an émigré, a Pathmark shopper, and her daughter’s co-
conspirator in Soviet food nostalgia and self-discovery. A wink, a laugh,
a transgression, a sweet sad life over the generations that throws an epic
history into a new light.”
—Stephen Kotkin, professor of history, Princeton University; author of
Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization

Copyright © 2013 by Anya von Bremzen All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Selected recipes originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Saveur and Food & Wine
magazines, Please to the Table by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman (New York: Workman
Publishing Company, 1990), and in The Greatest Dishes! by Anya von Bremzen (New York:
William Morrow, 2004).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Von Bremzen, Anya.
Mastering the art of Soviet cooking : a memoir of food and longing /
Anya von Bremzen.—First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Von Bremzen, Anya. 2. Food writers—United States—Biography. 3. Women cooks—Soviet
Union—Biography. 4. Cooking, Russian—History—20th century. 5. Food habits—Soviet Union.
6. Soviet Union—Social life and customs. 7. Russia (Federation)—Social conditions—1991– 8.
Russian Americans—Biography. 9. Moscow
(Russia)—Biography. I. Title.
TX649.V66 2013
641.5947—dc23 2013007787
eISBN: 978-0-30788683-5
Jacket design by Lisa Horton
Jacket illustration by Claudia Pearson
Author photograph by John von Pamer
Photograph on opening page for Part IV courtesy of John Welchman
v3.1
For Larisa
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Poisoned Madeleine
FEASTS, FAMINES, FABLES
PART I
ONE 1910s: The Last Days of the Czars
TWO 1920s: Lenin’s Cake
LARISA
PART II
THREE 1930s: Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for Our Happy Childhood
FOUR 1940s: Of Bullets and Bread
FIVE 1950s: Tasty and Healthy
ANYA
PART III
SIX 1960s: Corn, Communism, Caviar
SEVEN 1970s: Mayonnaise of My Homeland
RETURNS
PART IV
EIGHT 1980s: Moscow Through the Shot Glass
NINE 1990s: Broken Banquets
TEN Twenty-first Century: Putin on the Ritz
MASTERING THE ART OF SOVIET RECIPES
PART V
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Selected Sources
About the Author
PROLOGUE
POISONED MADELEINES
W
henever my mother and I cook together, she tells me her dreams. So
rich and intense is Mom’s dream life, she’s given to cataloging and
historicizing it: brooding black-and-white visions from her Stalinist
childhood; sleek cold war thrillers laced with KGB spooks; melodramas
starring duty-crushed lovers.
In a nod, I suppose, to her Iron Curtain past, Mother gets trapped in a
lot of her dreams—although now, at seventy-nine years of age and after
nearly four American decades, she tends to get trapped in pretty cool
places. Deep, for example, in a mazelike, art-filled palace, one much
resembling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, having retired as a
schoolteacher, she works as a docent. In this dream’s Technicolor finale,
an orange balloon rescues Mom from her labyrinth and deposits her at
the museum’s sumptuous café. Whereupon she gorges on cream puffs.
But it’s one dream of hers from long ago, one I remember her telling
me of many times, that’s most emblematic. Here she is, skinny, short-
haired, tiptoeing into my bedroom as I awake to the hopeless darkness of
a Soviet socialist winter. We’re in our minuscule flat in a shoddy
Khrushchev-issue stained-concrete prefab on the outskirts of Moscow. It’s
1968; I am five. Soviet tanks have just rolled into Prague, my dad has
abandoned us recently, and we’ve moved here from a Kafka-esque
communal apartment near the Kremlin where eighteen families shared
one kitchen. Mom, in her robe with faded blue cornflowers, sits on my
bed, presses a reassuring kiss to my forehead. But in her eyes I see such
toska (that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul), such desperate longing, I
know right away she’s been visited once more by that dream.
“Listen, listen, Anyuta,” she murmurs. “Yet again I’m transformed into
a lastochka (a swallow) … I escape from Russia, flying across the Soviet
border, and somehow no one asks me for documents. And suddenly I’m
in Paris! In Paris! I circle over the ocher-colored streets, I recognize them
from Utrillo paintings. On a tiny rue—it’s called ‘Street of a Cat Who
Fishes’—I notice an enchanting café. I speed down to the impossibly
colorful awning, I’m dizzy from the delicious smell of the food,
everything inside me is aching to taste it, to join the people inside …”
At this point my mother always woke up. Always on the wrong side of
the entrance. Always ravenous, overwhelmed by yearning for a world
beyond the border she was never destined to see. By nostalgia for flavors
that would forever elude her.
All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are
unhappy after their own fashion.
Mom and I both grew up within a triumphalist, scarlet-blazed fairy
tale of socialist abundance and glorious harvests. Our experiences,
though, featured no happy kitchens enveloped in an idyllic haze of
vanilla, no kindly matriarchs setting golden holiday roasts on the table.
Tea cakes rich in bourgeois butter? I do have such a memory … It’s of
Mom reading Proust aloud in our Khrushchevian slum; me utterly bored
by the Frenchman’s sensory reveries but besotted with the idea of the
real, edible cookie. What did it taste like, that exotic capitalist madeleine? I
desperately wanted to know.
Inevitably, a story about Soviet food is a chronicle of longing, of
unrequited desire. So what happens when some of your most intense
culinary memories involve foods you hadn’t actually tasted? Memories
of imaginings, of received histories; feverish collective yearning
produced by seventy years of geopolitical isolation and scarcity …
Until recently I didn’t talk about such memories much. Asked why I
write about food, I’d just rattle off my well-rehearsed story. How my
mother and I emigrated from Moscow without my father in 1974—
stateless refugees with no winter coats and no right of return. How, after
I graduated from Juilliard, my piano career was cut short in the late
eighties by a wrist injury. And how, searching for a new start, I fell into
food, almost by accident, really. And I never looked back. Following my
first cookbook, Please to the Table, about the cuisines of the former USSR,
nice things kept happening: exciting magazine stories, more cookbooks,
awards, almost two decades of travel and memorable meals.
Here’s what I rarely mentioned: scribbled skull-and-bones warnings
affixed to pots in my grandmother’s communal apartment kitchen,
where comrade residents pilfered one another’s soup meat. The
afternoons of me desperately gagging on caviar at my kindergarten for
the offspring of the Central Committee—gagging because along with the
elite Party fish eggs I felt I was ingesting the very ideology my anti-
Soviet mom couldn’t stomach. Nor did I mention the girls’ bathroom at
School 110, where I, a nine-year-old fledgling black marketeer in a
scratchy brown uniform, charged my Soviet classmates five kopeks to
touch the bottle of Coca-Cola that friends had brought us from the
mythical zagranitsa (abroad). Nor my present-day impulse to steal every
last croissant from the splendid free breakfast buffets at the lovely hotels
where I often stay for my work.
What would be the point of confessing my constant feeling of
inhabiting two parallel food universes: one where degustation menus at
places like Per Se or Noma are routine; the other where a simple banana
—a once-a-year treat back in the USSR—still holds an almost talismanic
sway over my psyche?
The stories I’ve kept to myself are the stuff of this book. Ultimately,
they’re why I really write about food. But they aren’t just my stories. For
any ex-citizen of a three-hundred-million-strong Soviet superpower, food
is never a mere individual matter. In 1917 bread riots sparked the
overthrow of the czar, and, seventy-four years later, catastrophic food
shortages helped push Gorbachev’s floundering empire into the dustbin.
In between, seven million people perished from hunger during Stalin’s
collectivization; four million more starved to death during Hitler’s war.
Even in calmer times, under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the daily drama
of putting a meal on the table trumped most other concerns. Across
eleven time zones the collective socialist fate of standing in food lines
united comrades from the Union’s fifteen ethnic republics. Food was an
abiding theme of Soviet political history, permeating every nook and
cranny of our collective unconscious. Food brought us together in
obsessive Soviet hospitality rituals—more herring, more Doctor’s Kolbasa
—and in our shared envy and spite for the privileged few, the grifters
and Party hacks with their access to better kolbasa (sausage). Food
anchored the domestic realities of our totalitarian state, supplying a
shimmer of desire to a life that was mostly drab, sometimes absurdly