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

“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