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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anya von Bremzen grew up in Moscow, where she played piano, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at her school, and acted in Soviet films. In this country, after getting an MA from the Juilliard School, she has established herself as one of the most accomplished food writers of her generation: the winner of three James Beard awards; a contributing editor at Travel+Leisure magazine; 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 with John Welchman). Anya contributes regularly to Food & Wine and Saveur and has written for The New Yorker, Departures, and the Los Angeles Times. Her magazine work has also been anthologized in several of the Best Food Writing compilations. Fluent in four languages, Anya lives in Queens, New York, and has an apartment in Istanbul.
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Copyright
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.
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