Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya von Bremzen grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable. In 1974, when Anya was ten, she and her mother fled to the USA, with no winter coats and no right of return. These days, Anya is the doyenne of high-end food writing. And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR .
In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. Her narrative is embedded in a larger historical epic: Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II starvation, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's disastrous anti-alcohol policies and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of this is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia and piercing observations. Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a book that stirs the soul as well as the senses.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Moving and darkly comic -- Niki Segnit * The Sunday Times * Heartbreakingly poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. This is an important book, a must read! * Heston Blumenthal * Vastly entertaining... A real treat. * Woman & Home * By turns funny, tragic and nostalgic, this is a wonderful, fascinating volume, which puts a human face on the grim pages of the history books * The Lady * This poignant memoir is an education in the richness of eastern European cuisine, and the story of Soviet communism, through the lens of family experience. * Observer * wry, provocative, genre-busting... * Wall Street Journal * Absorbing... a social history of the Soviet Union cast through the prism of food * Jewish Chronicle * Rollicking and heartrending * Time * You will read few better books about food, family, exile or the Soviet tragedy-and none, I'll bet, which combines all those themes this magically. Funny, angry, ingenious and moving. * AD Miller, author of 'Snowdrops' * The culinary memoir has lately evolved into a genre of its own... But Anya von Bremzen is a better writer than most of the genre's practitioners, as this delectable book, which tells the story of postrevolutionary Russia through the prism of one family's meals, amply demonstrates... von Bremzen moves artfully between historical longshots...and intimate details. The descriptions of meals are delightful... * New York Times *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Transworld Publishers Ltd
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-1-4464-6352-9 (9781446463529)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
As a child in the Soviet Union, Anya von Bremzen was the granddaughter of the former head of Naval intelligence, and thus a bona fide member of the nomenklatura. She was also the daughter of a disaffected dissident, a child actress and a piano prodigy. Then, because of political repression, she and her mother fled to America and Anya reinvented herself as one of the most accomplished food writers of her generation: the author of five acclaimed cookbooks, the recipient of three James Beard awards, and a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure magazine. She divides her time between New York City and Istanbul.
