Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen

(Crown, $26)

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food was a singular work of propaganda, said Sara Wheeler in The New York Times. First published by the Soviet government in 1939, and revised many times, it brimmed with recipes for sumptuous dishes whose ingredients almost never appeared on the nation’s barren shelves. Every Soviet household seemed to have a copy, though, and it was among the few mementos that 10-year-old Anya von Bremzen and her mother brought along when they left Moscow for the U.S. in 1974. Von Bremzen, now an award-winning food writer, has built a “delectable” memoir around a recent quest to cook her way through the book. “Moving artfully between historical long shots and intimate details,” she distills from the project a sweeping portrait of Soviet life.

Von Bremzen “does not spare the reader the harsh realities” of the post-revolution years, said Ellah Allfrey in NPR.org. Her mother, now 79, lived through Stalin’s terror and the Nazi invasion of Moscow, and she shares some grim memories as she cooks alongside her daughter. Yet when Anya recalls 1970s Moscow on these pages, “the city comes alive.” We’re with her as she walks the streets in search of a Sunday family treat, runs a black market in Juicy Fruit gum, and inhales the funky aromas wafting from the kitchen shared by the 18 families in her apartment building. Sketches of close relatives—“her grandfather the spy, her vodka-swilling grandmother”—help fill out her “banquet of anecdote.”

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Von Bremzen never loses sight of the comic potential of Slavic food, said Liesl Schillinger in TheDailyBeast.com. She describes one dish as emitting “enticing whiffs of wallpaper glue” and has a field day creating a prose sketch of a 12-tiered dish that ascends from a ground floor of burbot liver to a penthouse of calf’s brains. Of course, such indulgences “were never widely accessible—not in the age of the czars, not under Stalin, and not now.” But generations of Russians used the same cookbook to “savor the aroma of illusory empire,” and now all non-Russians can too.