Talking Tuesday: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

I wrote a few weeks ago about Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking; I finished it shortly after I first wrote about it and wanted to share a passage or two from it.  Von Bremzen is a gifted writer and her book is a delight from start to finish.  It is equal parts social history and memoir, and she deftly weaves together the gastronomic and general history of the Soviet Union together with her personal history.  The thing I liked best about the book was the way that Ms. Von Bremzen paints a picture of the lives they led, particularly in the Brezhnev era.  The portrait is vivid and real, with only the faintest whiff of nostalgia.

She writes quite a bit about Mikoyan's famous book, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, or Kniga in common parlance.  It was a book that informed the cuisine of Soviets for generations and through which one can trace policy shifts over time and various editions.

"The wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and its absence in the shops made Kniga's myth of plenty especially poignant.  Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled down the deception; long-suffering H. sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, an artistic doctrine that insisted on depicting reality "in its revolutionary development"--past and present swallowed up by a triumphant projection of a Radiant Future.  In socialist realist visions, kolkhoz maidens danced around cornucopic sheaves of wheat, mindless of famines; laboring weavers morphed into Party princesses through happy Stakhanovite toil.  Socialist realism encircled like an enchanted mirror: the exhausted and hunger-gnawed in real life peered in and saw only their rosy future--transformed reflections." (p.124)

I particularly liked her description of salat Olivier as a silent indicator of identity:

"With salat Olivier, identity issues boiled down mainly to the choice of protein.  Take for instance militant dissidents, the sort of folk who typed out samizdat and called Solzhenitzyn "Isayich" (note the extremely coded, Slavic vernacular use of the patronymic instead of first and last names).  Such people often expressed their culinary nihilism and their disdain for Brezhnev-era corruption and consumer goods worship by eschewing meat, fish, or fowl altogether in their Olivier.  At the other end of the spectrum, fancy boiled tongue signified access to Party shops; while Doctor's Kolbasa, so idolized during the seventies, denoted a solidly blue-collar worldview." (p.183)

I think there must be an American equivalent of the Olivier, where the ingredients indicate class and status, as well as personal identity.  Perhaps the lowly hot dog?  Would you like it all-beef, grass-fed, organic, kosher, or even vegan?

Ms. Von Bremzen's book is well worth a read, and contains a section of recipes that I hope to try out soon!

After finishing Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, I dove into Sana Krasikov's novel, The Patriots, which is about several generations of a family who emigrate back and forth between Russia and America during the course of the 20th century.  It is extremely well-written and completely fascinating.  The author clearly did a ton of research and really nailed the period and place. I couldn't put it down.

After that, I read Despite The Falling Snow, the novel upon which a so-so movie is based.  The book is just okay.  It suffers a deplorable lack of real research (the author admitted as much in the acknowledgements and it shows, particularly in the period sections).  It sounds like she didn't crack a single historical book about the period she is writing about, and relies instead upon a few interviews with a small group of people old enough to remember the time and a single trip to Moscow.  Interviews are useful, and have their place in the research process, but there is much to read to really immerse oneself in a period as well as a place different from one's own, and it seems to me that the author didn't do it.  The modern sections of the book are much more interesting as a result.  (A complete flip from the movie version, where I felt the modern sections were just a distraction from the period piece).  It is a story that is almost there but not quite.

I started Amor Towles' A Gentleman In Moscow, but I couldn't get into it right away, so I've set it aside in favor of Colleen McCullough's Bittersweet.  The book is very good, but it took a bit for me to get into the story.  I adored The Thorn Birds (both the book and the mini-series) and Bittersweet has been reviewed as a worthy successor to that novel (even though it inhabits a different place and space in time).   I'm about half way through the novel.  I have Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Tudor next up on my stack.

Quotations from: Von Bremzen, Anya.  Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.  New York: Crown Publishers, 2013.