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

Soviet cooking? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Wasn’t the Soviet Union a place where everything was in short supply, people waited on endless lines, there was little if any choice, and the center of every meal was vodka? Yes, indeed, and yet a quite interesting cuisine developed under these conditions. To get food and other necessities, Homo sovieticus could count on spending a third of his or her nonworking hours waiting in lines, where a special kind of communality developed. We think of lines as annoyances to avoid; in Russia they were not only unavoidable but also a central fact of life—even “a quasisurrogate church,” as one Russian novel, composed entirely of dialogues in a queue, puts it. Meals assembled with such effort were all the more appreciated. This book goes through decade after decade of Russian life, from pre-to post-Soviet times, and in each section accompanies family anecdotes with recollections of meals. And recipes. And culturally revealing cookbooks. And the conditions of buying food. “Not too rotten,” the author remembers her mother saying to a sales clerk. Not only was there a never-ending culture of the defitsit (shortage) of goods; there was also no packaging. If you bought meat and did not bring your own paper, you would have to carry it in your hands. People saved their mayonnaise jars so they could give their doctors urine samples. We get stories of kitchens shared by eighteen families and the chaos that sharing caused. Russian is a language without a word for privacy, and though Russians consume unbelievable amounts of alcohol, they look down on drinking alone: it is an antisocial sign of heartlessness, perhaps even of Jewishness! It is almost as bad as not drinking at all.

The author explains that the Russian Homeland (Rodina—a word with almost mystic significance) “can only really be understood v zabutylie (through a bottle).” According to the earliest Russian chronicles, Slavs chose Christianity because the alternative was to accept Islam, which forbade drinking. “Better to die of vodka than of boredom,” declared the poet Mayakovsky, and by “boredom” he meant “sobriety.” Government after Russian government has made its principal source of revenue the vodka monopoly, and by the Brezhnev era “our Rodina was in the collective grip of ‘white fever’ (DTs).” After making this point, the author provides eight colorful Brezhnev-era synonyms for “completely smashed.” Gorbachev’s most disastrous decision was to try to sober the country up. Nothing could have made him more unpopular. People envied MIG-25 pilots because they were given de-icer, whose principal ingredient was alcohol, which they drank, to the peril of their passengers and themselves. One of the author’s relatives, a lady’s man, would lie dead drunk in the street, and that made him all the more attractive to women, who pitied him. As a little girl, the author “soaked up vodka rituals with grandmotherly lullabies. We were a land in which booze had replaced Holy Water, and the rites of drinking were sacramental and strict.”

Russians also love to indulge in toska, a word that has no exact English equivalent but includes longing, missing, nostalgia, and a sensual sadness. With each decade described in this book, we get large doses of toska, slathered like lard, along with some terrible Soviet history: call the combination Russian “sweet and sour” soup. The author quotes Gogol’s exuberant descriptions of food and Chekhov’s comment that some luscious blini were “as plump as the shoulder of a merchant’s daughter.” Revolutionaries, by contrast, went the other way, to a sort of culinary nihilism, and so after the revolution the traditional domestic kitchen we all take for granted was deemed ideologically abhorrent. War and communism caused a famine that took the lives of five million, and an even larger famine was later deliberately engineered by Stalin to break the back of the peasantry...