“Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
– A Memoir of Food and Longing,” by Anya Von Bremzen, 2013
This is not
really a cookbook, although there are some classic Soviet recipes at the
back. It is more a social history that focuses
on food. It is filled with conventional anti-Soviet clichés most U.S. readers
are used to – some true, some not. Von
Bremzen’s ‘boho’ mother was very anti-Soviet and her hostility is one side of
the book. In a visit back to Moscow in 2011 on Victory Day, she humorously complains about "tanks and banks in Putinland." Both author and mother seem to be apolitical
people at bottom.
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| Food Politics |
But the
other side is the author’s very real social nostalgia growing up in the
Brezhnev 1960s and 1970s as a ‘sad-eyed bulimic’ young girl, even attending an
elite school just outside Stalin’s old dacha in the Kuntsevo Woods. It is a look into how mostly urban people in Moscow lived during the
workers’ state period. Given Anya’s grandfather was a functionary in naval
intelligence, they probably lived a bit better than most. She and her mother
emigrated from the USSR to
the U.S.
in 1974.
Food is
central to Anya, though she was brought up on piano lessons, Rachmaninoff,
Tolstoy and Pushkin. Von Bremzen writes about the various editions of ‘The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food,’ the
enduring Soviet cookbook and their version of the U.S. “Joy of
Cooking.” It was initiated by Anastas Mikoyan, the USSR's minister of food.
She comments on the joyous 6th International Youth Festival during
the ‘thaw’ under Khrushchev as well as her beloved Moscow Central Market, a
former farmer’s market, now a high-end bourgeois mall. The book covers Red October Chocolate and the
rest of the products produced by the USSR’s food industry, some of which
still exist.
After
leaving the USSR, she and her
mother invite ex-Soviet friends over to their apartment in Philadelphia for special events in which they
try to recreate a typical Soviet meal for each decade, pre-revolutionary to
glasnost. This forms the food structure
of the book.
Food, of
course, is central to human and daily life, and its production is key to how a
society functions. In the USSR,
because of the vast number of ethnicities and nationalities, the variety of possible
foods was huge. Besides Russian staples
there was wine from the Caucasus; Sovetskoye champagne; Moldavian kebabs and feta strudel; central Asian
quail pilaf; Kalmyk tea; Ukrainian borscht
and sausage; a Georgian stew called chanakhi
and a creamy walnut-sauced
chicken called satvisi,; Armenian dolmas;
Abkhazian apples and corn mush; Lithuanian sakotis
cake; Koland melons; Korean kimchi (chim-che);
Azerbaijani sturgeon salad; Byelorussian herbal vodka; Crimean fruit; Dangestan
brandies; Baltic herring rolls.
But at the
same time, because consumer goods were low on the bureaucrats’ priority list,
food was limited or of low quality, so a black market and informal ‘bhat’ relations formed to provide what
the state would not. With the looming
end of the USSR
under Gorbachev, food almost disappeared in cities as normal supply channels
collapsed. When Anya and her mother
immigrated to the U.S., their
‘First Supermarket Experience’ in the U.S. was epic, given the
choices. But they also found U.S. food to be
plentiful but bland or unhealthy. Russian
black bread made ‘Wonder Bread” seem pathetic. Tangy Sovok
mayonnaise showed ‘Hellmans’ to
be substandard. Soviet sosiski were
more flavorful and real than American ‘hot dogs.’
Von
Bremzen tells some valuable family stories and retails some facts:
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| The cloth strait jacket - heavy, hot , hard to see and move, hard to wear. |
*
On March 8, International Women’s Day, 1927 in Tashkent, 10,000 Uzbek women threw off their
veils (a massive shroud of heavy horsehair) and burned them. One of Von Bremzen’s Communist feminist
relatives was there. After that Muslim traditionalists
raped and murdered some of these women for this act of rebellion.
*
Mikoyan (who she calls the ‘Red Aunt
Jemima’) went to the U.S.
and brought back the idea of the hamburger but without the bun, which became
the ubiquitous Soviet kotleta. He also introduced the ‘Eskimo pie’ to the USSR. And then there was kornfleks and even ketchup.
*
The ruling nomenklatura had plenty of high-quality food, their own
cooks, supply chains and farms.
According to evidence, Stalin became quite the gluttonous gourmand. Though how that compares with the diets of today’s
U.S.
or Russian billionaire oligarchs is unsaid.
*
Russia
turned away from Islam because Islam forbade alcohol, including the culturally
significant vodka. In 988 the king of
the Rus adopted the Byzantine Eastern
Orthodox Church, which allowed booze.
*
The limitations of communal living in the cities were not so much in the
‘communal’ as in the tiny spaces that people had. They slept on aluminum cots (raskladushka) in hallways, in kitchens,
in closets and had no privacy. It took
years before Khrushchev and later Brezhnev began building identical apartment
blocks that had a bit more room, but these were not in the central city areas.
*
The old Bolsheviks were quite abstentious in their food habits. Lenin was against the working class drinking
alcohol. Wiser heads prevailed and the alcohol tax monopoly was reintroduced in
the 1920s.
*
Von Bremzen’s grandfather in naval intelligence confirmed the evidence
that Stalin ignoring multiple warnings of a surprise German attack in 1941. This led to 750,000 casualties, 3 million Soviet
soldiers captured and Nazi armies at the gates of Leningrad
and Moscow. This ‘mistake’ almost ended the USSR.
*
Recycling was common in the land of the Soviets.
*
She retails
the Sovok traditions of drinking
vodka, which she calls ‘co-bottling’ done in 3s, never alone, with a zakuska (appetizer) of sorts.
*
She asserts that ‘multi-culturalism’ - actually the right to
self-determination for each nationality written into the USSR’s constitution - ultimately blew up the Soyuz (Union). Historically, no national votes took place,
only a meeting between Yeltsin and 2 other republic leaders.
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| Zakuski (Appetizers) |
This book suggests
that had the Soviets had paid more attention to the consumer sector instead of the
military sector – i.e. music, clothes and especially living spaces and food - they
might have maintained support among the working-class and rural farm populations. According to Von Bremzen, standing queues (stoyat) are where people socialized, and
quite plainly their discussions were not complimentary to the food or political regime.
Von Bremzen
includes recipes for: Salat Olivier,
potato salad with pickles; Kulbiaka,
pastry filled with fish, rice and mushrooms; Chanakhi, stew of lamb, herbs and vegetables; Super Borshch, soup with beef, mushrooms,
apples and beans; Blini, pancakes with the trimmings.
Other
reviews on the USSR: Travel series on St. Petersburg / Leninsburg / Leningrad.
Books: “How the Beatles
Rocked the Kremlin,” “Reinventing Collapse,” “Soviet Fates and Lost
Alternatives,” “Secondhand Time,” “Russia and the Long Transition from
Capitalism to Socialism,” “Soviet Women.” Event: “Slavs and Tatars,” 'The Red Atlantis."
P.S. – Vegetarianism was frowned upon in the USSR. A ‘vegetarian society’ was established in
1901 with influence from people like Leo Tolstoy, but in 1929 it was
outlawed. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia called vegetarianism a ‘false idea’ with
‘no followers’ in the USSR. The word itself disappeared from Russian
dictionaries. At that time, vegetarianism
meant more than just not eating meat – it was pacifist and semi-political too,
so it was seen as threatening.
And I
bought it at May Day’s excellent used/cutout book section!
Kultur Kommissar
February 20, 2019
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