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Mastering the art of Soviet cooking : a memoir of love and longing / Anya von Bremzen.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Crown Publishers, [2013]Edition: First editionDescription: viii, 338 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0307886816
  • 0307886832 (ebk.)
  • 9780307886811
  • 9780307886835 (ebk.)
Subject(s):
Contents:
Poisoned madeleines -- Feasts, famines, fables. 1910s : The last days of the Czars ; 1920s : Lenin's cake -- Larisa. 1930s : Thank you, comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood ; 1940s : Of bullets and bread ; 1950s : Tasty and healthy -- Anya. 1960s : Corn, Communism, caviar ; 1970s : Mayonnaise of my homeland -- Returns. 1980s : Moscow through the shot glass ; 1990s : Broken banquets ; Twenty-first century : Putin on the Ritz -- Mastering the art of Soviet recipes.
Summary: Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, the author 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.
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 641.5947 V945 Available 33111005196130
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations  
 
     Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy--and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.
     Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 333-338).

Poisoned madeleines -- Feasts, famines, fables. 1910s : The last days of the Czars ; 1920s : Lenin's cake -- Larisa. 1930s : Thank you, comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood ; 1940s : Of bullets and bread ; 1950s : Tasty and healthy -- Anya. 1960s : Corn, Communism, caviar ; 1970s : Mayonnaise of my homeland -- Returns. 1980s : Moscow through the shot glass ; 1990s : Broken banquets ; Twenty-first century : Putin on the Ritz -- Mastering the art of Soviet recipes.

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, the author 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.

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