It was my favorite book I read last year, and as you may have already guessed from my five paragraph intro, I had many questions. Von Bremzen is aware of the difficulty, referencing Proust’s madeleine, the cookie that became the framing device that sparks his childhood reminisces in his novel Remembrances of Things Past, describing her own Soviet nostalgia as a “poisoned madeleine.” Yet she bites right in, deftly balancing the horrors (and camaraderie) of the communal Soviet kitchen with the abundance (and alienation) of American suburbia. in 1974, just before the time when she would’ve had to choose either “Jewish” or “Soviet” on her official passport, may just be comfortable trying to reconcile contradictions. How, for example, do you balance your own natural nostalgia without romanticizing the Soviet era? Or talk about its traumas without playing into the west’s same old reductive clichés? As the daughter of a dissident and the granddaughter of a Soviet intelligence officer, Von Bremzen, who emigrated to the U.S. The scope of the work is staggering, not to mention that Von Bremzen, a James Beard-award winning food and travel writer, is wading into a political minefield just to discuss her own childhood. It’s amazing how much historical context you need to adequately explain just one recipe. I’ve heard family recipes described as a conversation between the dead and the living, and that seems a fitting way to describe Mastering, a book that starts with food and eventually becomes a memoir of Soviet childhood and a family history of 20th Century Russia, all woven together in one beautiful braid. If you’re at all interested in the subject, I doubt there’s a book more indispensable than Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing.

Now that we don’t need images of bread lines and emotionless Slavic villains constantly reassuring us that we’re the good guys, we can finally ask: What those people were like and what it was like to live in that place and time? Which speaks to a larger cultural phenomenon.

For instance, after decades of patting ourselves on the back for the “Miracle on Ice,” we’re finally getting around to asking about the people on the other side, and thus we have two competing documentaries about the Soviet hockey team. But along with that predictable desire to replay our own hazy childhoods, of late there’ve been accompanying attempts to see beyond the surface-level iconography (which, to be fair, was pretty awesome). For a lot of my generation, who grew up on movies like Top Gun and Rocky IV and Rambo III, an attraction towards Cold War-era kitsch is natural.

Mastering the art of soviet cooking