The Book Depository Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen
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Price: £12.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking : Paperback : Transworld Publishers Ltd : 9780552777476 : : 03 Jul 2014 : And yet, the flavour of Soviet kolbasa, like Proust's madeleine, transports her back to that vanished Atlantis known as the USSR. In this sweeping, tragicomic memoir, Anya recreates seven decades of the Soviet experience through cooking and food, and reconstructs a moving family history spanning three generations. The Book Depository Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780552777476
MPN: 9780552777476
GTIN: 9780552777476
Author: Northern Lights
Rating: 5
Review: I just learned a new word, "toska", "that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul", and it certainly runs through this memoir - do not let the title make you think it is a cookbook. Covering the author's family and their lives from tsarist Russia through the Soviet era, the cold war, Glasnost and to 2011 Putin times, I found it intensely fascinating. Growing up in Norway in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet was a large, menacing presence to the east. We heard of bread lines and bombs and saw pictures of grave-looking men in the Kremlin in the news, but ordinary people were not part of our consciousness of Soviet. Certainly not their food, did they have any at all? My first trip there was in 1990, to then Leningrad, and my main memory were the empty shops, and for us privileged tourists the eternal chicken. I was 17, and knew far too little of the realities... From her mother's table in New York, Anya von Bremzen recounts her family's lives as privileged in some eras, shunned in others - the mosaic is rich and the food imagery brings it out for me. Unlike other reviewers, I found the topic well matched to the amount of detail given, and would wholeheartedly recommend this to those interested in a bygone time. Perhaps the "larger picture" isn't always there or sometimes seems divorced from the historical accounts included, as she tends to focus on the microcosmos of her own family or apartment building, but since she is recording her own experiences from childhood, it rings true to me. Intimate and distant in even measures, lovely.
Author: Emma L.S.Wates
Rating: 3
Review: quite interesting
