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Mastering the art of Soviet cooking : [a memoir of love and longing]  Cover Image E-audiobook E-audiobook

Mastering the art of Soviet cooking : [a memoir of love and longing]

Von Bremzen, Anya (Author). Gati, Kathleen, 1967- (Added Author).

Summary: A celebrated food writer captures the flavors of the Soviet experience in a sweeping, tragicomic multi-generational memoir that brilliantly illuminates the history and culture of a vanished empire. Proust had his madeleine; Narnia's Edmund had his Turkish delight. Anya von Bremzen has vobla--rock-hard, salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Lovers of vobla risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack, but for Anya it's transporting...

Record details

  • ISBN: 9780804128346 (electronic audio bk.)
  • ISBN: 0804128340 (electronic audio bk.)
  • Physical Description: remote
    1 online resource (1 sound file (12 hr., 37 min., 10 sec.)) : digital.
  • Edition: Unabridged.
  • Publisher: New York : Books on Tape, 2013.

Content descriptions

Formatted Contents Note: Prologue: Poisoned madeleines -- Feasts, famines, histories -- 1910s: 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.
Participant or Performer Note: Read by Kathleen Gati.
Source of Description Note:
Description based on hard copy version record.
Subject: Von Bremzen, Anya
Food writers -- United States -- Biography
Women cooks -- Soviet Union -- Biography
Cooking, Russian -- History -- 20th century
Food habits -- Soviet Union
Soviet Union -- Social life and customs
Russia (Federation) -- Social conditions -- 1991-
Russian Americans -- Biography
Moscow (Russia) -- Biography
Genre: Audiobooks.
Downloadable audio books.

Electronic resources


  • Baker & Taylor
    A multi-generational memoir by a celebrated food writer captures the flavors of the mid-20th-century Soviet experience, tracing her upbringing by an anti-Soviet mother, her witness to the political events that led to the empire's collapse and the parallel food universes of her life that evinced both simple and sumptuous fare. Simultaneous.
  • Findaway World Llc

    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.

  • Random House Digital
    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.From the Hardcover edition.
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