Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking
Page 1
MORE PRAISE FOR
MASTERING THE ART OF SOVIET COOKING
“This is much more than a memoir or an extended meditation on food and longing: this is history at its best, accessed through the kitchen door. Written with verve and seasoned with perfect doses of that irony that communist societies excel at cultivating, this book is a rare and delightful treat, as much of a page-turner as the best of novels and as enlightening an introduction to Soviet history as one could ever hope to find.”
—Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana
“Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a monumental but deeply human book that reads like a great Russian novel, filled with dark humor and nostalgia. It opens up an entire universe, teaching us about the many deep meanings of food: cultural, political, social, historical, personal.”
—Ferran Adrià, chef-proprietor, El Bulli
“A fascinating, colorful, and at times oddly tender look at the history of the former Soviet Union as seen through Anya von Bremzen’s intimate recollections of food—including foods never eaten or never to be sampled again. Von Bremzen does a soulful job of capturing Russians’ ‘complicated and even tortured relationship with food.’ What emerges is her own complicated yet loving relationship to the culture she and her mother willingly left behind, but could never quite abandon.”
—Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
“Anya von Bremzen describes the foods of her past powerfully, poetically, and with a wicked sense of humor. Anyone can make a fancy layer cake sound delicious. To invoke an entire culture and era through an intimate story about a salad or soup—that’s taking food writing to a whole different level.”
—David Chang, chef-founder, Momofuku
“Here’s a surprise: a wry account of how the Soviet Union tasted. The author’s mother, the brilliantly resourceful daughter of a top military intelligence officer, appears to come straight out of Russian literature—only to become an émigré, a Pathmark shopper, and her daughter’s co-conspirator in Soviet food nostalgia and self-discovery. A wink, a laugh, a transgression, a sweet sad life over the generations that throws an epic history into a new light.”
—Stephen Kotkin, professor of history, Princeton University; author of Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
Copyright © 2013 by Anya von Bremzen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Selected recipes originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Saveur and Food & Wine magazines, Please to the Table by Anya von Bremzen and John Welchman (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 1990), and in The Greatest Dishes! by Anya von Bremzen (New York: William Morrow, 2004).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Von Bremzen, Anya.
Mastering the art of Soviet cooking : a memoir of food and longing /
Anya von Bremzen.—First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Von Bremzen, Anya. 2. Food writers—United States—Biography. 3. Women cooks—Soviet Union—Biography. 4. Cooking, Russian—History—20th century. 5. Food habits—Soviet Union. 6. Soviet Union—Social life and customs. 7. Russia (Federation)—Social conditions—1991– 8. Russian Americans—Biography. 9. Moscow
(Russia)—Biography. I. Title.
TX649.V66 2013
641.5947—dc23 2013007787
eISBN: 978-0-307-88683-5
Jacket design by Lisa Horton
Jacket illustration by Claudia Pearson
Author photograph by John von Pamer
Photograph on opening page for Part IV courtesy of John Welchman
v3.1
For Larisa
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Poisoned Madeleine
PART I FEASTS, FAMINES, FABLES
ONE 1910s: The Last Days of the Czars
TWO 1920s: Lenin’s Cake
PART II LARISA
THREE 1930s: Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for Our Happy Childhood
FOUR 1940s: Of Bullets and Bread
FIVE 1950s: Tasty and Healthy
PART III ANYA
SIX 1960s: Corn, Communism, Caviar
SEVEN 1970s: Mayonnaise of My Homeland
PART IV RETURNS
EIGHT 1980s: Moscow Through the Shot Glass
NINE 1990s: Broken Banquets
TEN Twenty-first Century: Putin on the Ritz
PART V MASTERING THE ART OF SOVIET RECIPES
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Selected Sources
About the Author
PROLOGUE
POISONED MADELEINES
Whenever my mother and I cook together, she tells me her dreams. So rich and intense is Mom’s dream life, she’s given to cataloging and historicizing it: brooding black-and-white visions from her Stalinist childhood; sleek cold war thrillers laced with KGB spooks; melodramas starring duty-crushed lovers.
In a nod, I suppose, to her Iron Curtain past, Mother gets trapped in a lot of her dreams—although now, at seventy-nine years of age and after nearly four American decades, she tends to get trapped in pretty cool places. Deep, for example, in a mazelike, art-filled palace, one much resembling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, having retired as a schoolteacher, she works as a docent. In this dream’s Technicolor finale, an orange balloon rescues Mom from her labyrinth and deposits her at the museum’s sumptuous café. Whereupon she gorges on cream puffs.
But it’s one dream of hers from long ago, one I remember her telling me of many times, that’s most emblematic. Here she is, skinny, short-haired, tiptoeing into my bedroom as I awake to the hopeless darkness of a Soviet socialist winter. We’re in our minuscule flat in a shoddy Khrushchev-issue stained-concrete prefab on the outskirts of Moscow. It’s 1968; I am five. Soviet tanks have just rolled into Prague, my dad has abandoned us recently, and we’ve moved here from a Kafka-esque communal apartment near the Kremlin where eighteen families shared one kitchen. Mom, in her robe with faded blue cornflowers, sits on my bed, presses a reassuring kiss to my forehead. But in her eyes I see such toska (that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul), such desperate longing, I know right away she’s been visited once more by that dream.
“Listen, listen, Anyuta,” she murmurs. “Yet again I’m transformed into a lastochka (a swallow) … I escape from Russia, flying across the Soviet border, and somehow no one asks me for documents. And suddenly I’m in Paris! In Paris! I circle over the ocher-colored streets, I recognize them from Utrillo paintings. On a tiny rue—it’s called ‘Street of a Cat Who Fishes’—I notice an enchanting café. I speed down to the impossibly colorful awning, I’m dizzy from the delicious smell of the food, everything inside me is aching to taste it, to join the people inside …”
At this point my mother always woke up. Always on the wrong side of the entrance. Always ravenous, overwhelmed by yearning for a world beyond the border she was never destined to see. By nostalgia for flavors that would forever elude her.
All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy after their own fashion.
Mom and I both grew up within a triumphalist, scarlet-blazed fairy tale of socialist abundance and glorious harvests. Our experiences, though, featured no happy kitchens enveloped in an idyllic haze of vanilla, no kindl
y matriarchs setting golden holiday roasts on the table. Tea cakes rich in bourgeois butter? I do have such a memory … It’s of Mom reading Proust aloud in our Khrushchevian slum; me utterly bored by the Frenchman’s sensory reveries but besotted with the idea of the real, edible cookie. What did it taste like, that exotic capitalist madeleine? I desperately wanted to know.
Inevitably, a story about Soviet food is a chronicle of longing, of unrequited desire. So what happens when some of your most intense culinary memories involve foods you hadn’t actually tasted? Memories of imaginings, of received histories; feverish collective yearning produced by seventy years of geopolitical isolation and scarcity …
Until recently I didn’t talk about such memories much. Asked why I write about food, I’d just rattle off my well-rehearsed story. How my mother and I emigrated from Moscow without my father in 1974—stateless refugees with no winter coats and no right of return. How, after I graduated from Juilliard, my piano career was cut short in the late eighties by a wrist injury. And how, searching for a new start, I fell into food, almost by accident, really. And I never looked back. Following my first cookbook, Please to the Table, about the cuisines of the former USSR, nice things kept happening: exciting magazine stories, more cookbooks, awards, almost two decades of travel and memorable meals.
Here’s what I rarely mentioned: scribbled skull-and-bones warnings affixed to pots in my grandmother’s communal apartment kitchen, where comrade residents pilfered one another’s soup meat. The afternoons of me desperately gagging on caviar at my kindergarten for the offspring of the Central Committee—gagging because along with the elite Party fish eggs I felt I was ingesting the very ideology my anti-Soviet mom couldn’t stomach. Nor did I mention the girls’ bathroom at School 110, where I, a nine-year-old fledgling black marketeer in a scratchy brown uniform, charged my Soviet classmates five kopeks to touch the bottle of Coca-Cola that friends had brought us from the mythical zagranitsa (abroad). Nor my present-day impulse to steal every last croissant from the splendid free breakfast buffets at the lovely hotels where I often stay for my work.
What would be the point of confessing my constant feeling of inhabiting two parallel food universes: one where degustation menus at places like Per Se or Noma are routine; the other where a simple banana—a once-a-year treat back in the USSR—still holds an almost talismanic sway over my psyche?
The stories I’ve kept to myself are the stuff of this book. Ultimately, they’re why I really write about food. But they aren’t just my stories. For any ex-citizen of a three-hundred-million-strong Soviet superpower, food is never a mere individual matter. In 1917 bread riots sparked the overthrow of the czar, and, seventy-four years later, catastrophic food shortages helped push Gorbachev’s floundering empire into the dustbin. In between, seven million people perished from hunger during Stalin’s collectivization; four million more starved to death during Hitler’s war. Even in calmer times, under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the daily drama of putting a meal on the table trumped most other concerns. Across eleven time zones the collective socialist fate of standing in food lines united comrades from the Union’s fifteen ethnic republics. Food was an abiding theme of Soviet political history, permeating every nook and cranny of our collective unconscious. Food brought us together in obsessive Soviet hospitality rituals—more herring, more Doctor’s Kolbasa—and in our shared envy and spite for the privileged few, the grifters and Party hacks with their access to better kolbasa (sausage). Food anchored the domestic realities of our totalitarian state, supplying a shimmer of desire to a life that was mostly drab, sometimes absurdly comical, on occasion unbearably tragic, but just as often naively optimistic and joyous. Food, as one academic has noted, defined how Russians endured the present, imagined the future, and connected to their past.
That past is now gone. Vanished after the Soviet Union’s collapse. In place of our “Socialist Homeland” there are cultural ruins, a vast archaeological site of a Soviet Atlantis. But we’re not ready to let go of this rubble. Toppled headless statues of leaders, songbooks and candy wrappers, once-scarlet Young Pioneer scarves, triangular Soviet milk cartons blackened with grime—we cling to these fragments. Unlike the melancholy ruins that fueled the Romantics’ nostalgia for an idealized past, ours are pieces of our physical homes, of the lives we once lived. For us they’re still freighted with meaning: historical, political, personal. And almost always ambiguous.
I started my own collection of socialist fragments in 1974, weeks into our Philadelphia life. Mom instantly fell for Amerika. Me? Huddled on our bony refugee sofa I read Chekhov’s Three Sisters and whimpered along with the characters: “To Moscow … to Moscow.” My childhood fantasies of capitalist delicacies crashed against our first meal at the Robin Hood Diner. I choked on the cloying fluff of American coleslaw, stared in shock at the Day-Glo that is Velveeta. At home, while my mother gleefully slapped Oscar Mayer bologna onto alien Wonder Bread, I pined for the fragrant bricks of Moscow sourdough rye and the stale reek of cheapo Krakovskaya kolbasa. I’m pretty sure I’d lost my sense of taste those first Philadelphia months. Because depleted of political pathos, hospitality, that heroic aura of scarcity, food didn’t seem much of anything anymore.
Like a raggedy orphan, I paced our apartment, repeating to myself our sardonic Soviet defitsit (shortage) jokes. “Would you slice one hundred grams of kolbasa?” asks a man in a store. “Bring the kolbasa and we’ll slice,” answers the salesgirl. Or “Why are you emigrating?” “Coz I’m sick of celebrations,” says the Jew. “Bought toilet paper—celebration; bought kolbasa—more celebrating.”
In Philadelphia, no one celebrated Oscar Mayer bologna.
To revive my taste buds I began playing a game in my head. Picturing myself at a dacha (country cottage) surrounded by prickly gooseberry shrubs, I’d mentally preserve and pickle the tastes and smells of my Soviet socialist past in an imaginary three-liter jar of memory. In went the Order of Lenin Red October chocolate bars with a mirthful kid on the wrapper. In went the scarlet-wrapped Bolshevik Factory Jubilee Biscuits, the ones that dissolved so poignantly when dipped in tea from a yellow packet adorned with an elephant. In my mind’s eye I unwrapped the foil from the squishy rectangles of Friendship Cheese. Paused to dig an imaginary aluminum fork into the industrial breading of the six-kopek meat patties named after Stalin’s food supply commissar.
There was, however, an ideological cloud darkening my nostalgia exercise. The Friendship Cheese, the kolbasa, the chocolates—all were produced by the reviled Party-state we’d fled. Recalling Mom’s Proust recitations, I’ve come up with a phrase to describe them. Poisoned madeleines.
This is my “poisoned madeleine” memoir. It was my mother, my frequent co-conspirator in the kitchen and my conduit to our past, who suggested the means to convey this epic disjunction, this unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths. We would reconstruct every decade of Soviet history—from the prequel 1910s to the postscript present day—through the prism of food. Together, we’d embark on a yearlong journey unlike any other: eating and cooking our way through decade after decade of Soviet life, using her kitchen and dining room as a time machine and an incubator of memories. Memories of wartime rationing cards and grotesque shared kitchens in communal apartments. Of Lenin’s bloody grain requisitioning and Stalin’s table manners. Of Khrushchev’s kitchen debates and Gorbachev’s disastrous antialcohol policies. Of food as the focal point of our everyday lives, and—despite all the deprivations and shortages—of compulsive hospitality and poignant, improbable feasts.
CHAPTER ONE
1910s: THE LAST DAYS OF THE CZARS
My mother is expecting guests.
In just a few hours in this sweltering July heat wave, eight people will show up for an extravagant czarist-era dinner at her small Queens apartment. But her kitchen resembles a building site. Pots tower and teeter in the sink; the food processor and blender drone on in unison. In a shiny bowl on Mom’s green faux-granite counter, a porous blo
b of yeast dough seems weirdly alive. I’m pretty sure it’s breathing. Unfazed, Mother simultaneously blends, sautés, keeps an eye on Chris Matthews on MSNBC, and chatters away on her cordless phone. At this moment she suggests a plump modern-day elf, multitasking away in her orange Indian housedress.
Ever since I can remember, my mother has cooked like this, phone tucked under her chin. Of course, back in Brezhnev’s Moscow in the seventies when I was a kid, the idea of an “extravagant czarist dinner” would have provoked sardonic laughter. And the cord of our antediluvian black Soviet telefon was so traitorously twisted, I once tripped on it while carrying a platter of Mom’s lamb pilaf to the low three-legged table in the cluttered space where my parents did their living, sleeping, and entertaining.
Right now, as one of Mom’s ancient émigré friends fills her ear with cultural gossip, that pilaf episode returns to me in cinematic slow motion. Masses of yellow rice cascade onto our Armenian carpet. Biddy, my two-month-old puppy, greedily laps up every grain, her eyes and tongue swelling shockingly in an instant allergic reaction to lamb fat. I howl, fearing for Biddy’s life. My father berates Mom for her phone habits.
Mom managed to rescue the disaster with her usual flair, dotty and determined. By the time guests arrived—with an extra four non-sober comrades—she’d conjured up a tasty fantasia from two pounds of the proletarian wurst called sosiski. These she’d cut into petal-like shapes, splayed in a skillet, and fried up with eggs. Her creation landed at table under provocative blood-red squiggles of ketchup, that decadent capitalist condiment. For dessert: Mom’s equally spontaneous apple cake. “Guest-at-the-doorstep apple charlotte,” she dubbed it.
Guests! They never stopped crowding Mom’s doorstep, whether at our apartment in the center of Moscow or at the boxy immigrant dwelling in Philadelphia where she and I landed in 1974. Guests overrun her current home in New York, squatting for weeks, eating her out of the house, borrowing money and books. Every so often I Google “compulsive hospitality syndrome.” But there’s no cure. Not for Mom the old Russian adage “An uninvited guest is worse than an invading Tatar.” Her parents’ house was just like this, her sister’s even more so.