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Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
I saw that one but decided on Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.
https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art...okbubemailc-20
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.
It is also $1.99 marked down from $15. Published by Random House. |
I saw that one, too, but decided not to post it.
Being the youngster that you are, you may not realize that people in the U.S. during Soviet times food never . . . how shall I say this without using vulgarity . . . had high regard for Soviet food. Some dishes from the Eastern Bloc countries were highly regarded.
A quick story about Soviet food. I took a course one time in Group Tour management. This was a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The professor led trips himself, to a wide variety of places in the world. Well, one of those was the Soviet Union and he greatly vilified the food there. I don't remember much of the details that he gave, but one that I do recall, and will never forget, was about the group stopping at a certain place to eat. Seems like it was in a fairly rural area. They served chicken foot soup. He described it graphically. There was literally a cooked (I assume) chicken foot in each bowl of soup! I know that things have improved markedly since the old Soviet days, but because of his experience, I would be highly unlikely ever to buy a cookbook for Soviet food. I doubt that I would even browse through one.