From the book I love the Salat Olivier, a colorful potato and pickle salad in a tangy mayonnaise dressing. And yet I do miss Soviet food and find much of it really delicious. In the book I explore the complexity of a nostalgia for a difficult past - it's what I call the 'poisoned madeleine' factor. Blini are eternal, the celebrate the cycle of life.įood has such a nostalgic element for many what impact do you think food has on those memories? What is the most comforting dish from the book from you? And blini are a ritualistic dish served at births and wakes and commemorations. So it was fitting to start and end with yeast. Some things outlive political regimes and changing tastes. Many classical Russian dishes were lost after the 1917 Revolution but yeast dishes mostly survived. Any significance to this?īlini and savory baking - anything with yeast - is the most primal, archaic Slavic flavor. You start with the kulebiaka - and end with the blini.

More: Joan Nathan's Chosen Cheese Blintzes Scarcity made you extra-aware of what you were eating. My mother could improvise a feast from thin air: a wonderful borscht from a few forlorn beets, or fantastical desserts from a can of condensed milk. But the resilience and feats of improvisation were extraordinary - and imaginations made up for a lot. It was difficult to develop taste when ingredients you got attached to would just disappear one day. What effect do you think scarcity had on how Russian food developed? How did your family get creative when rations were limited? But we landed in Philadelphia and I developed an instant addiction to cheesesteak and hoagies.

The flavors and colors were strange to me: the black Oreo cookie, the Day-Glo orange Velveeta, banana splits that could feed a Russian family for a week. I experienced a deep culture shock, when after dreaming of American abundance in the USSR I encountered it in the flesh. from Russia as child, what were your impressions of American food? What did you gravitate towards?

It was long bottled inside me - until I felt it was time for it to come out. And so, I set off to write a memoir that would capture the entire Soviet 20th century through food and family stories. The story is almost Tolstoyan in scope, of hunger and improbable feasts, of longing, despair, but also of domestic triumphs over adversity. What inspired you to write the book - and why now?Īll my professional life as a cookbook writer and restaurant critic I was haunted and inspired in equal measures by Russia's epic, existential relationship with food. This book is quite the departure from your past works.

Anya von bremzen books