“All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy after their own fashion,” writes Anya Von Bremzen, playing on the opening line from Anna Karenina. In her book, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, the author and her mother explored what Soviet people ate during each decade of the 20th century and why. The book is a culinary memoir filled with humorous anecdotes of daily life, the study of Soviet history, recipes, and stories of feasts and famines. Her book spans a century. This blog will review the first half.

1910s: The Last Days of the Czars

The story starts with Anya and her mother Larisa sweating in their kitchen in Queens, NY. In a space smaller than an aristocrat’s closet, they recreated a lavish dinner as it would be served in 1910 Russia. Menu: fish-filled kulebiaka, chilled fish soup, and appetizers (zakuski), Guriev kasha and home-candied nuts. These dishes rarely exist outside of books. While Russian nobility would not call such meal excessive, the two cooks were so exhausted, they were ready to cheer for the Russian Revolution.

“Send your maid to the cellar to find…” This was the first line of many recipes of the time. Bourgeois feasted on fancy meats and fish, while their servants ate porridge and buckwheat, and peasants had it even worse. Perhaps food was the real cause of the revolution.

Favorite Historical Fiction about the last days of the Czars: The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander

1920s: Lenin’s Cake

1920s were the hungry years, with rations and famine, and with great changes in all aspects of daily life. “Bolshevism has abolished private life,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin in 1927. Specious homes, built before the revolution, were rebuilt into communal apartments, with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Lenin’s vision was to have workers, male and female, eat together at stolovayas between factory shifts and party meetings. But there wasn’t much to eat besides soup with rotten sauerkraut, millet kasha, and dry fish.

I stayed in a communal apartment when I visited my aunt in Moscow in 1986. Not only the kitchen and the bathroom were shared by the three families, but also the phone and the front door. Anyone visiting or calling would be interviewed by strangers until they could clarify who they need to talk to.

Favorite Historical Fiction about the Russian Revolution: The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov

1930s: Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for Our Happy Childhood

The author’s mother was a little girl in the 30s, taught to adore Stalin. While most people marched on state holidays carrying posters and balloons, “enemies of the state” were arrested and sent to work camps or shot. My grandfather told me of his childhood friend whose father was an artist; the poor man was arrested multiple times for drawing Stalin’s ears too big.

In 1936 Stalin sent commissar of Soviet food industry, Anastas Mikoyan, on a research trip to… United States. To study capitalism from within, apparently. Mikoyan toured the country coast to coast, inspecting meat plants, dairies, orchards, and farms. He shopped at grocery stores and ate at self-service cafeterias. But what impressed Mikoyan the most were the people eating hamburgers and hot dogs on the go.

Mikoyan returned, ready to change the Soviet food. The Soviet mass production of kotlety (beef patties), sosiski (sausages), morozhenoe (ice cream) and many other foods were developed as the result of his trip. Along with portraits of Stalin and the slogan “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for Our Happy Childhood” it became customary to draw posters of smoked meats to signify an abundance of food, which was surely coming.

Favorite Historical Fiction about Stalin: Children of Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov

1940s: Of Bullets and Bread

“Citizens of the Soviet Union! Today, at four a.m. German troops have attacked our country despite the treaty of non-aggression,” announced Premier Comrade Molotov, on June 22, 1941. Hungry times took a new meaning for the soviet citizens, who could receive food only by presenting kartochka (ration card). Young children stood in long lines in the cold to receive the bread, made of rye flour, with oats and even sawdust, while parents worked or went off to war. Lose your monthly cards, and your family could starve.

The story I remember my grandma telling me is that she, seventeen years old at that time, caught the eye of a boy from a well-connected family. But she couldn’t just tell him that she, her mother, and her sister were hungry. That would certainly put him off. Instead, she said they had a goat that they had trouble feeding. When he brought a sack of millet “for the goat,” grandma and her family had to endure a vexingly long evening of small talk before he finally left. As soon as the door closed behind him, they rushed to prepare gruel. Obviously, the goat didn’t exist, or it would’ve been slaughtered and devoured already.

The author’s mother also recalled eating millet, as well as pancakes from potato peel, balanda (soup from millet with addition of any meat bones or fish tails), duranda (hard cakes of linseed), kombizhir (“combined fat” or hydrogenated oil), and tushoshka (tinned pork, sent by the United States). Despite her impeccable manners in everything else, the woman ate like a hungry wolf for the rest of her life.

Favorite Historical Fiction about Russia in WWII: My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region by Alina Adams

1950s: Tasty and Healthy

In 1952, the new edition of the national cookbook, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, with the foreword by Stalin, came out. The heavy volume was much more than a collection of recipes, but filled with ideology and commentaries, and best of all, pictures of dishes rarely seen outside the pages. Even I remember swooning over those photos of lavish feasts and delicate desserts. (See featured image). The version also differed from the previous as any recipes perceived as American or Jewish were removed.

“The Book,” as it was often referred to, was so important to my grandmother, we brought it with us to United States. Whenever I asked her a question about cooking, she often told me to look it up in “The Book.”

And then… Stalin died in 1953. People died in the stampede at his funeral. Despite the leader committing genocidal purges against his own people, the country was heartbroken. My grandmother, pregnant with my mother, decided to name the baby Stalina. Thank God she changed her mind.

For more soviet history, memories and recipes, look up the book Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen