2,449: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen

There are two ironies in the very title of Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.  The first and more obvious irony is that, for most Soviet citizens during much of the Soviet period, the culinary art that needed to be mastered most was the art of obtaining food.  The second irony, which can only be grasped by anyone who reads this marvellous book, is that cooking is really just a thread onto which she strings a family memoir and a history of the Soviet Union like jewels on a necklace.

The book’s framework is the recreation by von Bremzen and her mother, Larisa (the true hero of the book) of a representative meal from each decade of the Soviet period, commencing with a celebratory end of era Romanov meal.  Onto this skeleton, she then weaves the story of her extraordinary family together with a more general history of the Soviet Union and a more detailed analysis of the food and cooking of each decade.

I will confess that, with both food and Russian history being particular interests of mine, von Bremzen would have struggled to lose my interest but there was never any danger of that occurring given the quality of her storytelling.

It helps that the two branches of her family contain a wonderfully eclectic mix of characters from Larisa, who appears to have been a natural born dissident to her grandfather Naum, a senior Soviet intelligence officer throughout the Second World War (or Great Patriotic War as it’s known in Russia) and from her father, Sergei, an unreliable spouse who at one time was responsible for monitoring the colour of Lenin’s embalmed corpse to her great great grandmother Anna Aleevna, a fiery idealist who fought for women’s rights in Turkestan in the early days of the Soviet Union but who ended her life broken and disowned in Siberia, having been sent to the gulag by Stalin.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking reads like a Tolstoyan family epic, sweeping across time and geography and tracing out the lives of the vivid individuals who make and made up the author’s extended family.  Her family story takes us from the Caucasus to the Ukraine to meet some of her Jewish relatives and their heritage and from her various family homes in Moscow to the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.

There’s also something telescopic about the way that Von Bremzen combines this panoramic story with intimate and detailed family stories such as the story of how Larisa lost the ration book during the Second World War – an event that usually spelt starvation and death for the family concerned – and learnt how to deal in the black market or the incredible story of Naum’s narrow escape from arrest during one of Stalin’s purges.

And as for the food, given that this is styled “a memoir of food and longing”?  Well, von Bremzen makes it clear from the beginning that this is no trawl through high gastronomy by pointing out, ““besides sosiski [Soviet hot dog sausages] with canned peas and kotleti (minced meat patties) with kasha, cabbage-intensive soups, mayo-laden salads, and watery fruit kompot for desert—there wasn’t all that much to eat in the Land of the Soviets.”

Instead, the central food-related themes are those of the struggle to obtain food: the rationing, the queuing, the failures of central planning, the Krushchevian obsession with corn, the near starvation of the Yeltsin years and the actual starvation in the Ukraine following collectivisation.  It’s the impact of Soviet totalitarianism on even the basic social structures of eating with the communal apartments and shared kitchens and the public canteens.

I think that the use of food as the central thread by the author is beautifully appropriate, given the importance that obtaining enough to eat assumed for most Soviets.  But von Bremzen goes further, linking individual Soviet leaders to particular foodstuffs and drawing from this parallels with their leadership.  So, we have Stalin’s championing of Soviet “champagne”, an ersatz product that was designed to demonstrate abundance and that Soviet quality of life was high – when the reality was one of fear, shortage and lack of quality.  Khrushchev is, inevitably, associated with corn and his failed attempt to use it as a miracle grain to solve the problem of poor harvests.  Like Khrushchev himself, it was doomed to failure.

In many ways, food embodies some of the key historical themes of the Soviet Union – from the brutal farm collectivisations and requisitioning of Lenin’s times, to the rationing and hunger of the Second World War and from the failures of the Khruschev years to provide the consumer goods to Russians that were becoming ubiquitous in the US to the quixotic and disastrous anti-alcohol policies of Gorbachev that would contribute to his unpopularity in the Soviet Union and its ultimate demise.

Stalin looms large over proceedings in Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking and I find it interesting that, no matter from what angle one views the Soviet Union, the vozhd becomes the dominant presence, even more so that Lenin himself.  One of my favourite stories in the book is of Stalin sending his faithful sidekick Anastas Mikoyan to the US to investigate what the American s are eating and how he comes back to introduce the hamburger (sans bun) and ice cream to the Soviet people.  It’s an almost picaresque story that I found reminiscent of the episode in Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son where a North Korean delegation makes a trip to meet a US senator at this ranch in Texas.  The story itself is good but, as with all the stories in Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, Von Bremzen tells it well.

Since her move to America, von Bremzen has carved out a successful career as a food writer and has won two James Beard awards for previous books.  She deserves to win further accolades for this one.

I’d like to thank Crown Publishers for sending me a review copy of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.

2,454: The Whole Fromage by Kathe Lison

Despite it not being set in Paris, and despite it only just being still July, I’m submitting The Whole Fromage as my final Paris in July (run by Bookbath and Thyme for Tea) offering as, firstly, it’s a fascinating book and, secondly, it positively drips (or, as it’s about cheese, possibly oozes) Frenchness.

The author, Kathe Lison, is a Wisconsin-born cheese lover who decided to travel around France to try and understand its cheese obsession better.  After all, in a country with somewhere between 350-400 recognised types of cheese, this leaves plenty of scope for discovery.  Now, of course, covering even a small proportion of these cheeses would be a practical impossibility and so, sensibly, Lison restricts herself to some of the best-known cheeses, such as Camembert, Roquefort and Comté, and a few other classic types, such as various brebis (sheep’s cheese) and goat’s cheese.

Each chapter revolves around visits she makes to local cheesemakers which form the platform for her to explore the history and culture behind them (and indirectly, much of France itself) and current issues and controversies.  In particular, a constant theme is the tension between traditional artisanal manufacture and modern, technology-aided industrial manufacture.

As well as being an entertaining travelogue and an interesting record of the labour-intensive work involved in artisanal cheesemaking and the hard lives of the makers and their families, The Whole Fromage is jampacked with information about French cheeses, such as their basic classification, the processes of cheesemaking, the economics of the enterprise and the intricacies and misleading nature of the AOC system.

It is also full of interesting tit-bits of information.  For example, I didn’t know that the classic white “fleurie” skin on a Camembert is not made by native Camembert mould (which is an unattractive blue-grey) but by the same mould that creates the equivalent mould on a Brie and was introduced to make a more visually appealing cheese.

Equally, I hadn’t realised that most Camembert is now made with pasteurised milk and not raw milk and so can’t be called Camembert de Normandie.  Or that 97% of Roquefort production is carried out by a single company the Société des Caves de Roquefort which is, in turn, controlled by the largest dairy products group in the world, Lactalis, which also owns the iconic Président brand of Camembert and butter.  Intrigued by this, I carried out my own inspection of some very rustic and traditional looking cheeses in Marks and Spencer the other day and, yes, the “traditional” Camembert in its wooden box was pasteurised and not AOC (and a Lactalis brand) and the Roquefort was made by the Société.  So, if you were in the Hayle branch of M&S in Cornwall last Tuesday and saw a dishevelled and sunburnt man in shorts standing by the cheese shelves smiling and muttering oddly, that was me and this was why!

Lison;s technique is not to spend much time with foodies or chefs but to visit the actual cheesemakers and other locals.  She mixes her discussions of history, politics and culture in with her travels and, although sometimes it can feel a little mixed up, her journalistic writing style keeps the narrative moving along and stops it getting bogged down in fact.  I should also point out that Lison has a real knack for describing food and its taste and odor. 

If you like cheese, want to learn more about it or just like reading about foodie travels, this is a must-read book.  The author is generous in praise for other writers on cheese such as the late Patrick Rance and I suspect that, in course of time, The Whole Fromage will be seen as a worthy addition to the cheesy canon.

On a more general note, The Whole Fromage gives a great deal of insight into the changing face of modern France.  As Charles de Gaulle pointed out, amusingly if inaccurately, “Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?” and the gradual erosion of rural life and the tension between industry and agriculture is never far from sight in the pages of Kathe Lison’s book.  She comments accurately when discussing the EU’s maligned Common Agricultural Policy that, without its subsidies, the prices of many of France’s most artisanal and traditional cheeses would be out of reach even to the relatively wealthy consumer and would, in consequence, die out and be lost to the world.  How long some of these can survive must be in doubt.

I’d like to thank Crown Publishing for sending me a copy of The Whole Fromage for review and, if you’d like a second opinion before buying this (which you should definitely do), please pop over to the following blogs:

• Comfort Bites
• The Literary Omnivore
• Cecelia Bedelia
• Estella's Revenge
• Old Uvai Reads

2,457: Mastering the Art of French Eating by Ann Mah

It’s Paris in July month, jointly hosted by Bookbath and Thyme for Tea and, although I’m late to the party as usual, I’m glad to be here, posting about a wonderful book which I suspect should best be read just before making a visit to France as otherwise it is likely to cause intense pangs of longing to the non-French reader.

The phrase “When good Americans die, they go to Paris” has been ascribed to many authors including Oscar Wilde, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thomas Appleton but, regardless of who first came up with this aphorism, Ann Mah, the author of Mastering the Art of French Eating and a self-confessed lifelong Francophile, must have felt like she’d died and gone to heaven when her diplomat husband is given a three year posting to Paris.  Shortly after arriving, however, their dreams of living in one the world’s most romantic cities are shattered as he is summoned to Iraq for a year.  Lonely and worried for his safety, she is suddenly required to create a new life for herself in a new home.

As well as reaching out both to the expat community, to friends of friends and to the colleagues she meets while volunteering as the programs manager at the American Library, Mah, an avid foodie, encouraged mainly via Skype by her other half, launches herself into an investigation of the history and culture of some of France’s most iconic dishes.  Along the way, she takes trips to their regions of origin, meets chefs and aficionados and partakes fully of some of France’s most renowned fare.

Most of the items she chooses to focus on are brasserie and bistro such as Paris’ steak-frites, the choucroute garni of Alsace and the cassoulet of the South West.  Reading her descriptions of the meals she ate and her encounters with local champions of the dishes is enough to make one’s tummy rumble, something which, in my opinion, is a good indicator of the quality of a book about food.  As well as these staples, she touches on a couple of more unusual regional classics, the Provençal soupe au pistou and the crêpes de sarrasin of Brittany and learns of the real passion with which the locals treat their culinary heritage.  Of course, it’s not all plain sailing - Mah admits defeat at the, how shall I put this, intestinal odour of true AAAAA approved andouillette from Troyes which, to be fair, although I have acquired the taste, I can understand - Mrs F wasn’t overly impressed when I ordered it at the excellent Brasserie Zedel here in London as its odour is truly of the farmyard.  About the only grumble I really had was her contention that aligot, the cheese and mashed potato concoction of the Aveyron region is not very well-known outside the area.  I can’t speak for the US, of course, but here in the UK, it has featured in a Delia Smith cookbook (the bestselling cookbook author of them all here) as well as the late Mireille Johnston’s A Cook’s Tour of France, albeit masquerading under another name - so it’s not exactly a secret.

Mastering the Art of French Eating is part travelogue, part memoir, part foodie investigation but it is, as much as anything, a love letter to France and Paris in particular and a bittersweet tale of involuntary separation.  Mah’s exploratory trips into the French regions are nicely interspersed with the story of her life in Paris, which, although difficult as life can be for the trailing spouse of a diplomat (something even the title alludes with its nudge towards another lonely diplomatic wife in Paris - Julia Child who also found purpose and solace in French cooking), is also full of new experiences.

Mah, the daughter of Adeline Yen Mah, the author of Falling Leaves, is a gifted writer who conveys a real sense of place and of feeling as well as being a dab hand at foodie description.  I thoroughly enjoyed Mastering the Art of French Eating and would recommend it to anyone who likes France, food or travel-writing.  Thank you very much to Penguin for allowing me to read this via Netgalley.

2,487: Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dnlop

To write an outstanding book in one genre may be unusual, to write one that is outstanding in two genres may be rare but to write one that is outstanding in three genres is just a little bit unfair to other authors.  Yet, that is exactly what Fuchsia Dunlop has done with the excellent Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, an excellent memoir, food book and travel book.

Fuchsia Dunlop was a sub-editor for the BBC when, having travelled in China, she was awarded a British Council scholarship to study in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan.  Soon tiring of academia, she talked her way into becoming the first Westerner to be accepted as a student on the three month professional cooks’ course at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine.

Having completed this course, she spent the following years immersed in Chinese food, travelling in Sichuan, Hunan, Xinjiang and Yangzhou, writing two excellent regional cookbooks – Sichuan Cookery and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook - and becoming, almost certainly, the leading authority on Chinese cuisine in the UK.

Food writing needs to make me want to rush out and immediately stuff my face with the kind of food that features in the book and Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper did that in spades, giving me an almost desperate urge to run to the nearest Sichuan restaurant, which, unfortunately, was not practicable, given that I was reading the book on the Tube on the way to work or in the evening at home.  Fuchsia Dunlop has the gift of being able both to describe dishes accurately but also to make the flavours and smells leap off the page in mouthwatering fashion.  I was particularly gratified that she gave a fascinating description of being taught how to cook fire-exploding kidney flowers, which was, coincidentally, the first Sichuan dish I ever ate, at the great Bar Shu in Soho.

However, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper doesn’t just excel in its descriptions of dishes and ingredients, it is a fascinating treatise on regional Chinese cuisines in its own right, initiating the reader into the very different cuisines and eating habits of the various parts of China that Ms Dunlop travels in, from the spicy, complex dishes of Sichuan to the delicate tastes of Yangzhou and the central Asian cuisine of Muslim Xinjiang.  I learned a huge amount from this and, having read this, I appreciated the wonderful recent BBC TV series, Exploring China, even more.

But Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper is not only a fine piece of food writing, it is also a great travel book as she describes and considers the changing nature of China during the years she has spent travelling and working there.  She writes evocatively about the speed with which the country has urbanised, tearing down old parts of cities and towns to be replaced with modern, concrete building and high rise blocks.  To mention Exploring China again, I was struck by the difference between the description of Chengdu in the early ‘90s in Sharks’ Fin and Sichuan Pepper by comparison to the soulless concrete megacity of 2012, shown on TV.

As well as this, Ms Dunlop talks passionately and unsparingly about how pollution and other environmental issues are affecting China and, in particular, its food resources.  She also addresses corruption and the way in which municipal funds are stripped away by local officials from the locals who really need them.

But, underlying the mouth-watering descriptions of food and the fascinating portrait of a changing China, maybe the most profound journey the book describes is that of Ms Dunlop herself.  Because, gradually, as the book progresses we see her shuffling off not just the culinary shibboleths of her Western upbringing but also many other cultural paradigms until she finds herself “thinking Chinese”.  To illustrate the way in which she grows accustomed to the omnivorous nature of Chinese life, in which almost any animal protein appears up for grabs, there is a very personal section of the book where she describes being at home in England and, upon finding a caterpillar in some salad, eats it to see whether she has left her Chinese eating habits in China.  Of course, she finds that eating caterpillar is unexceptional.

By the end of the book, Ms Dunlop appears to be almost split between two cultures in which she paradoxically appears both at home and a visitor.  Interestingly, she talks about Hong Kong, that former colonial jewel, as being a kind of decompression chamber for her between her two worlds.

I love this book and have also enjoyed each of Ms Dunlop’s cookbooks and so I am self-confessedly unobjective in writing about it.  Its subject matter is also so far within my wheelhouse that two of my family, completely independently, have bought me copies of Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper but, nevertheless, I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone with an interest in food, travel or China.

2,557: The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz

Appropriately enough with the Tour de France wending its way through France en route for the Champs-Élysées on Saturday 24^th, Bastille Day this Friday and the French women’s football team knocking us out of the World Cup at the now-traditional quarter-final stage, it is Paris in July month, hosted by Karen at Bookbath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea.  If you are not already participating, I do recommend you pop over to see what is going on.

But, zut alors!  With my usual lack of organisation, I failed to contribute anything during the first week of July.  I do intend to remedy that sad state of affairs this week, however, starting with The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz.

David Lebovitz is an American pastry chef, a long time chef-patissier at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.  In 2004, he moved to Paris, from where he writes and runs his own blog.  The Sweet Life in Paris is his sixth book but the first non-recipe book.

In the book, he tells the story of his move to France and how he became accustomed to a very different way of life to that of San Francisco, where he had been living previously.  There are a number of recipes, for both sweet and savoury dishes at the end of each chapter.  I have to say that these are very inviting and I am definitely going to be trying some of them, especially as he thoughtfully includes both US and European measurements in most of them.

Lebovitz’ writing style is fluid, self-deprecating and witty.  As someone who has worked in Paris and spent a lot of time there over recent years, some of his observations on Parisian life are bitingly accurate and his comments on a couple of Parisian restaurants that I have visited ring several bells.  If you are a foodie, you are likely to become quite jealous of his life, even though he tries very hard to dispel the image that he spends his life wandering around Paris sampling delicious products before either cooking gourmet meals or dining at swanky restaurants.

The structure of the book is very interesting: each chapter is very short and it is easy to see the influence that food blogging has had on his writing.  In fact, one could almost see the book as a collection of lengthy blog posts.  This has both its good and bad aspects.  On the one hand, it makes the book a good “dipper” as you can read a little, put it down and then pick it up again without worry.  The writing is quite informal and so is an easy read.

On the other hand, it is all a little bit disjointed and does read like a collection of short pieces rather than a coherent body.  Not a real issue for me but I could see some people finding that annoying.  It’s also a little bit “surface”.  In an effort to be humorous and engaging, Lebovitz doesn’t really delve very deeply into things.  The chapter on his experience with the French health service is a case in point: he could easily have introduced a little more thought without sacrificing the readability but doesn’t do so.  I appreciate that he is trying to entertain but I found that, even for a light, humorous book, it was a bit unsatisfying.  I also have one quite serious niggle.  Lebovitz actually doesn’t seem to like quite a lot of things about living in Paris.  There’s a sense of cognitive dissonance in the way chapter after chapter he criticises Parisians and Paris whilst continually protesting that he loves the place and the people.  Well, a lot of the time you could have fooled me.

Overall, this is a light, easy read.  If you are a foodie or you dream of living in Paris, you’ll enjoy it, although I would also direct you to Julia Childs’ My Life in France, some of MFK Fisher’s books or On Rue Tatin by Susan Loomis for more substantial “foodie in France” fare.  The Sweet Life in Paris was a bit like a  nice Madeleine – light, sweet but pretty insubstantial.  Mind you, I would happily eat a tray of David Lebovitz’ lemon glazed madeleines (recipe in the book)!

2,587: Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas by John Baxter

One of the most comforting things about Christmas is the familiarity of it all.  Many of us have grown up with a set of customs and rituals that are repeated Christmas after Christmas.  Whether it is the way in which our presents are delivered, the snacks that are left out for Santa Claus and Rudolph or the family trek to Midnight Mass, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without them.  And Christmas lunch is one of the most ritualised meals of them all.  The British roast turkey and trimmings followed by Christmas pudding, the Australian Christmas barbecue or the Central European goose, they are all hallowed by tradition and one messes with them at one’s peril.

So what happens when one gets married?  Do we create new rituals, blend two different sets or try and find compromises?  And is it even more difficult when one marries into a different culture?

James Baxter, an Australian writer, journalist and film maker confronted this very issue when he moved from Los Angeles to Paris to live with his Parisian girlfriend, whom he later married.  Not only did he have to cope with adapting to French life but he also did the unthinkable by taking over responsibility for cooking Christmas dinner for his new extended French family.

An Immoveable Feast is Baxter’s third volume of autobiography, following on from A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict and We’ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Lights.  It tells the story of his family life in France, based around preparations for his Christmas dinner and how he is trying to impress his family by introducing new dishes to the meal without moving too far away from the kind of repast that French culinary tradition would demand at Christmas.  Let’s just say that he serves up Cajun spit roast suckling pig.

An Immoveable Feast is an easy and inoffensive read.  There’s the requisite amount of gastro-porny description of French food and the sourcing of his dinner and sufficient Parisian atmosphere to create the sense of the different that the “foreigner living abroad” genre of books would require.  Ultimately, however, it is a little bit “meh”, a little bit insubstantial and a little bit pointless.  I suspect part of my reaction may be because I hadn’t realised that it was a volume of autobiography as well as a book about food.  I’m not a big fan of memoirs by “ordinary” people.  If I am reading biography or autobiography, I tend to need it to be about someone of real significance in their field.  I am not criticising Baxter here, I appreciate that he is a successful writer and probably a very nice chap, it’s just that I’m not that interested in his story.

I am, however, very interested in food (Mrs Falaise would say, too interested) and food writing.  And therein lies the nub.  There was not enough about the food or about French Christmas eating habits and rather too much about how his family and how he learned to cook as a young man in Australia to impress the girls.  It doesn’t make it a bad book, just not quite what I thought I was getting.

I don’t know if I would have had a different reaction to it if I had read his other autobiographical pieces first or if I had come to the book with different expectations but I didn’t really connect with it.  It would pass a couple of harmless hours but, in all honesty, there are many other books that would do the job better and leave more of an impression, at least in my opinion.

As for tomorrow’s post, well you’d better watch out, you’d better beware, ‘cos Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather is coming to town.