Anya Von Bremzen: Food and Longing

Anya Von Bremzen was brought up in a Moscow communal apartment where 18 families shared one kitchen. But in 1974, when she was still a little girl, her mother decided she’d had enough and packed up the family to move to America, which meant giving up their Russian citizenship for good. Her memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a tale “of food and longing” over seven decades of the Soviet experience, taking in Lenin’s bloody grain requisitioning, Second World War starvation, Stalin’s table manners and Khrushchev’s kitchen debates.

How did you go about researching seven decades of family history?

My grandfather was a Soviet hack, but we didn’t have much respect for him at the time. He would talk about interrogating Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trial, and we were like, ‘oh granddad, shut up, stop with the stupid war shit.’ We were so un-interested, and I feel really wistful that we didn’t sit him down more. He knew Stalin and he knew all these generals, and he filled me with such awe and respect.

And my grandmother’s grandmother on the paternal side was one of the first crusaders for women’s rights in central Asia. I remember there were all these stories when she unveiled Muslim women, and then I started reading about this movement – this massive, historical movement – and there she was in the middle of it. So our personal lives get caught up in this huge, epic history.

What was it like moving to Philadelphia from Moscow in the 1970s?

I was crushed, I really hated it at first. We lived in the centre of Moscow; it was very beautiful, we had a lot of friends, and then we came to suburban America. There were little buildings everywhere, everyone was driving, and we didn’t have a car so we had to walk on the highway. I even missed the food queues – I would learn so much from just queuing up for food, it was like a community thing. And though we hated the experience then, we soon missed it. But my mum loved everything about America – she was completely euphoric and I was the sourpuss.

What were some of the foods you found most surprising in America?

Velveeta, this horrible yellow processed cheese – it’s Day-Glo orange and you’re supposed to melt it. Pop tarts – we didn’t know we had to put them in a toaster. Our fellow emigrates would get floor wax, thinking it was butter, and spread it on bread. Ex Lax, which is a laxative chocolate. They thought it was normal chocolate and would be in the bathroom all day. It was hilarious.

Do you think you would have made a career out of food had you not been longing for it as a child?

Longing is the central concept in the book. In English novels I would read there would be asparagus, and I would say: ‘mum, what’s asparagus?’ I was dying to see an artichoke. You filled in the name with whatever you could imagine, and somewhere in the book I said dreaming about food is more rewarding than actually eating. The fantasy I developed around food was extremely rich.

What are some of your favourite feasts in novels?

In Russian literature a lot of Chekhov is about food – he’s got short stories about blini. Nikolai Gogol – his book Dead Souls is all about food. My mum read a lot of Hemingway – the Russians loved Hemingway – and Hemingway is very specific in the way he described food in Paris, for instance, in The Moveable Feast. You would latch on to every description of food.

With Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, what came first, the history or the food?

I think the history, but each decade had a visceral connection to something. I think when you write a book like this that blends the personal and the historical with food, I think you have to stop every once in a while and see what is going to turn pages. I found that it really in the end had to be driven by the personal story; the connection to the food had to be personal.

Is food an integral part of history?

If you look at Soviet history, the revolution was about bread. There were massive famines. Feeding the whole nation, the way they expropriated land from the peasants and gave it over to farms was on a larger scale. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, because arguably the food supply just fell apart. In 1989/90 there was no food, no controlled economy. You look at famines in China; it’s not necessarily about cooking but about the potato and potato rice. World history is driven by food.

Do you think food is a large part of women’s history too?

Traditionally, women were keepers of the hearth. In pre-historic societies the hearth – the domestic domain – was traditionally a women’s role. In terms of conquests and dominations and allocations, men always controlled the larger picture.

In Russia it was very interesting because the Bolsheviks really intended to liberate women from domestic labour. They wanted the state to assume that responsibility for bringing up children; they wanted to take away the children, put them in the crèches. They wanted to have mass public canteens that had food for the workers and they wanted women to be equal with men as part of the workforce.

Unfortunately that didn’t work out and Stalin back-paddled on the feminist vision, but by then all the women were in the workforce anyway. And they ended up carrying what the Russians called the double burden of housework and paid labour, so Russian women had it tough. Women were heads of scientific research facilities, they were nuclear scientists, they were heads of hospitals. Women really held very responsible roles in public and professional lives and at the same time men never cooked, so a woman who was a head of a hospital would have to come and cook for her children. When I look up to my mother and grandmother and their generations, I am in awe.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen is out now, published by Doubleday.