Born in 1963, a year which saw nationwide crop failures and hunger, in a country that spanned "one sixth of the measured world, eleven time zones, fifteen ethnic republics" and "a population of nearly 300 million by the empire's end," Bremzen imbibes the "complicated, even tortured, relationship with food" that marks the "national character." As she describes her childhood wanderings around Moscow in the early 1970s, an image emerges of a curious, adventurous girl, a youthful wanderer longing for new tastes and experiences.
The city comes alive as the young Bremzen walks the streets in search of the family's Sunday treat, buys birch-tree juice, establishes strategic friendships with vendors who dabble in the black market, learns to press on bread to establish its freshness and mimics the necessary ritual toasts to accompany vodka drinking with her grandmother (who, it must be said, serves her granddaughter limonad during these lessons).
Years later, now established as citizens of Queens, the author and her mother, the indomitable Larissa, embark on a mission to cook banquets commemorating decades of Soviet life from the last Czar to the Putin era. These are feasts of celebration and lament — inspired equally by the longing they feel for their home and their relief to be away from it.
They re-create iconic dishes for family and friends, dishes they remember and those they remember reading or being told of. Among these memorable meals, one in particular stands out, the re-creation of a kulebiaka as described in a book the author is given for her 10th birthday: "his kulebiaka was a twelve-tiered skyscraper, starting with the ground floor of burbot liver and topped with layers of fish, meat, game, mushrooms, and rice, all wrapped in dough, up, up, up to a penthouse of calf's brains in brown butter."
Along with such pre-revolutionary decadence the text is interspersed with re-creations of meals recalling the austerity of the 1920s and the crowded kitchens of the Soviet republic through to the expensive haute cuisine of the bling-obsessed Putin era. There is the myth of abundance of the Stalin years and folk memories of sausages and ice lollies: "a pink slice of kolbasa on a slab of dark bread, Eskimo on a stick at a fair — in the era of terror these small tokens had an existential savor."
It's a clever, elegant structure that allows the author to write a history of the country of her birth, with stories of her family — her grandfather the spy; her blousy, much-adored vodka-swilling grandmother; her handsome but irresponsible father; and, most of all, her constant sidekick and food enthusiast mother, a lifelong refusnik. Seen through the lenses of family and food, intimate details of seismic historical events are offered up — a banquet of anecdote that brings an entire history to life with intimacy, candor and glorious color.
The Salt
Kitchen Time Machine: A Culinary Romp Through Soviet History