Was difficult to assess whether it’s a 3.5 rounded up or down. Some observations:
- It’s only in a very subtle way about cooking. I’d rather say that the book is about Soviet culture and nostalgia through the view point of food. That was vaguely surprising in the beginning, because I expected something else, yet once I adjusted, it really felt like a good idea to tell the story through food.
- von Bremzen and her family felt at times a bit like the Chao family in Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels: not very representative of the class they ‘lead on’ to represent. It’s much less of an issue in this book, yet still: I wonder how wealthy the family was and how intellectual. I don’t know enough about the Soviet history (as compared to my comments on Chinese emigrants) but I always feel a bit funny about accounts from people that actually left the country because they didn’t like it. Again, I can’t super benchmark it here, but they are all very intellectual, seem to have important jobs and can afford their daughter to become a concert pianist. They know all the relevant folks to get ahead in the bread line and finally emigrate. Overseas again, they are swiftly very well established and travel the world. Doesn’t sound average to me.
- A similar point: in the end, von Bremzen is really indignant about the nostalgia that is ‘haunting’ the modern Russians. She’s upset about a poem being recited under the image of Stalin, yet happily enters the air plane to quickly go back to the most genocidal country on the planet. This general injudiciousness felt at the heart why she didn’t get the nostalgia til the very end, when she visits Lenin’s mausoleum. I’ll grant that she had a few things to criticize when she arrived in the US, but it felt like a false balance. And I already hear you say: it’s not a competition yada. Okay, that’s true, but it just tickles me the wrong way when ‘intellectuals’ travel around the world and then don’t concede some more epistemic humility in their analysis. Maybe she just didn’t go ‘meta’ enough for me.
Despite all these criticisms in the end, I think it was quite interesting to get access to Soviet culture in a way that a ‘normal’ history books reciting the facts and events cannot. This is why eventually I’d rate it 3.5. The nonchalance with which she describe the alcohol consumption (one of the cooler episodes) without being negligent or forgetting to point out that alcoholism is in fact a problem was extremely adequate altogether and captured something that felt like a Soviet ‘essence’ (not talking about the alcohol but really the conveyed feeling). Many West Europeans are just like ‘yeah, they drink a lot of vodka’, but they way von Bremzen described it (as well as many other dishes) felt, again, extremely adequate.
One last thing that I just remembered: Another postmodernly interesting thing that she picked up on: There is a discrepancy between the food how it is tasted and passed down through the generations and how it is imagined later through nostalgia. They prepare some sort of meat pie with ingredients that don’t occur in the original, authentic dish yet it makes it somehow better. The simulation of a food that has lost the reference to the previous referent gave me some Baudrillardian (Simulacra and Simulation) feelings, which was nice.
