mastering the art of soviet cooking by anya von bremzen

She defined kindness and heroism as “moral beauty,” which “triggers ‘elevation’ – a positive and uplifting feeling” that “acts as an emotional reset button, replacing feelings of cynicism with hope, love and optimism.”The study suggested this happens when one watches a news story about kindness after watching ones about bombings, cruelty, and violence. They support “the belief that the world and people in it are good.” And they provide “relief to the pain we experience when we see others suffering.”It was her fourth point that stuck with me. Wildly inventive and slyly witty, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses.A week ago, a British researcher published an article titled “Stories of kindness may counteract the negative effects of looking at bad news.” As you might imagine, I was intrigued.Kathryn Buchanan of the University of Essex shared four main takeaways from her research: Stories of kindness remind us of our shared values.

Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Now Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. When Anya was ten, she and Larisa fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return.

It was a life by turns absurd, naively joyous, and melancholy-and ultimately intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother, Larisa. She sang odes to Lenin, black-marketeered Juicy Fruit gum at school, watched her father brew moonshine, and, like most Soviet citizens, longed for a taste of the mythical West. A banquet of anecdote that brings history to life with intimacy, candor, and glorious color.”-NPR’s All Things Consideredīorn in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen. A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations

Mastering the art of soviet cooking by anya von bremzen