One of the author’s relatives, a lady’s man, would lie dead drunk in the street, and that made him all the more attractive to women, who pitied him. People envied MIG-25 pilots because they were given de-icer, whose principal ingredient was alcohol, which they drank, to the peril of their passengers and themselves. Nothing could have made him more unpopular. “Better to die of vodka than of boredom,” declared the poet Mayakovsky, and by “boredom” he meant “sobriety.” Government after Russian government has made its principal source of revenue the vodka monopoly, and by the Brezhnev era “our Rodina was in the collective grip of ‘white fever’ (DTs).” After making this point, the author provides eight colorful Brezhnev-era synonyms for “completely smashed.” Gorbachev’s most disastrous decision was to try to sober the country up. The author explains that the Russian Homeland ( Rodina-a word with almost mystic significance) “can only really be understood v zabutylie (through a bottle).” According to the earliest Russian chronicles, Slavs chose Christianity because the alternative was to accept Islam, which forbade drinking. Russian is a language without a word for privacy, and though Russians consume unbelievable amounts of alcohol, they look down on drinking alone: it is an antisocial sign of heartlessness, perhaps even of Jewishness! It is almost as bad as not drinking at all. We get stories of kitchens shared by eighteen families and the chaos that sharing caused.

People saved their mayonnaise jars so they could give their doctors urine samples. If you bought meat and did not bring your own paper, you would have to carry it in your hands. Not only was there a never-ending culture of the defitsit (shortage) of goods there was also no packaging. “Not too rotten,” the author remembers her mother saying to a sales clerk. This book goes through decade after decade of Russian life, from pre-to post-Soviet times, and in each section accompanies family anecdotes with recollections of meals. Meals assembled with such effort were all the more appreciated. We think of lines as annoyances to avoid in Russia they were not only unavoidable but also a central fact of life-even “a quasisurrogate church,” as one Russian novel, composed entirely of dialogues in a queue, puts it. To get food and other necessities, Homo sovieticus could count on spending a third of his or her nonworking hours waiting in lines, where a special kind of communality developed. Soviet cooking? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Wasn’t the Soviet Union a place where everything was in short supply, people waited on endless lines, there was little if any choice, and the center of every meal was vodka? Yes, indeed, and yet a quite interesting cuisine developed under these conditions.

Mastering the art of soviet cooking