You can use your St. Louis County Library card to borrow titles from these partner libraries:
What's Cooking in the Kremlin
From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
A high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure by an award-winning Polish journalist that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power through food
In the gonzo spirit of Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S. Thompson, Witold Szabłowski has tracked down—and broken bread with—people whose stories of working in Kremlin kitchens impart a surprising flavor to our understanding of one of the world’s superpowers.
In revealing what Tsar Nicholas II’s and Lenin’s favorite meals were, why Stalin’s cook taught Gorbachev’s cook to sing to his dough, how Stalin had a food tester while he was starving the Ukrainians during the Great Famine, what the recipe was for the first soup flown into outer space, why Brezhnev hated caviar, what was served to the Soviet Union’s leaders at the very moment they decided the USSR should cease to exist, and whether Putin’s grandfather really did cook for Lenin and Stalin, Szabłowski has written a fascinating oral history—complete with recipes—of Russia’s evolution from culinary indifference to decadence, famine to feasts, and of the Kremlin’s Olympics-style preoccupation with food as an expression of the country’s global standing.
Traveling across Stalin’s Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chornobyl, and even to a besieged steelworks plant in Mariupol—often with one-of-a-kind access to locales forbidden to foreign eyes, and with a rousing sense of adventure and an inimitable ability to get people to spill the tea—he shows that a century after the revolution, Russia still uses food as an instrument of war and feeds its people on propaganda.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
November 7, 2023 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593683897
- File size: 305287 KB
- Duration: 10:36:00
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
August 28, 2023
Journalist Szablowski (How to Feed a Dictator) serves up a culinary travelogue infused with dark and savory legends from Russia’s kitchens, dachas, cafeterias, and canteens. He interviews the great-granddaughter of one of Czar Nicholas II’s cooks to find out what the czar and his family ate in their final days before Bolshevik guards executed the whole family, including their chef; evaluates Lenin’s diet of fried eggs, raw milk, and boiled buckwheat for its revolutionary health benefits (and risks); muses on how Stalin’s love for his native Georgian food brought a “genuine gastronomic revolution” to the U.S.S.R.; and relays firsthand accounts from survivors of the 1930s famine in Ukraine and the 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad about eating soups made from pinecones and breads baked with ground tree bark. Among those he spotlights are Faina Kazetska, the Star City cook who prepared meals for Yuri Gagarin and other Soviet cosmonauts; the dozen young women from Pripyat who cooked for the cleanup crews after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl; and Kremlin chef Viktor Belyaev, whose lavish feasts dazzled delegations of Western leaders including Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon. Szablowski’s account is enriched with recipes gathered during his travels throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and several ex-Soviet republics. Readers will be satiated by this easily digestible gastronomic history.
-