Luckily, Anya von Bremzen not only is familiar with the full gamut of Slavic fare, she retains affection from her Soviet childhood for alarming fish entrées accompanied by “enticing whiffs of wallpaper glue.” More luckily still, through breathtaking feats of raconteurial skill, she makes you envy the recipes that make her mouth water, even when you don’t yourself hanker for the mythic meals she conjures-and even when she herself admits that she’d never eaten them, given the endless defitsits (food shortages) of her native land. Trying not to breathe, I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls-I remember an impression of Knox Blox made of wallpaper paste-smiled faintly, and said as convincingly as I could, “Ochen’ vkusno!” She had spent days scouring the markets for the ingredients. I remember in particular a clearish, jiggling aspic-big and flat as a sheet cake-that contained a pale poached fish the size of a man’s foot, served to me by an eminent aproned professor in a Moscow high-rise in 1993.

Visiting Moscow for the first time in the 1990s, I belatedly understood my friends’ reaction, when I confronted unfamiliar Russian treats that made my flesh crawl. But when my school friends would drop by our kitchen and catch the whiff of dill, they would flee. My Cold War childhood was like an unending session of Soviet show-and-tell. From my tenderest youth, my slavophile professor parents threw raucous Russian Club parties at our home for their students, for which my mother spent hours cranking beef and softened onions through a meat grinder she’d lugged back from a Moscow study trip.

Although I’m American, devoid of any jot of Russian blood, an accident of birth assured that taste memories of borscht, poppy-seed cake, and the soft, meat-filled buns called pirozhki romp through my psyche. Reading Anya von Bremzen’s one-of-a-kind culinary and sociopolitical memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, a nostalgically anti-nostalgic tribute to 20th century life and food in the land once known as the Soviet Union, I thought of that gustatory paradox. It means “very tasty ” and it simply never is-that is, not to those unaccustomed to the flavors of the Slavic palate. One of the most misleading phrases in the Russian language is “ Ochen’ vkusno!” which is invariably said any time you sit down to a meal in Russia that a hostess has gone to some effort to prepare.

Mastering the art of soviet cooking