It is something that everyone ate at New Year with Brezhnev on the television.

Salat Olivier, the potato and pickle salad.

What is the most evocative Russian dish for you? She looks in fridge, which is empty, yet somehow always manages to cook a meal. It was a whole attitude, a way of conjuring up small miracles from a can of tomato paste. It was much more than a collection of dishes. It was very heroic and I wanted to pay tribute to that. Really authentic Soviet cuisine always involved feats of improvisation in relation to whatever new scarcity was underway. Something else replaced it: Soviet cuisine. Russian cuisine was really stopped in its tracks in 1917. Should Russian cuisine be considered great internationally? Food was something that really connects and has immediacy. There was an intimate, internal Soviet life around the kitchen table. I try to personalise their experiences and show how life was experienced in very strong colours with happiness as well as tragedy. I have tried to counter the image of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union with people just being cogs in the terrible machine of the state. It’s the idea of the poisoned Madeleine, the cookie of your childhood that is not always an idealised past but very traumatic. Food is something very mundane that everyone remembers – the smells, the sensations. I was surprised by the incredibly lively debates. We would invite old ladies around to her apartment and talk about Stalin. It’s a multi-generational family history, a social history of Soviet food and a cooking chronicle of me and my mother in Queens. Everything I did was coloured by the scarcity of those early Soviet years, the whole tragic values. Meanwhile something was really eating at me about our past, and our relationship to our food – something darker, more existential, more powerful. I had become a food writer, producing articles for glossy magazines and winning awards for writing about fancy chefs. What inspired you to write Mastering The Art of Soviet Cooking? A lavish 600 page on the culinary friendship of nations as the country was collapsing.

It was ironic, just when the republics left the Soviet Union, and there was no food.

The idea was to write a book on the food of the 15 republics. I translated a cookbook from Italian and thought maybe I should write my own one about Russian food, which was very much in vogue at the time, during glasnost. I trained as a pianist but had a hand injury and shifted into cookery writing by fluke. I was born in Russia in 1963, and emigrated to the US at the height of the Brezhnev stagnation in 1974. Interview by Andrew Jack ( did you start writing about cooking?

Anya von bremzen books