Publishers Weekly
08/28/2023
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. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
Finalist for the André Simon Food Book Award
“Chatty and illuminating.” —The New York Times
“Fascinating . . . Poignant . . . Reveals the flip side of repression and violence. In the end What’s Cooking in the Kremlin is about care; about how cooks looked after others with food, conversation, favors, and beauty, wherever they could scavenge it.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Extraordinary tales . . . [A] feast of a book . . . The great strength of What’s Cooking in the Kremlin is the way that Szabłowski has managed to track down people, many now very old, who have vivid food memories from another time . . . [and] allows them to serve their testimony in full. The result is a work of oral history of the kind made so popular by the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich.” —Daily Mail
“Moving . . . The level of detail is truly remarkable. . . . There is plenty of humor in these pages, but the tone is never jarring. . . . These historic testimonies are particularly poignant as Russia continues to strike villages that endured the Great Famine. . . . Does not disappoint.” —The Moscow Times
“The vignettes in this book reveal a different side to political figures and thereby dent the image they foster. It is hard, for instance, to see Mr. Putin in the same way after hearing of his childlike obsession with ice-cream.” —The Economist
“Fascinating tales of hunger and brutality . . . A Studs Terkel history of food, life, death, and dictatorship that’s admirable for its honesty, tenderness, and immutable sorrow . . . The oral histories ripple with tension. . . . Delightful.” —Food & Environment Reporting Network
“A fascinating and wide-ranging history, with recipes.” —Arlington Magazine
“Superb on every page . . . Magnificent.” —Strong Words
“An original work of social history . . . Entertaining . . . Poignant, timely . . . A bitter history lesson taught with humor and grace . . . Detailed, chilling, and priceless.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A culinary travelogue infused with dark and savory legends from Russia’s kitchens, dachas, cafeterias, and canteens . . . enriched with recipes gathered during [Szabłowski’s] travels throughout Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and several ex-Soviet republics. Readers will be satiated by this easily digestible gastronomic history.” —Publishers Weekly
“A riveting account of a uniquely sumptuous cuisine prepared in often grotesque and dangerous settings. Poignant, comical, and, in the best sense, disturbing.” —Paul Freedman, author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America
“This wickedly delicious tale uncovers the secret gustatory history of the Kremlin and will leave you begging for seconds.” —Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs
“I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As a chef and the daughter of Soviet Jewish refugees, I have experienced a lifelong fascination with, mingled with repulsion toward, the food on my ancestral table. What’s Cooking in the Kremlin gracefully captures this perpetual tension—it is what inevitably arises when an extraordinary cuisine becomes a weapon deployed against the very people who’ve made it.” —Bonnie Frumkin Morales, author of Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking
“A captivating, heartrending, and fascinating book that is more important now than ever with the Ukraine conflict. The chapter about the famine in Ukraine was especially touching for me, as my grandparents and great-grandparents lived through it. You won’t be able to put it down!” —Tatyana Nesteruk, author of Beyond Borscht and founder of Tatyana’s Everyday Food
“By turns poignant and playful, What’s Cooking in the Kremlin offers an invaluable history of Russia viewed from the kitchen and told through engaging stories and oral histories given by cooks who survived the vagaries of the Kremlin’s whims and who toiled through the great afflictions of collectivization, the Siege of Leningrad, the Chernobyl disaster, and more.” —Darra Goldstein, author of A Taste of Russia, The Georgian Feast, and Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore
“This book will make your mouth water. Witold Szabłowski’s delicious dive into Russian imperial history comes complete with recipes for Stalin’s favorite Georgian Walnut Jam, the Blockade Bread that people ate during the World War II Siege of Leningrad, and the Turkey in Quince and Orange Juice served to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Yalta in 1945. A fascinating and insightful culinary extravaganza that explores how the way to the famed Russian soul has always been through the collective stomach.” —Kristen R. Ghodsee, author of Everyday Utopia, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, and Red Hangover
“A spicy and original romp through Russian history through the tales and recipes of the cooks who served rulers from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin.” —Robert Service, author of A History of Modern Russia and biographies of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Nicholas II
DECEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
Someone thought that having the subjects quoted in this audiobook speak in a thick (almost comically so) Russian accent was a good idea. It was not. In fact, the accents distract from a compelling audiobook. The text itself is chockablock with tidbits of information about the eating habits of the famous: Lenin had little love for food, Stalin preferred his native Georgian dishes, and the Romanovs ate opulently almost to the very end. The work tells a lot of inside stories about those who cooked for them and adds fine stuff on how those eating under duress in Ukraine survived and how the Soviet army ate in Afghanistan. More's the pity, then, that this audiobook is surely better on the page. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-08-23
Penetrating the secrets of the Kremlin through delightful chronicles of the long-suffering chefs who catered to Russian leaders.
In an original work of social history, Polish journalist Szabłowski, the author of How To Feed a Dictator and Dancing Bears, alternates narrative with interviews (and recipes) to delve into some recondite and often apocryphal stories of the people who cooked for the Russian elite, from Ivan Kharitonov, the chef executed with Tsar Nicholas II in 1918; to Polina Ivanovna, who cooked “the Soviet Union’s last supper.” What the author learned can be summed up in two sentences of Russian propaganda: “It doesn’t matter if a story is true. What matters is that people believe it.” Case in point: Vladimir Putin’s grandfather, Spirodin, cooked in various Russian sanitoriums, but claiming that he served Russian leaders from Rasputin to Stalin was great propaganda when Putin was campaigning for office. Over years, Szabłowski has tracked down many of his elusive subjects, and he tells a wide variety of entertaining stories about this colorful cast of characters, including longtime Kremlin chef Viltor Belyaev, who relates detailed, chilling, and priceless stories about cooking for Brezhnev and Gorbachev; the devoted cook who created food in tubes for cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s mission to space in 1961; and the doomed kitchen staff assembled for the clean-up crew after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The author includes horrific eyewitness accounts of Ukrainians surviving the Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 (“Every seven minutes someone in Ukraine died of starvation”), as well as those who suffered during the two-year German siege of Leningrad. Szabłowski also relates the saga of the intrepid “Mama Nina,” who cooked for a Soviet airbase in Afghanistan, with little understanding of the nature of the war. The author closes with a poignant, timely look at the tenuous culinary culture of the Tatars, who were nearly eliminated from Crimea.
A bitter history lesson taught with humor and grace.
