by Anya von Bremzen, 2013
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before.
This is the category for which I had the hardest time finding a selection. While I’ve eaten a number of different types of cuisines, I certainly haven’t tried everything, but I also didn’t want to select some sort of cookbook that I had no interest in reading just because it fulfilled the task. I found Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking on a list of food books on Goodreads and was intrigued by the premise: von Bremzen and her mother cook through a hundred years of Soviet history, decade by decade, using food as a way to explore social change in the former USSR. Although I’ve had Russian food before, it was by way of a Russian friend I had in college and I’ve never actually been to a Russian restaurant or had such food since that time. The idea of getting to learn more about a country that I, admittedly, know very little about through its food seemed like a great way to fulfill the task. I wish I could say that I enjoyed it.