From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork
by Witold Szablowski
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Published Nov 2023
384 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
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 and photos—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.
"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
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Witold Szabłowski is an award-winning Polish journalist and the author of How to Feed a Dictator ("an outright pleasure to read" —Bill Buford) and the New York Times Editors' Choice Dancing Bears ("mix[es] bold journalism with bolder allegories" —Timothy Snyder). When he was twenty-four he had a stint as a chef in Copenhagen, and at age twenty-five he became the youngest reporter at one of Poland's largest daily newspapers, where he won awards for his features on the issue of immigrants flocking to the EU and the 1943 massacre of Poles in Ukraine. He lives in Warsaw.
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