Mastering the Art of Food Memoir
I’m an Anya von Bremzen fangirl, and here are Desk Book Club notes.
I’m doing an essay workshop on Tuesday, June 24, that includes a rigorous edit from me and an open space for conversation with other writers. A few spots are left for each session. Sign up for 11 a.m. or 7 p.m. Find the discount code for members in the header or here.
My experiment in non-promotion of this workshop has gone about as well as you’d think! But I’m excited to work on people’s work with them.
As noted through Monday’s “What Do You Want From Food Writing?” this book is considered a food memoir par excellence. My paperback copy of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food & Longing by Anya von Bremzen—our current book club selection—has been well marked by my hand. There are the underlined sentences, the bracketed-off paragraphs, the lines and stars against larger chunks to mark their significance. How to write notes on a book I adore, for its structure, writing, and exploration of both cuisine and self? It’s been hard to figure that out.
The last two book club selections, I read in digital formats, because the books themselves had gotten packed away. I refused to read Soviet Cooking this way: I’d already filled it with marginalia, to my memory. But the marginalia is just the ecstatic outbursts of a fangirl, not the useful critical thought of whatever role I’m occupying currently. Regardless, I’ll do my best.
I’m extremely interested, you might have noticed over time, in how food in the kitchen and agriculture as a necessity is treated under various political-economic systems. Anything is better than what we do in the capitalist U.S.A., right? But what’s become clear through my reading is that powerful people always fuck food up, and the domestic is always ensnared in this push-pull. How the domestic gets ensnared in our ideologies—my favorite subject.
In June and July, we’re reading Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen. We will have the Zoom discussion on Sunday, July 20, at 1 p.m. EST, with the author herself. I will send my reading notes for the first half of the book on June 20. You can buy all the 2025 Desk Book Club picks at this year’s partner bookstore, D.C.’s Bold Fork Books, for 20% off with the code in the header or at this link.
