What's Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork

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Synopsis
&“Chatty and illuminating.&” —The New York Times&“Riveting—a delicious odyssey full of history, humor, and jaw-dropping stories. If you want to understand the making of modern Russia, read this book.&” —Daniel Stone, bestselling author of The Food ExplorerA high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power through food, by an award-winning Polish journalist who&’s been praised by both Timothy Snyder and Bill BufordIn 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.
Copyright:
2021

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
384 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780593511176
Related ISBNs:
9780143137184
Publisher:
Penguin Publishing Group
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Witold Szabłowski
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Travel, Cooking, Food and Wine
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.
Translator:
Antonia Lloyd-Jones

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