The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food by Darra Goldstein

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food by Darra Goldstein Diane P. Koenker Goldstein, Darra. The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food. California Studies in Food and Culture, 77. University of California Press, Oakland, CA, 2022. xviii + 171 pp. Map. Illustrations. Suggestions for further reading. Index. $24.95: £20.00. Drawing on a lifetime of experience as a literary scholar, food writer, cookbook author, Gastronomica editor and visitor to Russia, Darra Goldstein offers a lively introduction to the elements of Russian cuisine and culinary culture. The book's three chapters, plus a coda on post-Soviet foodways, range widely over foods, practices, technologies, production, consumption and popular culture. While gesturing to the multiplicity, diversity and richness of Russian food culture, the book opts for unity and essence as its organizing principle. 'Russians retain a strong sense of what constitutes "real food"' (p. 51), she writes, and she returns repeatedly to the 'touchstone flavors' that 'all Russians craved' (p. 114). These included a love of the sour, including the classic sourdough rye loaf, sweet-sour dishes made with the ubiquitous honey, and fermented products of all types. Goldstein balances the idea of a stable national cuisine with consideration of trade routes, borrowings, and the absorption of new foods such as tea, potatoes and tomatoes into the panoply of Russian flavours, but the emphasis is on what constituted Russian cuisine and practices. Goldstein [End Page 758] is the author of the prize-winning The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia (New York, 1992), but consideration of empire and difference lies outside her purview here. The first of three chapters introduces the reader to the variety of Russian food and beverages, their historical development, culinary practices and technologies, and food culture from the peasant masonry stove to the factory canteens of the Soviet era. The second chapter focuses on scarcity and hardship, particularly focusing on the twentieth century with its famines, deficits, three-line shopping and dacha survival gardens. The third chapter examines Russian hospitality, starting with the traditional welcome of bread and salt, and exploring the celebratory consumption of food at home, on the street, in palaces and in apartment kitchens. In the two chapters on scarcity and hospitality, Goldstein tends to choose the more extreme examples, with an extended section on the siege of Leningrad and detailed accounts of gargantuan aristocratic feasts. She claims that the standard American meal of starter, main and dessert owes its origin to the Russian table. In Russian practice, the sequential delivery of zakuski, soup, main dish and sweets replaced the French custom of presenting all of a meal's dishes at once. Among the fascinating anecdotes that support her narrative, I was especially struck by The Poetic Potato festival, begun in 2016 to commemorate the poet Joseph Brodsky's potato digging days during his 1960s exile in the far north. The coda takes the reader to post-Soviet Moscow, offering a potpourri of over-the-top restaurants, commercialization and spectacle. In concluding, the narrative comes full circle to the efforts of food practitioners to reclaim ancient traditions of timeless Russian food in response to the embargo on imported food products after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Engagingly written and illustrated with photos and artwork, the book offers stories both familiar (Leningrad, McDonalds) and unfamiliar (Brodsky, Count Alexander Sergeevich Stroganov's dinner parties). It draws especially on literary references, foreign travellers' accounts and historic Russian cooking manuals. The book is intended for a popular audience who will appreciate the authenticity of Russian food names (studen´, beryozovitsa and kundiumy, for example). It lacks notes, and while it is clearly based on Goldstein's own extensive research and writing, the work of other scholars is evident but regrettably unacknowledged. There is a short list for 'further reading' that includes some but not all of this research. With its fundamentally literary orientation, Kingdom of Rye could profitably be read in tandem with Alison K. Smith's Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia (London, 2021), which offers an historian's perspective. [End Page 759] Diane P. Koenker UCL SSEES Copyright © 2022...