Searching for home with Anya von Bremzen
How the award-winning food author unwrapped the global mythology of the national dish
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Lecker Book Club is a monthly feature spotlighting a recently released book within the genre of food writing. As well as a podcast interview with the author, you can find additional content here. As the name suggests, I’d love this to be a conversation. Have you read the book? Are you cooking from it? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This month the book is National Dish by Anya von Bremzen.
Photo credit: Derya Turgut
National Dish is a book from which you can take away many things. There are many fascinating insights into the history of food and nationhood of different places; some great ‘Did you know…?!’ conversation starters. But it’s also an extremely fun and dynamic read, a whistlestop tour around the world with Anya von Bremzen as your knowledgeable and entertaining tour guide. Anya was born in Moscow to Ukrainian parents and emigrated to the US as a child. Her and her mother arrived as stateless refugees to the country in 1974.
As an opener to our conversation via video call, I asked Anya what had first drawn her to the idea of the national dish.
“It's actually something that I've been thinking about for quite a while because my career in food is quite accidental. I was a concert pianist and then I had a hand injury. I was looking for something to do. I translated a cookbook from Italian and I thought, Oh, I should write my own.
And my ever first cookbook was called Please to the Table…subtitled, unfortunately, The Russian Cookbook. But in fact, it was about the cuisines of the former Soviet empire, all the different republics, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Georgia, which are all now independent countries.
But as the book came out in 1990, the Soviet Union went bust. And these former republics of an empire became independent countries. And over the years, I literally watched in real time as they established their national canons, their national histories and their national cuisines. So it just made me realise how recent some of this nation building is and often how constructed and I've been thinking about this ever since and now in the age of this intense globalisation, what is a national cuisine? What is a national dish?
On the one hand, the world is becoming more and more same. You can eat instant ramen in remote Andean or Mexican indigenous villages, or you can have sushi at any swishy place from Istanbul to Dubai to wherever. At the same time, as kind of the other side of the coin, our compulsion to tie food to place, to search out the local, the so called authentic, is stronger than ever in response to this globalisation.
So I thought it would be a really good time to explore this through food, because food is a subject that tells us so much about so many things.”
I said to Anya that it does indeed feel like a very timely book, for many reasons. One of them is that it provides interesting and sometimes necessary context to the ongoing conversation around attribution and cultural appropriation, and asked whether she thought there was any particular motivation for these topics to be at the top of people’s minds today, particularly around food.
“Telling stories through food. It's actually quite recent. I mean, food has always been an important part of the narrative, but in the so-called food writing space, in the intellectual space, food used to be something for ladies who write cookbooks, right? And now we have serious scholars and serious writers examining it to look at other phenomena.
Because of social media, because food is always with us on TikTok, on Instagram, we finally realised how many stories we can tell through food.
To go back to your question about cultural appropriation, the reason is we're hearing about it so much is because we're finally paying attention to racial injustice, to power struggles. And again food is such an interesting way, an interesting lens through which to talk about it.
But at this point, I feel that these phrases have been so overused that I feel that it will be maybe useful to talk about racial injustice directly, as opposed to saying, well, he appropriated my mofongo or my sushi or whatever. It's kind of almost becoming meaningless at this point.
And I think the only thing that's going to really change the world is political action. It's political engagement and I always joke [that] if there was a donate button every time we use the phrase cultural appropriation, it might've been more helpful.
We really need to stay engaged and we can't just kind of disassociate ourselves, just because we use these trendy terms.”
National Dish has seven chapters, including an introduction and an epilogue, each set in a different country. I was curious how Anya had come to select these particular places and these particular dishes.
“Well, that was quite difficult because, as you can imagine, every country has its own national dish and all these dishes tell important stories. I didn't want to be a total neophyte. I wanted to go back to places that I've researched before that I visited where I had contacts and I also wanted to look at foods that are truly iconic and everyone can relate to.
So pizza in Naples. Natural choice. In Japan, ramen, something that everyone knows, as well as rice, boiled rice, another cornerstone of Japanese diet. I wanted to look at tapas in Spain. Cause it's such an important way of not just eating, but socialising… small bites, little plates to share. They brought down the tyranny of the white tablecloth of the French.
I started in France because that's where an explicitly nationalistic discourse about food started. It's the culture that gave us terms like chef and gastronomy. It's where the restaurant was invented, believe it or not. It didn't exist in its current form in the 1760s. Sauces and the great self importance and pomposity. And the idea that food was something uniquely French, we had to examine this. And as my French dish, I chose pot-au-feu, which translates as ‘pot on the fire’ and essentially is a boiled dinner. But it's really been consciously elevated to the status of a natural dish.
Then I go to Mexico and I examine the corn maize tortilla and the female indigenous labor behind it, as well as mole. Which is this complicated multi ingredient stew that contains elements from Spain, from the old country, and as well as indigenous elements. And it kind of represents what the Mexicans call mestizaje, the fusion of these elements in national identity.
And because I have a home in Istanbul, I look at meze, another important small plates tradition, and how that reflects the complicated multicultural Ottoman past. Because the Ottoman Empire dominated so much of the world, but it's been replaced in Turkey and other countries with nation states and a different definition of identity.
And then I finally end in Ukraine with Ukrainian Borsch.”
The final chapter of the book is a heartbreaking, vital essay about the strength of resilience of the Ukrainian people in the face of the atrocities being committed in their homeland, and how Borsch has become a symbol of strength and solidarity in their nationhood. I wondered whether Anya had always planned to end the book this way.
“That Borsch episode really brought home my own sort of existential homelessness. Because I was someone from Moscow who speaks Russian, who thinks in Russian, but I am so opposed to what Putin has done, and I just so loathe everything about Russia. I don't want to have anything to do with that place anymore. I don't want to ever go back to Moscow.
As I was finishing the book, I had something else in mind. I wanted to make Thanksgiving, which is a classic American meal in my very multicultural neighbourhood where 160 languages are spoken. So I thought, wow, it'd be cool to go on and just interview all these people from different countries, what Thanksgiving means to them as an invented tradition.
But, unfortunately, then the war broke out. And a huge pot of borsch sat in my fridge, it was made by my mom, and it kind of seemed – very tragically – where I had to end the book. It's one chapter of the book I wish I didn't have to write.”
In this way National Dish feels like a very contemporary book, but the historical research Anya carried out to provide the necessary context around the various dishes was extensive. Did this give her any inkling about what might be to come in the future of the national dish?
“I can only tell you what happened in the last 5, 10 years, which is – on the one hand – the intensification of globalisation and the erasure of borders and of national identities because everything is so digitalised.
And on the other hand, the intensification of nationalism, because I think it's almost a natural reaction to protect what we think is our identity, to protect our roots. I mean, the populist dictators that unfortunately are on the rise: the Putins, the Bolsonaros, the Trumps are stoking these feelings.
But I think whatever the dish of the future is, it’s going to be virtual. If we have a future at all, unfortunately, as this planet, we've just had the hottest summer on record. I mean, as I talk to you, we are over 40 degrees. here in New York in September.”
I said that this was something that did strike me when reading the book, as there is a question mark around how much of these dishes – the cultivation of their ingredients and their preparation methods – will even be possible in the coming years. Did writing National Dish feel like an act of preservation?
Not exactly. I think it's a chronicle of what people are saying. It's a snapshot of a moment now.
I came into this project as an extreme cosmopolitan who was very anti-nationalist because precisely I was seeing all these populist dictators, all the ugly sides of nationalism. But then came out of it with respect, having listened to so many people with respect for people's idea of who they are, right? Whether I agree with them or not, you know, this book very much was about listening. It was searching for home, yes, to some extent for myself, but I wanted to see how other people perceived it.
Politics were changing. In Spain, for instance, this horrible, toxic populist party, Vox, was gaining more and more popularity. But now, recently, they lost seats. So these things are very fast. They move too fast for anyone to be able to predict anything.
And the world is so unexpected. Who could have envisaged that we’ll be locked down in a pandemic. And the pandemic also brought forth interesting things about nationalism. On one hand, you had this closed borders. You had vaccine nationalism. You had this is mine and this is yours.
On the other hand, you had unprecedented international co-operation in creating vaccines. You had this stunning rise of digital commerce across the globe because you couldn't travel. So again, it goes both ways. And also you had this huge global trend of sourdough baking, right?
So like the entire world was posting their mason jars of starters, you know, bubbling away. It was like, suddenly it was like everyone was eating the same thing. Or, at least, the hipster contingent, right?”
I agree that it seemed like a certain type of person who exists in some form all over the world was eating certain things during that time. I find this point about lockdown sourdough particularly interesting as something else I’ve been working on recently (coming soon!) has been looking at bread. An aspect of this has touched on the homogenisation of certain types of sourdough bread. People often seem to have this very specific idea about what a sourdough loaf looks like. And that is essentially the Tartine San Francisco white loaf. But then there is this sort of conflict or tension between that idea and then…what grains do you actually grow in your country? And And moving forward, how can farmers grow what's good for them, what's good for the soil, what's good for us?
And Anya also examines the idea of terroir and how it’s encroaching on different food cultures around the world – like Japanese sake production – when it was originally of a very specific origin.
“It was the French. They first articulated this, since the 17th and 18th century. It's a very French concept that's been adopted and borrowed everywhere.
But it is interesting what you say, that that kind of extreme locavore culture globally in the end is used to produce something that is instantly recognisable, whether it's a Tartine loaf or a certain beer, right, craft brew.
It's on the one hand very homogenous and in another way, very specific to place. It's a good point. In some ways without even realising it, it's very specific to place because you have your own cultural understanding of something that someone else might not have.
So yeah, it's so interesting because of Instagram. It really is because of social media, right?”
And this brought me onto another idea around culinary tourism. Anya describes the cooking of pot-au-feu (which you can hear about in the podcast episode) as a “museum piece of a French meal”. And this reminded me of being in San Sebastian earlier this year, eating pintxos in the old town almost entirely surrounded by other tourists, and then asking a friend who lived there whether anyone local even drank there any more. Not really, she said. They go elsewhere now.
Where does the preservation of food culture end, and stagnation begin? Where does a city’s cuisine become a theme park?
“Culinary tourism is a very interesting subject and, again, I don't have an answer. I think it's a little bit of both because without the interest from abroad, a lot of these places maybe would have shut down.
But now that they are catering almost exclusively to foreigners. Are they preserving something or are they changing it? Again, there's no good or bad. I'm not someone who essentialises culture and who says, well, it has to be this way. And I want to be in a place where, you know, all the grandmas and grandpas are playing cards and having their fish soup, whatever.
Because I think that idea is also a touristic idea, right? It's us imposing our own vision on the world. But…I'm not sure what the correct answer is. I mean, just try to choose places that are less crowded now? But I'm seeing it everywhere. Europe is just… because of cheap flights, because of Airbnb, because of these huge global conglomerates, it's completely changing the face of cities.”
As a final note, I asked Anya whether any conversations had arisen from writing the book that had surprised her.
“No, I think some of the subjects are difficult, some of the subjects are...not to say explosive, but, you know, who owns a culture and what I – a white woman with all the privileges – do in writing about it.
So I addressed it as much as I could, but, I am who I am. I mean, I came to the United States as a refugee from a very difficult place and this difficult place has become uglier since, so there's always a political story there.
It's about cultural sensitivity ultimately. And I think I was extremely aware of all these issues. One can't disassociate it from what we eat.”
National Dish by Anya von Bremzen is out now, published by ONE, an imprint of Pushkin Press.
You can find all the Lecker Book Club picks on my Bookshop.org list.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. If you would like to hear a longer, more in depth version of my conversation with Anya, click here for the podcast.
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