This collection of articles, the editors tell us, was “cooked up” (xix) not at a conference, but in a conference hotel room. As a result, this fine volume suffers from none of the haphazardness of many a conference collection, instead amounting to a carefully-crafted and coherent whole that balances accessibility to non-specialists with scholarly rigor.

A foreword by Darra Goldstein, who began writing seriously about Russian food long before the birth of “food studies,” sets the stage by introducing three keywords—“scarcity, “desire,” and “creativity” (x)—that serve as guideposts as we read on. In their excellent introduction, editors Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger further frame the essays in several important ways. First, they detail how texts of all kinds were permeated by the dominant Soviet discourse on the proper way to eat and think about food, which arose as “an alternative to a free market food discourse based on preferences in taste and free choice” (2), while simultaneously standing in direct contradiction to the lived reality of ordinary citizens. They go on to examine the ways in which the theoretical categories advanced by western scholars to study intersections of food, gender, and class are often inadequate to describe the particularities of the “nonmarket economy of scarcity.” (9) And finally, they problematize the uses of the term “traditional” in a world in which the largely imagined pre-revolutionary past plays an important role in the food narratives of the present and future.

The eleven articles that follow are diverse in both subject matter and disciplinary approach, drawing on theoretical frameworks from history, anthropology, film studies, and literary and cultural studies. The first section, entitled “Women in the Soviet Kitchen: Cooking Paradoxes in Family and Society,” opens with a pair of essays that introduce themes that run throughout the collection. Adrianne K. Jacobs elucidates the state of the late Soviet kitchen, a gendered space marked by the rise of a neotraditionalist ethos that counters the earlier official narrative that women would be liberated from the drudgery of the kitchen by Soviet communal dining. Irina Glushchenko, well known for her book on Mikoyan and obshchepit, expands on the picture sketched by Jacobs with a nuanced analysis of how depictions of gender roles in popular film both reflect and shape a new reality that is problematic for women and men.

The following two sections are less tightly focused, yet synergies among the articles abound. For example, Benjamin Sutcliffe's article on Iurii Trifonov's House on the Embankment at first glance seems to be an odd choice for inclusion, since questions of gender are not foregrounded, and food is just one part of the “corrupting collection of banal objects” (128) that tempts the protagonist. Yet as we read on, we see that the satiation (sytost΄) central to Sutcliffe's argument is further contextualized and deepened by juxtaposition with Olena Stiazhkina's “Sated People” in the article that follows. Stiazhkina analyzes how this class of other, “not entirely Soviet people” (133) emerged from the shadow economy, bringing with them “prestigious food practices,” (132) which, in turn, influenced mainstream Soviet food practices and gender roles. Lakhtikova and Brintlinger are to be commended for their painstaking translation of this dense article, but in a piece that deals largely with semantics and subtleties of everyday discourse, I wished that the translators had included more of the original Russian in the notes. (They do provide key terms such as teneviki, dobytchiki, fartsovshchiki, and many others in the body of the text.)

The thematic “red threads” (18) that run through the book are so numerous that no more than a few can be mentioned. In her insightful analysis of Zofia Wędrowska's wildly popular 100 Minutes for Beauty and Health, Ksenia Gusarova explores how an emerging consumer society at odds with the realities of continued scarcity leads Wędrowska's readers to embrace “elective asceticism” (230)—the same standards of beauty that the women alongside Stiazhkina’s sated “Other” arrived at via a different route entirely. This is arrived at via a different route entirely. The “ethic of care” (248) that Ona Renner-Fahey identifies as fundamental to Irina Ratushinskaya's gulag memoir resonates with Melissa L. Caldwell's formulation of dachas as a “feminized site of problem-solving” (183). When Stiazhkina invokes the “gastronomic mother” (152) who seeks to maintain her power in the domestic domain by controlling all aspects of food consumption, we hear echoes of the “superwoman-like pride” (Lakhtikova, 83) with which highly educated women applied themselves to the task of entertaining, perhaps as a means of compensating for the lack of power in their professional lives. In addition, cabbage appears intermittently throughout the book, picking up additional layers of meaning eventually made explicit in an article by Brintlinger.

Sometimes the connections between the articles are paradoxical. At the same time that Lakhtikova's party hostesses were sharing recipes as a way of countering official discourse on proper nutrition for Soviet workers, the zeks in Renner-Fahey's article were sharing knowledge about health and nutrition to help them endure disease and organize effective hunger strikes. Whereas women in most contexts in the book are engaged in various forms of resistance to the dominant discourse, Lidia Levkovitch demonstrates how the female characters in Vil Lipatov's Gray Mouse instead function as mouthpieces for official ideology set against the male protagonists and the “alternative spaces their drinking creates” (200). The collection is rounded out by a final paradox, Amelia Glaser's analysis of the poetry of Nonna Slepakova, in which the cyclical time of the “female everyday” (301) balances precariously between stagnant byt and sustaining images of home and hearth.

In her Afterword, Diane P. Koenker skillfully recaps and ties off the thematic threads, while adding additional context and raising new questions for investigation. The cumulative bibliography and index at the end further enhance the value of this book for the broadest possible readership, ensuring it will take its rightful place on the shelves of anyone interested in food and Soviet culture.