Seasoned Socialism

1. Food studies is becoming increasingly popular in both conferences and in classrooms. This book explores the late Soviet era through food including: the anxieties around continual problems of scarcity, the luxury and prestige attached to certain items, and the creativity Soviet citizens applied to their provisioning and cooking.

2. The book is written with undergraduate audiences in mind and will have strong appeal for course adoption.

3. Darra Goldstein, a prominent scholar of Soviet food culture, will provide a preface for the volume. Brintlinger is an established academic with several monographs and edited collections to her credit. Lakhtikova and Gluschenko are earlier-career scholars with extensive teaching and research experience in the Russian émigré culture and Soviet food.

Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women's central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Food, both in its quality and quantity, was a powerful tool in the Soviet Union. This collection features work by scholars in an array of fields including cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, history, and food studies, and the work gathered here explores the intersection of gender, food, and culture in the post-1960s Soviet context. From personal cookbooks to gulag survival strategies, Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women's journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.

Foreword / Darra Goldstein

Introduction: Food, Gender, and the Everyday through the Looking Glass of Socialist Experience / Anastasia Lakhtikova and Angela Brintlinger

I. Women in the Soviet Kitchen: Cooking Paradoxes in Family and Society

1. Love, Marry, Cook: Gendering the Home Kitchen in Late Soviet Russia / Adrianne K. Jacobs

2. "I hate cooking!": Emancipation and Patriarchy in Late Soviet Film / Irina Glushchenko, Translated by Angela Brintlinger and Anastasia Lakhtikova

3. Professional Women Cooking: Personal Soviet Cookbooks, Social Networks and Identity Building / Anastasia Lakhtikova

II. Producers, Providers and Consumers: Resistance and Compliance, Soviet-Style

4. Cake, Cabbage, and the Morality of Consumption in Iurii Trifonov's House on the Embankment / Benjamin Sutcliffe

5. Sated People: Gendered Modes of Acquiring and Consuming Prestigious Soviet Foods / Olena Stiazhkina

6. Dacha Labors: Preserving Everyday Soviet Life / Melissa L. Caldwell

7. Vodka en plein air: Authoritative Discourse, Alcohol, and Gendered Spaces in "Gray Mouse" by Vil' Lipatov / Lidiia Levkovitch

III. Soviet Signifiers: The Semiotics of Everyday Scarcity and Ritual Uses of Food

8. Cold Veal and a Stale Bread Roll: Zofia Wędrowska's Taste for Scarcity / Ksenia Gusarova

9. "Our only hope was in these plants": Irina Ratushinskaya and the Manipulation of Foodways in a Late Soviet Labor Camp / Ona Renner-Fahey

10: Shchi da kasha, but Mostly Shchi: Cabbage as Gendered and Genre'd in Late Soviet Prose / Angela Brintlinger

11. Still Life with Leftover Cutlet: Nonna Slepakova's Poetics of Time / Amelia Glaser

Afterword: Cultures of Food in the Era of Developed Socialism / Diane P. Koenker

Index