Cookbooks & Beverages
A few years ago my employee Elizabeth and I generally unpacked UPS shipments from our book distributors and publishers around lunchtime, and we found ourselves particularly vulnerable to all the fine cookbooks arriving. This listing is by no means all of our cookbooks. It is a gathering of recent and/or interesting titles along with a few classics added to show we have grounding in our selection. My mother raised me to read cookbooks somewhat the same as a novel or a history or a biography. Pretty pictures and clever premises are not enough to stock a title. It must have accessible content as well, and a cookbook with good writing is a treasure.
Davai! The Russians and their Vodka
Davai! The Russians and their Vodka
““It’s not out of poverty or grief that the Russian
people drink, but out of an age-old thirst for the
miraculous and the extraordinary; they drink,
if you will, mystically, striving to lift the soul out of
its earthly equilibrium and to return it to a
blissful, incorporeal state.””
- Abram Tertz
You cannot separate Russians from their vodkaor vodka from Russia. For over 600 years, this proud Slavic culture has – for good or ill – been inextricably bound up with their national drink. Vodka is an omnipresent and constant factor in Russian history, a drink for the great and the lowly, in times of happiness and in times of calamity. This has been expressed in literature, song, politics, history and every aspect of popular culture.
In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.
In addition, most all of the hundreds of wonderful quotes from literature, theater and poetry are presented in both their Russian original and English translation, making this also a useful guide to improving one’s Russian through the lens of this ancient drink.
Reviews
"In roughly three hundred pages Trommelen attempts to capture not merely the cultural history of vodka as product but to reveal Russia’s often unhealthy relationship with the spirit and the degree to which it informs moments of individual and even national cultural significance. There can be little doubt that Trommelen succeeds in laying out the multi-faceted position that vodka enjoys in Russian life as he draws examples from literary, political, and anthropological sources....it is far broader in scope and vision than other monographs... The book is an excellent introduction not only to the specific cultural rites of drinking but also to a large number of Russian cultural situations and customs."
– John Ellison, Slavic and East European Journal