In Soviet Russia, food was not just demoted to fuel but became a means for the state to wield power; "whip and gingerbread" goes an old saying – the equivalent of the carrot and stick. And, as Anya von Bremzen puts it in her memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, gingerbread was scarce.

Indeed, von Bremzen frames her book with the statement: "Inevitably, a story about Soviet food is a chronicle of longing, of unrequited desire." What wafts from its pages, like the aroma of a sumptuous goulash, is the appetite with which this scarcity – and the generally underwhelming nature of  food available in 20th-century Russia – has endowed its author.

Food for von Bremzen is not just fuel. A contributing editor of the US magazine Travel + Leisure and recipient of three prestigious James Beard awards for her food writing, she celebrates the prandial indulgence she and her family were denied before moving to America when she was 10, in 1974. Food is also a way of remembering three generations of family history and nearly a hundred years of Russia's past, with tales of the black market, grain requisitioning and the lack of privacy: when 18 families shared one kitchen, "the public cauldron replaced the household pot".

Cooking is also a medium for von Bremzen, as a child, to identify herself. She "runs from [her] Jewishness", fleeing the kitchen on smelling a Russian Jewish dish, and, when in the US they find a (delicious and authentic) kulebiaka, the traditional fish pie from tsarist Russia, it is not as she and her mother recalled it: "Who were we kidding? Whether we liked it or not, we were Soviets, not Russians. In place of sturgeon, defrosted cod would do just fine."

This poignant memoir is an education in the richness of eastern European cuisine, and the story of Soviet communism, through the lens of family experience.