Cooking Bolshevik: Anastas Mikoian and the making of the "Book about Delicious and Healthy Food"

Both one of the most iconic cookbooks of all time and one of the strangest, the "Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche" became the culinary bible of the Soviet household during the mid-twentieth century. The logical culmination of a decade of Soviet culinary evolution under the leadership of Anastas Mikoian, the original "Book about Delicious and Healthy Food" is a microcosm of Stalinist civilization that exemplifies the contradictory trends making up Soviet politics and culture in the late 1930s. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Anastas Mikoian's personal papers retained in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, as well as published primary sources, this article seeks to contextualize the complex tale of the cookbook's origins in a broader narrative of the construction of the Soviet Union's official food culture under Mikoian's leadership during the 1930s.