Kingdom of Rye is a concise history of the everyday and extravagant foods of Russia from earliest times into the 2010s. It begins with an all-too relatable story of the author being dissuaded by her graduate school advisers from writing on such a “trivial” subject as food, and redirected into more, as it were, standard fare. As the further readings section at the end of this book demonstrates, those professors were proven wrong about the significance and popularity of food as a subject of investigation. As well as historical cookbooks—which Goldstein has also produced—there have now been a number of volumes on food in Russia, all adding to our understanding of social and cultural history by examining a fundamental part of human life. Kingdom of Rye contributes to that literature by presenting an up-to-date and accessible introduction to the topic.
Kingdom of Rye is divided into three chapters. The first deals with traditional foods, beginning with the rye bread from which the volume takes its title. This chapter takes us through the ingredients and methods of preparation for historical Russian foods and drinks, often in substantial detail. Chapter 2 tackles the darker subject of hardship and famine, covering major topics such as the Holodomor. This chapter remains focused on the issue of ingredients and processes, recounting such stories as how “candies” were made from sugar melted into the floor of a bombed-out factory during WWII. The third chapter moves us in the other direction, to excess and extravagance, looking at how tsars and nobles sought to impress their guests with surprises and culinary delights. The book finishes with a coda on Post-Soviet Russia, tracing the rise and fall of the popularity of western foods, from the queues outside the first McDonalds in 1990 through to the destruction of foreign imports contravening countersanctions during the 2014 Annexation of Crimea. This is an engaging work providing a fascinating glimpse of the everyday realities of how Russians have eaten in the past and eat today.
However, the book's framing of what constitutes “Russian” is sometimes troubling. Despite the recent—and important—trend in Russian Studies scholarship towards interrogating and revising a concept of Russia based on the experiences of Moscow and St. Petersburg, this book harkens back to such earlier views. Goldstein talks about the northern cold but also discusses Astrakhan and Kyiv; there is extensive coverage of the Siege of Leningrad but no mention of the Kazakh famine. The minorities and colonies of the Russian empire are given little treatment, and when they do it is as a brief note on how their traditional dishes entered Russian cuisine. This work would have benefited from an explicit consideration of what it considers to be “Russian,” and how to square that concept with Russia as an empire.
More concerning is the treatment of Kyivan Rus΄. This book of Russian history follows many others and begins in pre-Christian Kyiv, which is not necessarily a problem; there certainly were notable continuities between this southerly principality and Moscow's later development to the north. The problem begins when Goldstein uses the Russian rather than the Ukrainian spelling of Kyiv, and explicitly identifies Kyivan Rus΄ as a Russian state (12, 64). This would always have bothered Ukrainians, Ukrainianists, and medievalists, but as this book appears in the same year as the Russian invasion of Ukraine—a war justified by the Kremlin as regaining historical Russian territory—this identification of Rus΄ as Russia has immediately aged poorly. When writing long-term histories of Russia it makes sense to include the earlier East Slavic principalities, but we need to be clear to distinguish them. Rus΄ is not Russia.
With general audience and long-period books like this, authors have a narrow path to tread to create a legitimate generalization of topics the author does not have space to discuss without stepping into oversimplifications and errors. Kingdom of Rye's presentation of what constitutes Russia and Russian elides imperial realities; its identification of Kyivan Rus΄ as Russian is a troubling error, especially in the current context. As a concise and readable work on Russian food history, this is excellent. As a general history of the Russian empire, it is less successful.
