A Taste of Russia: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality

This is a great cookbook. A lot of time & work was put into it. However, some of my favorite Russian recipies are missing from this book. I would recommend "The Art of Russian Cuisine" for those of you who are interested in food that Russians cook daily or for holidays.

Having spent a lot of time working in the former Soviet Union, and trying to reconstruct many of the wonderful and interesting dishes from various republics, I was delighted to find a book that "translated", "a pinch of this and a gram of that" into something I could understand and make with products available to me here in the US. I recommend this cookbook to anyone who has tried food from Eastern Europe, enjoyed it and wants to bring it up to our standards. The book is so popular with my friends that I keep giving it as a gift. However, I do feel the title "A Taste of Russia" is not "politically correct", since the dishes are from many of the 17 former republics of the Soviet Union, Russia being only one of them.

This is a great book on the food of Russia and the culture also. All to many times we seem to channel Russian cuisine into a few simple dishes. Granted the few simple dishes we view as "Russian" are grand and quite tasty, we tend to shove aside the rich culinary history this country has and the peoples grand capacity to share and truly enjoy food and life. Many times it has been written of the sharing and emphasis of food and being together to enjoy it in other european cuisines, however Russia tends to be overlooked in the cloud of past paranoia of the political state of the land. Ms. Goldstein gets beyond that and makes it clear that food is the binding stuff of a country and of people just as it is in this country and all around this globe.