Some Russian Concepts of Food and Cooking

Lesley Chamberlain has a degree in Russian and worked in Moscow as a journalist from 1978-9. She is the author of Food and Cooking in Russia, to be published by Penguin Books in February 1982. As will be evident from this article, she believes that the study of what might be called 'food language' can throw interesting light on how a given people thinks of foodstuffs and what they do with them, and how their attitudes to foods have changed or remained stable. This may seem obvious, but it represents an approach to the subject of food history which has not been adopted by many writers other than anthropologists, who have tended to focus their work on small tribes of a primitive character rather than major national or ethnic groups of the contemporary world.