The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

By Alina Bronsky

Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year 
Finalist for the German Book Award 
Favorite Read of the Year in the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal

In her second novel, Russian-born Alina Bronsky gives readers a moving portrait of the devious limits of the will to survive. The narrator of this rollicking family saga is the outrageously mischevious Rosa Achmetowna, whom The Millions calls "one of the most fascinating women in the world."

When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, “stupid Sulfia,” is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa’s surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother’s eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.

Told with sly humor and an anthropologist’s eye for detail, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781609459581

Alina Bronsky

Alina Bronksy is the author of Broken Glass Park (Europa, 2010); The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Europa, 2011), named a Best Book of 2011 by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly; Just Call Me Superhero (Europa, 2014), Baba Dunja’s Last Love (Europa, 2016), and My Grandmother’s Braid (Europa, 2021). Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

Reviews for The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

[iambookish-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really struggled on what to rate this book. (again I would like to have the option for 3.5 stars!). I'm rating it a 4 because I really couldn't put the book down. It was funny, bizarre and very readable.

[lkernagh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I definitely preferred this one over Bronsky's debut novel, Broken Glass Park. Why? I like the fictional memoir approach to the story and I really, really like our snarky/sneering narrator,Rosalinda! Crazy, I know, especially given the character's rather disturbing cynical narcissistic personality - one reviewer has described Rosalinda as the "Tartar babushka from hell" - which should be an immediate turn off. Okay, she is not quite that bad - from hell, that is - but boy, does Rose have quite the interesting tunnel vision focus when it comes to her family and the world around her. Think Hyacinth Bucket (Keeping Up Appearances) meets Joan Crawford (Mommie Dearest) and you get the general idea. Thrown into the mix is a really fascinating portrayal of a Tartar who, on one hand, will do whatever it takes to fit into the Russian mold "to get ahead" while at the time, has an internal struggle about losing her Tartar roots. Rose has a lot of common sense ideas that, in principle, are jewels of wisdom so it is pretty easy to start to see things from her point of view (always a slippery slope!). It is Rose's determination to get out of Russia - the economy is collapsing after all - that we really get to see just how ruthless Rose can be. Of course, I am saddened at the state of the family dynamics but I love how each character - from down-trodden on the surface, mousy Sulfia to loud, energized Aminat - add life to what could have been a rather antagonistic story. End result: Bronsky proves once again that she has a gift for constructing compelling narrators. You don't have to like Rose to appreciate Bronsky's keen eye for observation and captivating wit.

[mamashepp · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rosalinda is officially the most self-centered character I've ever "met" in a book but for some strange reason I was so drawn to her.

[labfs39 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rosa knows everything. She knows that her daughter is stupid and ugly and only has a husband thanks to her. She knows that her granddaughter is smart and pretty, thanks to her care. And she knows that without her, her family would be nothing. It′s hard being the only intelligent, beautiful person around, but Rosa bears the burden.One day her daughter, Sulfia, tells her that she dreamt about a man and is now pregnant. Rosa believes her immediately, for what man would be attracted to her ugly, dim-witted daughter? But for as much as she derides her daughter, Rosa loves her granddaughter and takes over raising her. Aminat is not as easily cowed as her mother, however, and the three are entwined in a destructive, subversive embrace.Rosa is one of the most detestable characters I′ve encountered in literature. She is self-aggrandizing, delusional, and cruel. She has perfected the use of emotional abuse to inflict pain while professing love. Yet despite this, the book is funny at times, and I found myself admiring Rosa′s spirit, almost, even as I deplored her actions. Like Baba Dunja′s Last Love, Bronsky′s writing is crisp and acerbic with a strong female protagonist. But whereas Baba Dunja′s love for her granddaughter is self-effacing and supportive, Rosa′s is greedy and domineering. Baba Dunja sacrifices herself for others; Rosa sacrifices others for herself. I don't know how to rate Hottest Dishes, because it is well-written, but repelling.

[wassilissa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rosalinda ist eine ältere Tatarin, die in Russland lebt. Mit ihrer Tochter Sulfia ist sie notorisch unzufrieden, als diese schwanger wird, versucht sie zudem auch das Kind abzutreiben. Dies gelingt ihr nicht und in der Folge entwickelt sie eine Affenliebe zu diesem Baby, Amniat. Ohne Skrupel entfremdet sie das Kind der Mutter, verhindert die Auswanderung der Familie nach Israel und schließlich gelingt ihr die gemeinsame Übersiedelung nach Deutschland.Dass Aminat sie da schon längst nicht mehr liebt, da ihre Bedürfnisse nicht erkannt, ja sogar aufs ärgste missachtet werden, all das nimmt Rosa in Kauf- Hauptsache das Kind hat es einmal besser (v.a. materiell). Rosa denkt an Aufstieg durch Bildung: Aminat hingegen geht einen ganz andren Weg, der dem Westen entspricht, den Rosa nicht vorhersehen konnte und an dem sie keinen Anteil hat.Dieses Buch kommt von der ganzen Aufmachung und dem Schreibstil her so locker wie ein Buch von Marina Lewycka daher. Aber in Wirklichkeit ist es eine ganz schauerliche Geschichte. Lesend schwankte ich zwischen absolutem Abscheu gegenüber Rosalinda und einem gewissen Verständnis, mitunter sogar ein ganz klein wenig Zuneigung.

[nosajeel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic book from the first sparkling paragraph to the moving ending. The narrator is a complete original, a spunky tartar grandmother, one part monster and one part saint, that I find hard to describe. So have to just recommend that everyone read the book for themselves.

I also find myself having a difficult time doing justice to the story. It begins in 1978 in a Russian city with the (soon-to-be) grandmother discovering that her teenage daughter is pregnant. Despite her best efforts to induce a home-remedy abortion, a daughter is born to her. The story centers around these three generations of women with a variety of men serving primarily as a backdrop, mostly husbands and lovers, as they navigate Soviet culture and eventually emigrate to Germany.

History and the passage of time are lightly depicted in a book that covers 1978 to 2008, with the most interest being on the development of the granddaughter and her relationship with the two women that care for her and often trade or steal her back and forth.

[bookoisseur · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book...despite hating the narrator. It was an odd read.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is Alina Bronsky's second novel, following the very successful Scherbenpark. The narrator is Rosalinda, a Russian lady who has become a grandmother very much against her wishes. Once she has seen her new granddaughter, Animat, she becomes possessed with the determination to do everything in her power to help the child (and keep control of her), to the detriment of her daughter Sulfia if necessary. Rosa is used to getting what she wants: armed with the strong conviction that she is always right, she deploys all the techniques at her disposal in the course of her campaign: bribery, physical coercion, deception, blackmail, psychological warfare, the giving and withdrawing of sexual favours, a fraudulent claim to knowing the secrets of Tartar folklore, even prayer (although she is cautious with this last: she's learnt that God has a tendency to overdo things). The unfortunate Sulfia is pushed into three marriages, with increasingly disastrous results, but Rosa does manage to get the family out of the chaos of post-Soviet Russia into Germany. And eventually, despite her own best efforts to mess things up, many things do work out for the best, although not at all in the way she intended.This is a bit of a one-joke book: much of the point relies on Rosa's conviction that she is always acting for the best, whilst inadvertently allowing the reader to see the damage she is doing by constantly seeking to retain control of her daughter's and granddaughter's life. And that can get a bit wearing after a while. But it's also clearly a book about emigration, and about how people who live in hard times have to develop sharp elbows, and how much of a luxury it is to be able to retain liberal moral values. Rosa — like Frau Brücker in Die Entdeckung der Currywurst — is someone who has simply decided that in the present circumstances, conventional moral standards don't apply. Unlike Frau Brücker, she has innocent victims around her who get hurt, however. They are both caricatures, of course, but the point of caricatures is that they have recognisable characteristics. There's a lot in both of them that reminds me of people I've met: relatives who lived through the last war, people who have emigrated from countries in a chaotic state.BTW: just to be clear, this isn't a book about cooking. The title is yet another fraudulent stratagem out of Rosa's arsenal. She's been brought up in the monoculture of Stalin's Soviet Union, and knows next to nothing about the culture of her Tartar ancestors. But she discovers later in life that there's a market for ethnic folklore...

[pepe68-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sehr unterhaltsam, aber doch tiefschwarzer Humor, bei dem Lachen manchmal im Hals stecken bleibt. Etwas langatmig, weil immer im selben Duktus und ohne rechte Dramaturgie erzählt.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Whew! Is there a narrator of a book out there anywhere who is more savage, more self-satisfied, and more manipulative than Rosa Achmetowna, the narrator and main character of Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine? What a story! I read straight through and I feel like I’ve just spent four hours in hand-to-hand combat.

[readingwithtea · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"As my daughter Sulfia was explaining that she was pregnant but that she didn't know by whom, I paid extra attention to my posture. I sat with my back perfectly straight and folded my hands elegantly in my lap."Rosa's mentally hindered daughter Sulfia announces a pregnancy. Despite Rosa's best folkloric efforts, Aminat is born, and from that moment Rosa employs every fibre of her cunning, strength, effort and money into wrestling her away from Sulfia, claiming Sulfia is an unfit mother. When a travelling German writer becomes fixated on Aminat, Rosa sees her escape to the West.Wow. Just wow. Rosa is a seriously devious, evil character. Can understand why she makes it onto a few villain lists (to quote Literate Housewife: "Rosa Achmetowna makes Scarlett O’Hara look like a Girl Scout and perhaps even Mother of the Year. Her story should be compulsory reading for every teenage daughter who thinks her mother is the worst mother in the world. Very few mothers will retain monster status in comparison"). But I had to keep reading as the horror of the situation spiralled further, while Rosa believed she still has it all totally under control. She does remind me of a much less pleasant Emily Gilmore.We never really establish what's wrong with Sulfia, which I found frustrating; not being able to escape Rosa's psychotic brain does leave quite a few puzzles unanswered. Similarly, Aminat is an interesting character and I would have liked to have spent more time with her. A dual approach would have been interesting here - alternating chapters written by Rosa and Aminat? The men are pretty dire - which is a trend I'm finding in my reading at the moment. Although in this case, the women are dire too so it's not poor writing of male characters... What I couldn't understand was the fact that every man tolerated Rosa's bizarre behaviour!Plot wise? There's no great rush - it's the tension and movements in the power struggle between the three generations of women that propel us towards the end. Thus the plot feels haphazardly timed; for a long time nothing really happens, then suddenly there's a rush for Israel. Then nothing happens again for a long time, then Germany. I suspect that I didn't get on with this because the humour didn't do anything for me; the blurb suggests that it is "told with sly humour and an anthropologist's eye for detail... women whose destinites are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic."All in all - odd. Definitely a book I'll remember for a while, and unlike anything else I read this year. However, not a pleasant experience - the humour fell short for me.

[blacksheepdances · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"I was a fundamentally generous person, and I valued the interchange between generations. Helping support Sulfia in raising my grandchild didn't bother me at all. Neither did drawing Sulfia's attention to her own frequent mistakes. All I ever did was for her to improve herself."Perhaps this should be called The Battle Hymn of the Tartar Mother....The narrator of this fast-paced novel is a mother more like Mommie Dearest than June Cleaver. She's actually kind of scary. Yet her witty observations, completely oblivious of her own sinister attitude, makes the reader both laugh and cringe.As it begins, Rosalinda is bemoaning her stupid daughter--an ugly thing with no prospects for success and an unplanned pregnancy to boot. She believes in some sort of immaculate conception because she's sure no man would have her hideous offspring. Eventually, the child is born and it's up to Rosalinda to try and create a stable and loving environment away from the child's hapless mother.And yet, Bronsky has given us an unreliable narrator, the classic type that makes you begin to question everything about the story. Little hints are thrown out, via Rosalinda's stream-of-consciousness thinking, that tell you more about why she is so difficult. It soon becomes fairly clear that her daughter is not the idiot we're made to envision."I had tried to teach her that nobody should be able to see when you were scared. That nobody should be able to tell when you were uncertain. That you shouldn't show it when you loved someone. And that you smiled with particular affection at someone you hated."The story progresses as the three generations of women fight for survival, and Rosalinda's influence is felt everywhere. She really is the story; the characterization of her is full of revealing details. She knows just when to let her hair down (literally) to get her way, and when and what kind of flowers to send for a bribe. She knows that certain events require heels and the fur coat, while at other times her beauty must be downplayed. And she thinks nothing of throwing a boot at her daughter's face to get her way.Aminat and Sulfia aren't as fully developed...but really, how could they, given the magnitude of Rosalinda? Another character that is intriguing is Kalganow, Rosalinda's husband, who leaves her after a particularly harrowing cross-examination by her. His presence in the story is at the periphery, but every scene he appears in is priceless. In all, the story had me laughing in shock and awe at her atrociousness. Yet it grew tiring too, by the end, as she never seemed to mellow. I still enjoyed it, but I thought that underlining her pushy character was already done and I was convinced. I did like how certain factors that explained her behavior were subtly incorporated without excusing her. This will likely be in my top five fiction titles for the year....and the cover art is just brilliant.

[bakersfieldbarbara · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found this book very difficult to read, as I got emotionally involved. From having her daughter "given" to a pedophile, and trying to whip her daughter into shape according to Rosalinda Achmetowna's idea of what a daughter ought to be left me wondering why someone would write such a book. Since there is freedom of speech, freedom of press and all of the other freedoms, I chose to not like this book, and to say so. There will be those who love this genre, and that is fine. Again, our freedoms to chose. There may be some lessons in this book for me, but I will ponder the this woman whom I found impossible to like. Good writing, but not my kind of reading for uplifting and encouragement in today's world. Having had a career of dealing with such personalities, I know this is a true indication of a part of society. I do not discourage anyone from reading this book; I just would not recommend it as a general open recommendation.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rosalinda Achmetowna is possibly the most brazen unreliable narrator I have ever met in literature. She will tell you, without hesitation, how good she is at whatever she decides to try her hand at while being the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the wittiest, and the most capable woman on the face of the earth, bar none. After a few pages I found myself asking, “Is anything she says true? Or is it all a pack of lies?” It’s not until quite late in the book that you find the answer to that question and by that time I had pretty much figured out the horrifying situation that she had created.It is 1978 when the book opens in the former Soviet Union and Rosalinda’s daughter, Sulfia, is explaining that she is pregnant, but doesn’t know who the father is. Being the excellent mother that she is, Rosa decides they need to do ‘something’ about this inconvenience. She tries a couple of different methods, one of which is particularly brutal, and yet a child is born some months later. Unfortunately, the child is burdened by a grandmother from hell and the story follows this family as she forces Sulfia into not one but three bad marriages, the last of which lands them in Germany.I’m not exactly sure what to think of this book. Initially, I felt the author had written it with tongue firmly in cheek. But as the story progressed, I was horrified at the direction it was taking. And yet I didn’t dislike it. At all. Actually, I found myself eagerly returning to the book to find out what new and audacious turn the tale would take next. But I was appalled at the way she wrapped up the story, mainly because I had suspected it all along and hoped it wouldn’t go in that direction.The voice that develops from beginning to the story’s end is very interesting and although I disliked it early on, it grew on me and was totally suitable for this character, Rosa, who tells the entire story. I guess I would say it is a book you should read and judge for yourself. It won’t be for everyone, that’s for sure, but at the same time, I’m glad I read it.

[jasonlf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic book from the first sparkling paragraph to the moving ending. The narrator is a complete original, a spunky tartar grandmother, one part monster and one part saint, that I find hard to describe. So have to just recommend that everyone read the book for themselves.I also find myself having a difficult time doing justice to the story. It begins in 1978 in a Russian city with the (soon-to-be) grandmother discovering that her teenage daughter is pregnant. Despite her best efforts to induce a home-remedy abortion, a daughter is born to her. The story centers around these three generations for women with a variety of men serving primarily as a backdrop, mostly husbands and lovers, as they navigate Soviet culture and eventually emigrate to Germany.History and the passage of time are depicted quite lightly in a book that covers 1978 to 2008, with the most interest being on the development of the grandaughter and her relationship with the two women that care for her and often trade or steal her back and forth.

[yourotherleft_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rosalinda Achmetowna only wants the best for the people she loves. Really, everything that she does so well is all for the benefit of her "ugly" daughter, Sulfia, her hapless husband, Kalganow, and her beloved, willful granddaughter Aminat. She is determined to find her daughter a husband, whatever the cost, and she knows she must rescue her granddaughter from Sulfia's "incompetent" parenting. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is Rosa's story as told by Rosa herself. Her ill-conceived helpfulness is something that her family members hope only to escape. Readers will cringe and occasionally laugh at Rosa's twisted idea of benevolence as she tries to woo perspective husbands to her perpetually cowed daughter with everything from extravagant dinners, small briberies, and forceful threats. Readers will be appalled but absorbed in the telling as Rosa uses her cleverness and wiles to escape the Soviet Union when she extorts sponsorship for she, Sulfia, and Aminat from a German man visiting to collect recipes for a cookbook about Tartar cuisine. Rosa's games are dangerous and self-serving indeed, though it will take dreadful outcomes to make her see the cruel realities of her actions.Bronsky's got an incredible talent for telling a story from a totally believable point of view of an extremely vivid, if bizarre and eye-poppingly self-deceived, narrator. Rosalinda is a domineering mother of epic proportions, a woman who "selflessly" afflicts all her loved ones with her inflated ego and with those things that she thinks are best, that to most people with sense, are completely crazy and undeniably reckless. She is a terribly unreliable narrator, but an incredibly unique one that makes for a cleverly told story. Despite her behavior, which is sometimes utterly repellent, readers will be loathe to look away from a story rife with personality and dark humor.The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is not going to be a book for everyone. Bronsky is an undeniable talent, but the brutal honesty of her stories can be something of an acquired taste. It's easy to be appalled at the many terrible things Rosa does in her quest to do "the best things for everyone," and really, it seems as if that is, in fact, the point. At the same time, though, readers might find Rosa to be, despite all odds, a sympathetic character. On the whole, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is a disturbing tale told in the cleverest way with a unique narrator whose compelling voice will help you forgive a multitude of sins.