Grandma Alla and I liked to sit on the fountain’s red granite edge, cracking sunflower seeds as sparrows peeped and the water jetted fantastically among sixteen larger-than-life golden statues. They were of kolkhoz girls in ethnic costumes, set in a circle around a baroque eruption of wheat. The fountain was completed right after Stalin’s death, and gilded (so people whispered) at Beria’s orders. “National in form, socialist in content”—a spectacle of the happy family of our Socialist Union republics. How could I ever confess to my anti-Soviet mom that I, a cynical kid exposed to samizdat, was utterly mesmerized by this Soviet imperialist fantasy? That in their wreaths, tiaras, hats, ribbons, and braids the golden maidens were my own ethnic princesses?

The friendship of nations…

The hackneyed phrase was one of the most powerful propaganda mantras of the Soviet regime. Druzhba narodov: it celebrated our empire’s diversity. Compensated us for our enforced isolation from the unattainable zagranitsa. What comrade, went the official line, needed crap capitalist Paris when more than 130 languages were spoken inside his own borders? When to the east he could behold the tiled splendors of Samarkand; enjoy white, healthy lard in Ukraine; frolic on pine-fringed Baltic sands? Your typical comrade didn’t make it past sweaty Crimean beaches. But oh, what a powerful spell the ethnographic myth cast over our Union’s psyche!

Some Union, ours. To telescope rapidly: Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the newly aggregated Transcaucasus formed the initial Soviet fraternity, bonded by the 1922 founding treaty. Soon after, Central Asia supplied five fresh socialist –stans: Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Come the midthirties, the Transcaucasus was split back into Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All the carving and adding wasn’t entirely neat, though. Samarkand, a predominately Tajik city, was given to Uzbekistan. The Christian Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh got trapped in Muslim Azerbaijan. The nasty seeds of future un-friendships were being sown across the map. By 1940 the Soviet family reached fifteen members when the three Baltic republics and Moldavia were dragged in, courtesy of the treacherous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. My gilded fountain’s enigmatic sixteenth maiden? She was the happy Karelo-Finnish Union Republic, later demoted to a subrepublic of Russia.

So there we were: the world’s largest country by far, one sixth of the planet’s land surface; a seeming infinity pitched within 37,000 miles of the border, reaching from the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific Oceans. Fifteen full Union republics—all founded, please note, on ethno-national principles, from behemoth Russia (population almost 150 million) to teensy Estonia. In addition: twenty autonomous subrepublics, dozens of administrative “national” units, 126 census-recognized “nationalities” (Sovietese for ethnicity)—more than fifty languages spoken just in the Caucasus.

Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Back in my childhood, though, the Party talk was all SOLIDARITY. Profound RESPECT for ALL republics. The great Soviet COMMITMENT TO ETHNIC EQUALIZATION! (Prolonged stormy applause.) The Bolshevik fathers created nations. Stalin for his part deported them. Under Brezhnev, the Union’s original vision of federalism and affirmative action had been revived—as institutional kitsch. The Mature Socialist celebration of ethnic friendship produced a never-ending costume carnival of Dagestani metalwork, Buryat archery skills, Moldavian embroidery. As a kid I lapped it all up. And the barrage of state-sponsored multiculturalism left me in a tizzy of perpetual hunger for the “cuisines of our nations.”

So I acquired the second of my Moscow memories—of the two-storied Central Market on the Boulevard Ring, in the company once again of my hard-living Babushka Alla.

The Tsentralny Market was the friendship of nations come to throbbing, screaming, haggling life. Instead of golden statues, shrill Uzbek melon matrons wiped juice-stained fingers on striped ikat silk dresses, while Tajik dames hovered witch-like over banks of radishes, their heavy eyes kohl-rimmed, their unibrows a sinister line. I wandered the market aisles, ravenous, addled by scents of wild Uzbek cumin and Lithuanian caraway. After the greenish rot of state stores, the produce here radiated a paradisiacal glow. Kazakhs hustled soccer ball–size crimson apples (Kazakhstan’s capital was Alma-Ata: “Father of Apples”). Fast-talking Georgians with Stalinist mustaches whistled lewdly at my blond grandma and deftly formed newspaper cones for their khmeli-suneli spice mixes, tinted yellow with crushed marigold petals. I was particularly agog at the Latvian dairy queens. The Baltics were almost zagranitsa. Polite, decked out in spotless white aprons, these lady-marvels filled Grandma’s empty mayonnaise jars with their thick, tangy smetana (sour cream). In contrast to state smetana, theirs was a quality product: undiluted with buttermilk-diluted-with-milk-diluted-with-water—the usual sequence of Soviet dairy grift.

I gushed, and gushed, about the Central Market—as spectacle, as symbol—in the introduction to our cookbook.

In the friendship of nations spirit, the very first recipe I tested was my dad’s Georgian chicken with walnut sauce (with the bird from my handbag on Broadway). Georgia was the Sicily of the Soviet imagination—a mythic land of inky wines, citrus, poets, tree-side philosophers, and operatic corruption. I followed with Armenian dolmas, then on to Baltic herring rolls, Moldavian feta-stuffed peppers, Byelorussian mushrooms.

Even pre-revolutionary Russian cuisine reflected the span of the empire. With Mikoyan’s 1939 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, this diversity got Sovietized. As the decades progressed, our socialist cuisine merged into one pan-Eurasian melting pot. Across the eleven time zones, the state’s food service canon included Ayzeri lulya kebab and Tatar chebureki (fried pies). In Moscow you dined at restaurants named Uzbekistan or Minsk or Baku. And singularly Soviet hits such as salat Olivier and the proverbial “herring under fur coat” lent socialist kitsch to Uighur weddings and Karelian birthday parties.

This was the story I wanted to tell in our book.

Please to the Table came out at the end of 1990. With four hundred recipes on 650 pages, it was heavy enough to whack someone unconscious.

A couple of months after publication, a phone call startled John and me in the dead of an Australian night. (We’d moved to Melbourne, where my Derridarian taught art history.) It was our editor in New York, very excited. Please to the Table—if you please—had just won a James Beard Award.

The news was doubly shocking to me.

Because who could ever imagine a more ironic moment for a fat, lavish book celebrating the culinary friendship of our Soviet nations? It was the spring of 1991, and our happy Union was coming apart at the seams.

For a principal pair of reasons, arguably. One was Gorbachev’s disastrous handling of ethnic conflicts and secessionist passions in the republics. The other: the piteous mess he was making of the Soviet economy, which left stores barren of almost everything edible.

“Ha! Better publish it as a USSR tear-off calendar!” my Moscow friends had joked two years earlier, while I was still researching Please to the Table.