

Toska, “that peculiarly Russian ache of the soul,” periodically stalks the author and her mother, Larisa Frumkin, who emigrated together from the Soviet Union to Philadelphia in 1974, when the author was 10.

Travel + Leisure contributing editor and three-time James Beard Award–winning cookbook author von Bremzen’s ( The New Spanish Table, 2005, etc.) nostalgia for a prickly Soviet childhood brings memories of food both delectable and biting.
