Description
Book SynopsisAlison K. Smith examines changing attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs about the production and consumption of food in Russia from the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. She focuses on the way that competing ideas based either in traditional Russian practice or in new practices from the rational West became the basis for Russians'' understanding of themselves and their society. The Russians who participated in the process of self-definition were variously private authors and reformers or public servants of the Russian imperial state. Some had great success in creating a sense of themselves as ultimate authorities on a given topic. For example, a series of cookbook authors developed a system of writing Russian cookbooks in ways that borrowed from, but were still quite different from, foreign sources. Others found the process of mediating these ideas more difficult; agricultural reformers, in particular, sometimes found traditional practices, now deemed irrationa
