Meet Larisa

Larisa was born in 1934 in the bustling Black Sea port of Odesa in Ukraine, but moved to Moscow while very young. Her father was a high-ranking naval intelligence chief who’d interrogated Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials; her mother was an architect and a painter. Cooking was a huge challenge in the former USSR, where long lines and chronic shortages were a daily reality, but like so many busy women, Larisa could conjure up small feasts out of a few root vegetables and a couple of eggs. Her Moscow kitchen was always full of guests.

Always at odds with the repressive Soviet regime, in 1974 Larisa and her young daughter found themselves stateless refugees to the US with no right of return, though after Gorbachev opened the border in the late 1980s, she was able to reunite with her family. In Philadelphia, and then in New York, Larisa taught ESL in elementary schools while her daughter, Anya von Bremzen, became a professional food writer—many of Larisa’s recipes are included in Anya’s James Beard–award winning cookbook Please to the Table. 

After retiring from teaching, Larisa worked as a volunteer guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and became obsessed with reconstructing historic feasts. After Saveur magazine published a story on her nineteenth-century Russian meal, Larisa and Anya began to cook their way through the twentieth century, which became the basis of Anya’s acclaimed memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking—Larisa is the protagonist.

Larisa loves surprising guests with elaborate multi-course menus, but she’s equally happy making traditional Russian comfort food: hearty soups, savory baking with yeast dough, blini and salads. 

Her recipes and stories have been featured in Spruce Eats, Saveur, Food & Wine, Tasting Table, Epicurious, NPR, The Gothamist, WNYC, and other publications. She starred in a six-part show on food history for Russian TV.