Darra Goldstein


Darra Goldstein, the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita at Williams College, is an award-winning cookbook author and world-renowned food scholar. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief of CURED Magazine, from Zero Point Zero Productions, which was launched in October 2016. She is the founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, which won the 2012 James Beard award for Best Publication, and she served as its editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2012. Recently, she has been honored as both a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Food Studies at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto and as a Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Goldstein is also the founding series editor for the California Studies in Food and Culture and the food editor for Russian Life magazine. Goldstein has served on a number of culinary diplomacy programs including as Cultural Envoy from the U.S. Department of State to the Republic of Georgia and as a consultant on food and diversity for the Council of Europe along with other USAID and European Union culinary projects. In 1984-1985, Goldstein was the spokesperson for Stolichnaya Vodka in the United States; later in her career Goldstein also consulted for Firebird restaurant and the famed Russian Tea Room in New York City.

Personal life and education

Goldstein currently resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband Dean Crawford, a writer and professor of English at Vassar College. They have one daughter, Leila.
Goldstein grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the middle child of Irving S. and Helen Haft Goldstein. Her father was an organic chemist who specialized in wood and paper science. Goldstein's love of food stems from her mother who, in her words, “loved to cook.” Her mother won numerous cooking contests and was a finalist in the 1968 Pillsbury Bake-Off. Her mother even won a contest sponsored by King Arthur Sardines with a recipe for sardine and cream cheese dip. The prize included a pewter bowl, which Goldstein still has to this day, and a hundred cans of sardines, which Goldstein remembers receiving in care packages while she was a student at Vassar College. There she studied Russian, German and French. She graduated from Vassar in 1973.
Goldstein's interest in Russia traces back to her grandmother who was a Russian Jew. Goldstein's grandmother never shared stories about her childhood since Russia was intolerant of Jews at the time, but Goldstein's curiosity about her grandmother's past led her to start studying the Russian language as a freshman at Vassar. After Vassar, Goldstein went on to receive an A.M. and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Stanford University. During graduate school she was research assistant to Bertram D. Wolfe, a founder of the American Communist Party who by the end of his life had become a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Goldstein took a year off from graduate study in 1978-1979 to work for the USIA in the Soviet Union, touring with the exhibition "Agriculture USA."

Early career: Russian art, culture and cuisine

Goldstein's academic career began in Russian literature with her Stanford Ph.D. dissertation on Nikolai Zabolotsky, a Russian poet whom Goldstein describes as “brilliant.” Her early academic career was studying Russian modernist poetry, and she wrote a number of articles on and gave academic talks about Russian poets and artists such as Zabolotsky and Pavel Filonov.

Russian art

Goldstein pursued her interest in Russian art after Milo Beach, then chair of the art department at Williams College, encouraged her to apply for a Mellon Grant. After receiving the grant, Goldstein spent a year studying Russian and Soviet art, and then in 1985, she prepared an exhibition for the Williams College Museum of Art called Art for the Masses: Russian Revolutionary Art from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, the first exhibition ever to showcase the work of the important collector Merrill C. Berman. This research also inspired a course she taught for many years at Williams, "Twentieth Century Russian Art and the Birth of Abstraction," which investigated Russian art within a cultural framework and explored the relationship between artistic production and politics.

Russian literature and cuisine

As Goldstein read Russian literature at Vassar and Stanford, she became interested in how food was used to describe scenes and characters, but throughout her early career, Goldstein's academic research in Russian art and poetry remained separate from her growing interest in food. When she first arrived at Williams College as an Assistant Professor of Russian in 1983 to teach courses on Russian language and literature, she also published her first cookbook, A La Russe: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality, which was nominated for a Tastemaker Award.

Late career: Food studies

Goldstein's second cookbook, The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, won the IACP Julia Child Award for Best Cookbook in 1993. The Georgian Feast was an integration of Goldstein's art and culinary interests, drawing its inspiration from Niko Pirosmani, a Georgian artist from the early twentieth century who painted many depictions of Georgian meals. Following the book's positive reception, Goldstein redirected her academic research towards food studies. She developed a new course at Williams, “Feasting and Fasting in Russian History,” which melded her two passions for Russian literature and cuisine. The course integrates close readings of Russian literature with a hands-on approach to Russian cuisine, enabling students to experience the intersection of the scholarly and experiential that Goldstein finds crucial to the study of food.

1990s and 2000s

Goldstein's career bourgeoned in the 1990s and 2000s. She founded the acclaimed journal Gastronomica in 2001. She also consulted for the Russian Tea Room, organized several museum exhibitions, and published numerous books and exhibition catalogues.

Russian Tea Room

Goldstein consulted for the famous Russian Tea Room in New York City in 1999-2000 and for the Firebird Restaurant in 1996.
In a 2010 essay Goldstein recounts many tasting sessions, including the Kabob Tasting of April 29, 1999 that featured fourteen different kabobs ranging from guinea hen marinated in yogurt, mint, saffron and paprika to sturgeon in a spicy cilantro marinade; five different side sauces accompanied all the kabobs. Goldstein also advised the restaurant team about Russian culture and investigated bakeries around New York City to find one that could produce the dense, dark sourdough bread needed for a Russian meal. Disputes occasionally arose between Goldstein and the restaurant's owner, Warner LeRoy, regarding authenticity. For instance, LeRoy was hesitant to list sour cream on the menu because of America's then anti-fat campaign. They compromised by calling sour cream by its Russian name, smetana, which––according to Goldstein––"somehow sounded less fattening."

Exhibition curation

In partnership with museum curators Goldstein organized several exhibitions, including Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age and Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, both at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Goldstein recalls Feeding Desire as “one of the most wonderful projects I’ve ever worked on.” In particular, she was enthralled by the silver place settings by Claude Lalanne; each piece was cast from a different form in nature: flowers, bumblebees, caterpillars.

Cookbooks

During this time, Goldstein wrote two cookbooks, The Vegetarian Hearth and Baking Boot Camp. She also consulted for the Council of Europe as part of an international group exploring ways in which food can be used to promote tolerance and diversity, serving as editor of Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue. Goldstein believes that “food can be a wonderful tool to promote understanding, but too often it’s used divisively, as a source of conflict instead of sharing.” In 2008, she went to Israel to see whether recognition of common foodways could lessen the divide between Israeli Arabs and Jews, but political tensions and issues of culinary appropriation of dishes like hummus worked against reconciliation.

2010s

With the growing visibility of Gastronomica, Goldstein rose to become a prominent voice in food studies while continuing to publish cookbooks and teach at Williams College. In 2013, she was named Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Food Studies at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. In the fall of 2016, Goldstein was named a Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she will spend November 2016 and deliver a public lecture; she is the second recipient of this fellowship.
In the fall of 2016, Goldstein launched CURED, a biannual magazine from Zero Point Zero Productions; CURED, according to Goldstein, is the first periodical to explore how age-old methods like salting, pickling, and fermenting inform the way we think about and consume food today.
In the spring of 2017, Goldstein retired from her professorship at Williams College, becoming the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita. At the 2017 Williams College Commencement, President Adam Falk said the following of Goldstein: "You introduced students to the language, literature, and intellectual history of Russia, providing many of them a rich, immersive experience of post-Soviet Georgia. And at the same time, you turned your lifelong passion for food into a glorious, multi-course feast. More than mere fuel, food, you have shown, both conveys and develops culture as much as do art, literature, and music."

Cookbooks

Goldstein broadened her scholarship by publishing Fire and Ice, a cookbook of classic Nordic home cooking that was nominated for awards in 2016 by both the IACP and the James Beard Foundation.
Also in 2015, Goldstein published the 900-page Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, for which she served as editor-in-chief. With nearly 600 entries contributed by 265 writers from across the globe, the volume explores the long history of sugar, ranging from sugar's dark past in slavery to its use in medical studies to candies found around the world. It also received a James Beard Foundation nomination. In one interview about the Companion, Goldstein mentioned her favorite sweets: Life Savers, fruit jellies, and—at the top of her list—marzipan.

''Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture''

Goldstein credits an article she published in 1995 as the impetus for creating Gastronomica. This article, "Russia, Carême, and the Culinary Arts," discussed the great French pastry chef Antoine Carême's pièces montées or sugar sculptures in the context of the architectural drawings he made for monuments in St. Petersburg, Russia. Goldstein was dismayed that her highly interdisciplinary research would reach such a small audience after its publication in the scholarly Slavonic and Eastern European Review.
Wanting to create a platform for academics and food writers to come together and help legitimize the budding field of food studies, Goldstein approached the University of California Press about the creation of a new food studies journal. The first issue of Gastronomica appeared in 2001, and Goldstein served as the magazine's founding editor and editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2012. The journal embraced the artistic and the academic, attracting a diverse following from home cooks to professional chefs to food historians. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, Goldstein used prose, poetry, photography and painting to address a wide range of topics in food studies, including pressing societal issues such as poverty and nutrition.
Food celebrities praised the journal Goldstein created. Chef Dan Barber said of Gastronomica: “Darra created a new forum for all the different ways of thinking about food––a literary agora for foodies, intellectuals, artists and Americana enthusiasts.” Mitchell Davis of the James Beard Foundation hailed Gastronomica as “a New Yorker for foodies.”
For many, Gastronomica is best known for its covers where Goldstein blends her passions for art and food. Each issue was interspersed with edgy artwork and photography with a cover that was, in Goldstein's words, designed to be “unexpected and intellectual.” The cover from her last issue as editor-in-chief in November 2012 was only partly tongue in cheek: a close-up of a human skull covered in rainbow sprinkles set against a blue gradient backdrop, alluding to a Mexican sugar skull for the Day of the Dead.
Goldstein stepped down as editor-in-chief of Gastronomica at the end of 2012 when the University of California Press decided to cut its production budget. Because of her dedication to high quality art in the journal, Goldstein decided to move on with the change in budget. Upon her exit, Goldstein noted in a University of California Press interview: “I think Gastronomica’s greatest achievement has been to bridge the divide between academics and the food world, on the one hand bringing serious writing to the general public and on the other bringing a sense of aesthetics to the world of academic writing.”

Books