In 1935, barely a few years after the paroxysms of the first five-year plan, Joseph Stalin made a famously upbeat pronouncement: "Life has become better, comrades. Life has become happier."

It was the Leader of Progressive Humanity's "happiness" pivot. Endlessly echoed on posters and in the press, it kicked off the official new orientation of the second half of the terror-filled Soviet 30s. Ditching the utopian asceticism of the Bolsheviks, the state now promoted a socialist version of bourgeois living. Stakhanovite miners and party nomenklatura elites received ornate furniture sets and apartment keys for outstanding achievements. A buoyant consumer goods drive was launched; along with it, an aggressive campaign for a "new cultured lifestyle". These Stalinist mantras of good cheer and prosperity shimmered like magical incantations in the collective psyche of a half-starving citizenry, still reeling from the horrors of collectivisation.

Part of this sunniness mandate was the creation of a Soviet socialist food canon – source of all the meat patties (kotleti), mayonnaise-laden salads, and spicier fare from ethnic republics that would fuel the USSR for its next 50-plus years. Anastas Mikoyan, the moustached Armenian (then commissar of the food industry), served as the chief engineer of the Soviet palate – and gullet. In 1936 Mikoyan criss-crossed the US, scouring for secrets of capitalist food manufacturing to bring home. In 1939 – at the end of Stalin's blood-soaked purges – Mikoyan's commissariat issued an official Soviet cookbook. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food would become a totalitarian kitchen bible. Shared by one sixth of the world's population, the 15 republics and over 100 ethnicities of the USSR, it ran through a dozen editions with more than 8m copies in print (and still selling).

My mother, Larisa, was five, living in Stalin's Moscow with her family, when the hefty tome with its parsley-green cover entered her life. Ogling the fantastical colourised photographs – tables crowded with silver and crystal, platters of beef decorated with tomato rosettes, frilly cakes poised amid elaborate tea sets – she was utterly mesmerised. The images conjured up skatert' samobranka, the enchanted tablecloth from Russian folklore that covered itself with food at the snap of a finger. Or perhaps she thought of the popular Soviet tune of the day, "We were born to turn fairytale into reality", whenever her mother Liza transformed the book's recipes into fish suspended in glistening aspic, or canapes with frilly mayonnaise borders. Kniga (The Book) even taught my mom how to read. It sparked a fascination with food that's animated her entire life.

And she wasn't alone.

Across the 11 Soviet timezones, generations of women grew up leafing spellbound through the well-splotched pages of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. In the universe of culinary advice, it had and has no equal. With 400 recipes it was an encyclopaedic cooking manual, sure. But with its didactic commentaries, ideological sermonising, neo-Enlightenment scientific excursions, and lustrous photo spreads advertising the glories of Soviet canneries, fisheries and meat-processing plants, this landmark of domestic socialist realist propaganda offered much more. It offered a complete blueprint of "joyous", "abundant", "cultured" socialist living.

Kitchen tyrant … Stalin on a picnic at his dacha in the 1930s. Photograph: RIA Novosti/Alamy

You could also chart the USSR's political and cultural shifts by comparing Kniga's editions. The inaugural 1939 "Mikoyan" green volume appeared when an internationalist Bolshevik rhetoric still held sway. This was an internationalism celebrated, for instance, in the hit 1936 Soviet musical comedy film Circus, in which the great Yiddish actor Shloyme Mikhoels sang a lullaby to the mixed-race child of an American heroine. Mikhoels' lullaby was later deleted. So was the singer – assassinated in 1948 on Stalin's orders amid general antisemitic hysteria. Reflecting the postwar political mood, xenophobia reigned in the monumental 1952 edition of Kniga (the volume that taught my mother how to cook). Gone were 1939's Jewish teiglach recipes; vanished, Kalmyk tea (Kalmyks being a Mongolic minority deported for supposed Nazi collaboration). Canapes, croutons, consommes – such "rootless cosmopolitan" froufrou was expunged. Ditto sendvichi, kornfleks, and ketchup, American delicacies snatched by Mikoyan from his 30s US trip. With its sombre brown covers, the iconic 1952 Kniga was more politically virulent, solemnly happier, with the monumental bulk of Stalinist skyscrapers. The appearance was meaningful. Cooking was obviously no frivolous matter. No! Cooking, dear comrades, represented a collective utopian project: Self-improvement and Acculturation through Kitchen Labour.

Come the next edition, in August 1953, and surprise! All of Stalin's didactic quotes had disappeared at his death. The streamlined cover of the 1960s editions reflected Nikita Khrushchev's campaign against pompous Stalinist ornamentalism. The kitschy 70s volume, from my own Moscow childhood, bristled with recipes from the Soviet republics, echoing Leonid Brezhnev's propaganda of ethnic equalisation.

Anya von Bremzen's fourth birthday party in Moscow, with her mother Larisa serving the food Photograph: anya von bremzen

Kremlin winds shifted and commissars vanished, but the official myth of abundance persisted – and Soviet citizens clung to the magic tablecloth fairytale. They imagined Riga sprats or Abkhazian tangerines suddenly materialising at stores; dreamed of days overflowing with hard salami and buttery sturgeon. Even in the cynical 70s, the kitchen remained an island of optimism. Because who could resist the utopia of the socialist good life promoted so graphically in Kniga? Consider the opening photo-panorama of that high-Stalinist 1952 edition. Here are craggy oysters – oysters! – heaped on a silver platter between bottles of Crimean and Georgian wines. Long-stemmed cut-crystal goblets tower over glistening fish in aspic. A bottle of Sovetskoye-brand champagne – Stalin's pet project – angles its neck toward a majestic suckling pig.

Meanwhile, the intro informs us, capitalist states condemn working citizens to constant undereating, and often to death by starvation. Any cookbook is selling a fantasy, of course; but it was the wrenching discrepancy between the abundance on the pages and the absence in shops that made Kniga's myth of plenty so poignant. Long-suffering Homo sovieticus gobbled up the deception; long-suffering H sovieticus had after all been weaned on socialist realism, on reality depicted "in its revolutionary development" – past and present fused into a triumphant projection of a radiant future.

When Soviet Jews began emigrating in the 70s, many packed the hefty cookbook in their paltry 40kg baggage allowance. By then Kniga had become so cherished an icon that comrades lugged it with them even as they fled the repressive state that published it. My fervently anti-Soviet mother, however, abandoned her copy when we left for the US in 1974. The tattered volume that taught her and her mother proper socialist cooking was by then ideologically radioactive to her.

Wholesome produce … illustration from The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

A few years ago, setting out to write a memoir about Soviet food, I presented Mom with Mikoyan's original 1939 edition. First she flinched. Then she fell for it – hard.

"Drab, dreary recipes," she'd grumble – while cooking up a storm from the gaudy pages and matching her table settings in outer-borough New York to ones in the photos, like her mother in Moscow 70 years before. She piped mayonnaise borders on to "Stalinist-baroque" crab salads, carved tomato rosettes, and fashioned kotleti from meat, carrots, cabbage and beets. Every night she phoned friends, roaring at Kniga's vaunting invocations of "mankind's centuries-old dream of building a communist society … of an abundant, happy, and joyous life".

"I'm not nostalgic," she'd correct me. "I just like old cookbooks. And this one, wow, a real antique!"

Until: "What do they call that syndrome when victims fall for their tormentors …?"

The Russia of today, meanwhile, is gripped by a nostalgia for the USSR. Our Kniga is enjoying a reborn star turn. Its 50th anniversary a few years ago was lavishly celebrated in the press. The fairy tale, despite all, endures.

Kotlet, comrade? – Five favourite Soviet dishes



Crab salad

Before the USSR started exporting canned Kamchatka crab for hard currency in the late 1960s, "Chatka" cans were ubiquitous in stores even when other foodstuffs were scarce. This mayo-drenched salad of crab, potatoes, cucumbers and beloved Soviet tinned peas is essentially a variation of the iconic socialist Salat Olivier. And how not to love the "Stalinist-baroque" presentation in the photo, with pompous cut-glass bowl and fanciful decoration of chimerical anchovy strips (never seen in Moscow stores).

Vinegret

Another Soviet salady icon, this colourful dice of beets, pickles, potatoes and sauerkraut dressed with a sharp vinegar sauce was the stuff of a million proletarian bashes – particularly because it's so comradely with vodka. I made my very first vinegret from the Kniga recipe. It was nearly perfect.

Kotleti … the Soviet response to hamburgers. Photograph: SoFood/Alamy

Kotleti

Inspired by his 1936 trip to the US, Stalin's food supply commissar Anastas Mikoyan wanted to copy Yankee burgers in Russia. But the second world war intervened: somehow the bun got lost in the shuffle and our empire got hooked on unsandwiched meat patties instead. Beef – or chicken or pork or fish – stretched out with bread, rolled in more breadcrumbs and fried to a crunch, these socialist burgers truly sustained the entire population of the USSR. Famously, Kniga also includes recipes for vegetarian kotleti fashioned from cabbage or beets.

Fish in marinade

Fried fish chilled and steeped in a complex tangy tomato "marinade" scented with bay leaf and cloves enjoyed a kind of viral popularity in thaw–era Moscow. My mother would serve it at her candlelit bohemian soirees, and to this day it remains a signature dish on her table.

Chanakhi

The colourful claypot stew of lamb, aubergines, potatoes, tomatoes and lots of herbs from Georgia is rumoured to have been Stalin's favourite dish. This unsettling fact notwithstanding, chanakhi was a kind of sunny, vibrantly spiced "ethnic" dish that satisfied our Moscow cravings for exotic flavours.