Darra Goldstein is the founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Hailed as “a New Yorker for foodies,” Gastronomica won multiple awards under her editorship and in 2012 was named Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She is also the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita at Williams College, where she moved beyond her initial training in Russian language and literature to teach courses in food studies.
Darra’s interest in the study of food began in graduate school at Stanford. Hoping to write a dissertation on food in Russian literature, she was told that her topic wasn’t sufficiently intellectual, so she wrote instead on the Russian modernist
poet Nikolai Zabolotsky. Even after publishing her dissertation as Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes (Cambridge University Press, 1994), she continued to think about the uses of food in literature, and in 1983, as a newly minted Ph.D., she published her first cookbook, À la russe: A Cookbook of Russian Hospitality (still in print, and now titled A Taste of Russia). The book also reflected her experience of studying and working in the Soviet Union and led to a stint as a spokesperson for Stolichnaya vodka when it was first introduced to the US—a fascinating exercise in cross-cultural communication during the Cold War.
Over the years Darra has published widely on food, literature, culture, and art and has 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. Her most recent narrative book is The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food (University of California Press, 2022). In 2015 she published the James Beard- nominated Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, for which she served as editor in chief. Darra is the author of eight award-winning cookbooks: A Taste of Russia, The Georgian Feast (the 1994 IACP Julia Child Cookbook of the Year), The Winter Vegetarian, Baking Boot Camp at the CIA, Fire and Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking, and Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, named one of the ten best cookbooks of 2020 by Forbes, Esquire, and the Washington Post. Most recently, with coauthors Cortney Burns and Richard Martin, she has published the first four books in a series of six on preserved foods: Preserved: Condiments and Preserved: Fruit (2023) and Preserved: Drinks and Preserved: Vegetables (2024).
Other experiences include consulting for the Russian Tea Room and Firebird restaurants in New York City and serving on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. For many years she was food editor of Russian Life magazine and continues to be the series editor of California Studies in Food and Culture from the University of California Press, a book series that seeks to broaden the audience for serious scholarship related to food. In 2023 Darra was named editor in chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies, a digital platform published by Oxford University Press.
Darra’s reputation extends beyond the United States. She has 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, and under her editorship the volume Culinary Cultures of Europe: Identity, Diversity and Dialogue was published in 2005. In 2013 she was named Distinguished Fellow in Food Studies at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, and in 2016 was honored with a Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. In 2020 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals and in 2022 was awarded the Sakhe(l)ebi Prize for her contributions to Georgian culture. Darra currently sits on the advisory board of the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts and is a member of the advisory “Kitchen Cabinet” for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.