Darra Goldstein

Darra Goldstein (born April 28, 1951) is an American author and food scholar who is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, emerita at Williams College.

She is the founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, which won the 2012 James Beard award for Publication of the Year, and she served as its editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2012. She also served as editor-in-chief of the short-lived magazine CURED from Zero Point Zero Production. Goldstein is the author of six award-winning cookbooks, most recently Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, which topped the list of Best Summer Cookbooks 2020 in The New York Times Book Review.

Goldstein is also the founding series editor for California Studies in Food and Culture and from 2002 to 2016 was the food editor for Russian Life magazine. She 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 (in 2013) and as a consultant on food and diversity for the Council of Europe (from 2002 to 2005) along with other USAID and Council of Europe 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.

Goldstein 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. In 2020, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP).

Goldstein currently resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, Dean Crawford, a writer and professor of English, emeritus 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 (on her mother's side) 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. (1976 and 1983, respectively) in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University. At Stanford, Goldstein proposed writing a dissertation on food in Russian literature, but she was told it was not a serious, academic topic; instead, she wrote on Nikolai Zabolotsky, a Russian poet whom Goldstein describes as “brilliant.”

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."