From duty to pleasure in the cookbooks of communist Bulgaria: attitudes to food in the culinary literature for domestic cooking released by the state-run publishers between 1949 and 1989

ABSTRACT

This article examines how ideology influenced the home cooking literature in communist Bulgaria. It traces the evolution of discourses related to taste and pleasure from food and cooking in state-published cookbooks between 1949 and 1989. Evaluating the fluctuation through the decades, it argues that “futurism,” to which food was a means to convey political and social agendas, prevailed until the end of the 1970s. Taking pleasure in eating and cooking was only legitimized in the 1980s. The analysis suggests that while Bulgarian cookery literature fully accepted the futurist ideology of the USSR, it made little use of the Soviet “Socialist Realism gastronomy,” which saw food as a source of pleasure and cooking as “excellent respite from work”.

KEYWORDS:

• Cookbooks
• ideology
• cold war
• Eastern Europe
• communism
• Bulgaria
• history of food
• everyday life
• cultural history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term “nutritionism” to describe the food ideology characterized by obsession with nutrients and by general neglect of any social, emotional, or cultural meanings of food.

2. Apart from the commercial cookbooks, promotional, educative collections of recipes were released by institutions and organizations. They were distributed through alternative channels and did not have any significant impact. My broader research suggests that today they are rarely found in households. They were also impossible to track down systematically, as they were not treated as official books and were not deposited in the National Library.

3. The approach used is as taught by Barbara Wheaton during her seminar “Reading Historic Cookbooks: A Structured Approach” at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in June 2016.

4. The question of which ingredients were absent from the Bulgarian market was never researched systematically. But the contemporary press, industries’ internal reports, and a growing number of published individual and collective memoirs offer insights. Key sources are the several expert surveys of the state of supermarkets in late socialism, found in the national archive. For example in 1972 an expert group at the Ministry of Domestic Trade (Ministry of Interior Trade, 1972) claimed that one of the best supplied shops in the capital was “regularly without meat, cured meats and sausages, soft cheese, fresh fish, fresh fruit, or 42.6% of the assortment.” “In different moments were absent chocolate-based produce, alcoholic drinks, certain types of sausages, vegetables, special sorts of bread and others, or another 29.3% of the [provisioned] assortment.” In conclusion, “only 28.1% of the assortment, such as bread (generic), milk and yogurt, sugar, some sugar produce and some fish cans have been regularly supplied” (Shkodrova, 2014).

5. I use the term “leisure food” to describe the food which Bulgarian housewives most often cooked during weekends or to entertain their family or guests and which usually included a broad variety of dough-based dishes, both salty and sweet.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Albena Shkodrova

Albena Shkodrova is a journalist and a historian. For seven years she has been the editor in chief of Bulgaria’s gourmet magazine Bacchus. Her book Communist Gourmet: The Curious History of Food in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria (2014) became a bestseller in Bulgaria. Its English edition by CEU Press is expected in 2019. In 2017 Albena Shkodrova defended in Belgium her PhD Rebellious Cooks: Practical and Hedonistic Powers of Writing Recipes in Communist Bulgaria. This research, based on household manuscripts and oral history, is a systematic study of the meanings of home cooking.