Rebellious Cooks: Practical and Hedonistic Powers of Recipes in Late Communist Bulgaria

Rebellious Cooks: The Practical and Hedonistic Powers of Recipes in Late Communist Bulgaria

Communism was established in Bulgaria in 1944, assuming many of the classic Marxist aspirations - including the idea to liberate women from the burden of the kitchen chores. But by the 1970s the overwhelming majority of Bulgarian women were involved in intensive exchange of culinary recipes: they traded them at work, on private gatherings, at any public place and by any means of communication at their disposal. This research seeks to capture the social meanings of this zealous exchange, which resulted in prolific private culinary literature: manuscripts, scrapbooks, or combinations of both.

Starting from the notion of cuisine as a concise expression of social circumstances in all their complexity, including “social and political organization, ideology and the circumstances of history and encounters with other cultures” (Gillian Crowther, 2013), the research examines the motivation behind private attempts to ignore, replace or amend its official version by private ones.

It studies the personalisation of communist cookbooks as a way to amend not only the immediate content of the official culinary literature, but the social relations it encodes (Mary Douglas, 1972).

The research examines hand-made cookbooks as a private escape, concealed expression of individuality in times, when the official regime imposed collectivism. It tries to define at what extent it was a reaction to the food deficits, plaguing the communist market, and at what - an act of social resistance.

It enquires was cooking seen as an escape, as a shelter for forbidden individuality, as a challenge to regime’s denial of privacy. As a right to retain older family values, disputed and even ridiculed by modernity. It tries to detect how far this unarticulated argument between a man and a system was culinary, and how far – ideological.

The research will seek to identify the opposition between private and formal cookbooks on multiple levels: as a silent argument over the ideal woman image (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, 1987, Archer, 2008), over promoted ideological virtues (Davis, 2011), over the denial of system’s economic deficiencies (Notaker, 2008), or over right to private choices.