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). 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. 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. Rebellious Cooks: The Practical and Hedonistic Powers of Recipes in Late Communist BulgariaĬommunism 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.
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