Rebellious Cooks and Recipe Writing in Communist Bulgaria

Albena Shkodrova

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350132320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

How did people exist and resist in their daily lives under Soviet control in the Cold War period? Shkodrova's monograph shows how in communist Bulgaria many women passionately exchanged recipes with friends and strangers, to build substantial and impressive private collections of recipes. This activity was borderline contraband in going against the general disapproval of home cooking that formed part of the ideology of communism, in which home cooking was considered household slavery and an agent of patriarchalism. Private recipe collections were by far the preferred written source of culinary information, more popular than the state-approved commercial cookbooks. Shkodrova shows how these recipe collections held many different meanings for the women who collected them, from helping to navigate the communist economy, to enabling new friendships to be developed while engaging safely in power relations, and cultivating a sense of individual identity in a society where collective existence was prioritised and exalted. Drawing on primary sources including scrapbook cookbooks and working from the establishment of cookery classes before communism and their obliteration thereafter, Shkodrova presents a structured outline of the meanings of recipes exchange and home cooking for Bulgarian women under communism.

PART ONE

THE CONTEXT

COOKING ADVICE IN BULGARIA

‘Stealing with the eyes’, the traditional method of learning through observation, was as good as the only way to master cooking in Bulgaria until well into the 19th century. In other parts of Europe a tradition of household manuscripts had developed since the 14th century and cookbooks were printed for commercial distribution since the 17th century (Notaker 2012: 135). The first Bulgarian cookbooks though only appeared in 1870s (Slaveykov 1870, Smrikarov 1874), and not much happened in the following decades. Little further culinary advice was released until the end of the 19th century, as Bulgaria, along with other emerging states in the Balkans, consolidated from fragments of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and struggled to construct a state. My research identified only eleven cookbooks, published between 1870 and 1900, and seventeen in the first two decades of the 20th century¹, the growth probably impeded by the First World War.

The actual rise of commercially printed cookbooks occurred between the two world wars. Women’s magazines, agricultural societies, cookery schools and private individuals joined forces and released at least thirty-two new titles in the 1920s and seventy-nine in the 1930s, to which numerous additional print runs of earlier books were added. However puzzling it may seem, the 1930s turned out to be the golden age of the 20th-century cookbooks’ publication in Bulgaria – the abundance of new advice, which this decade saw, was not achieved again until the 1990s.

Several key circumstances came together to provide for this success, and one of them was the growing literacy among the female population. Lagging behind some economically developed countries like Great Britain or France, Bulgaria entered the 20th century with literacy levels similar to Italy’s,² somewhere above 53 per cent, which was the percentage of children attending primary school. By 1925 though this proportion was already at 84.2 and it reached nearly 100 in the 1950s (Bulgaria XX Vek 1999: 618).

The system of schools expanded and in 1909 a reform in education directly interfered in women’s patterns of learning to cook: the state introduced a four-year education cycle for girls to level it with that of boys, and added as an obligatory subject ‘home economy, science of education and needlework’. High schools were still not accessible to everyone – by 1930 71 per cent of the children in the country attended secondary education and in 1940 it was 80 per cent. Girls attended less than boys (Bulgaria 20th Century: 622). Still the growing attendance of home economy courses – in or outside schools, must have rapidly boosted the number of women, confronted with written cooking advice.

As a result of parallel efforts to encourage sophistication in cooking a significant network of women’s societies were created, which were thriving across the country in the 1930s and early 1940s. These influential organizations used their membership fees and volunteer work to arrange charitable opportunities for the education of young girls, preparing for married life or work as household servants. Archive materials of these societies suggest that they cooperated with local chambers of agriculture, schools, and between each other, developing vast networks and ensuring good media exposure.³ Examples of their enterprises were exhibitions, educative events and publications, which travelled across the country. Women were taught how to cook potatoes, how to prepare healthy and cheap food, how to be practical, or adopt nature-friendly practices and similar (Tsoncheva 1941: 3).

The growing school attendance among girls not only offered access to an alternative source of knowledge, but changed women’s lifestyle, particularly in rural families. Many sources confirm that girls in pre-modern Bulgaria learned to cook by practising, assuming part of their mothers’ cooking obligations, while the other family members were spending long days working on the farm or in the fields⁴. School attendance, though, took them out of their parents’ households at least during daytime and changed the family routine for many (Gavrilova 1999: 350). They learned to read and to cook independently from their families, and for purposes different from maintaining their parents’ household: many of them hoped to find jobs in other people’s homes, or to be prepared to run their own household.

The critical contribution of the cooking classes was that they combined practice with reading and writing of recipes, thus combining the traditional method of learning through observation with the habit of acquiring knowledge through written text. It is very likely that the joint efforts of home economy classes in schools and cooking classes and lectures by various societies and organizations laid the foundations of written recipe culture in Bulgaria, and also of many collections of recipes in that country. During my research I encountered three sets of notes from courses, followed in the 1920s and 1930s, which were inherited and treasured by the succeeding generations. A similar connection was established elsewhere, for example according to Knezy (2003: 144) recipe writing in Hungary became popular in the 1930s, when girls were able to attend similar cooking classes. Also Goody (1977: 141–142) observed a connection between the mobility of young women, the time they spent in school and away from their familial houses and gardens, and their tendency to ‘learn cooking indirectly from books’. Indeed, the other effect of cooking classes on women in Bulgaria was to make them users of cookbooks.

The rich variation of advice, provided in the Bulgarian cookbooks by the end of the 1920s and throughout the 1930s, must have served domestic cooks’ expanding interests. There was a giant leap between the food culture that transpired from the late 19th-century introduction into absolute basics (Slaveykov 1870, Smrikarov 1874) and the lamentation over the lack of basic skills and taste in the Bulgarian kitchen (Domashna gotvarska kniga 1895), and the culinary cosmopolitanism in the cookbooks from the 1930s, which brought together Middle Eastern, Central and Western European, Russian and American cuisines, quoted Escoffier, the Danish minister of health or Greta Garbo and had developed the notion of ‘Bulgarian cuisine’. If in the first half a century of its existence political life in modern Bulgaria did not exactly flourish, one could reasonably state that its food practices did.

The arrival of communism though was to reboot the process.

SETTING UP THE COMMUNIST ARENA

The communist state in Bulgaria was made possible on 8 September 1944, when the week-old national government declared war on Nazi Germany. This was an attempt to escape the alliance with Hitler, concluded four administrations earlier – but as it turned out, one that came just too late. Trapped by a sequence of strategic miscalculations and brought into an impermeable international isolation, later the same day Bulgaria was invaded by the Soviet army. On the following morning a Soviet-supported coup, dubbed ‘an uprising’ by the communist historiography, ousted prime minister Muraviev. It brought to power a coalition with the participation of the Communist Party. Thus started a process, which led to 45 years of communist rule and profoundly influenced the 20th-century modernization and everyday life in the country.

Between 1944 and 1947 the Communist Party was consolidating and asserting its power. Transformed overnight from an illegal group of 2,500 members into an official political organization, it formed a national militia and launched the pursuit and executions of enemies: politicians, monarchists, the military elite, the upper-middle class, industrialists or intellectuals. According to a recent investigation by Lilkov and Hristov an estimated 26,000 Bulgarians perished in the initial purges, some of them through executions, staged to spread terror. Entire villages were exterminated, after being robbed. A communist militia, led by then still unknown Todor Zhivkov, was formed from criminals released from the prisons at the height of the coup, and many were also killed in criminal acts or in resolving personal feuds (Lilkov and Hristov 2017: 28). Rape, extortions and mass graves asserted the ultimate power, which scared some and attracted others, providing for a fast swelling membership of the Communist Party.

The process profoundly repositioned layers of the society in a way that was very similar to the Soviet October Revolution. Entire social groups were obliterated as ‘former people’, as they were literally called by the communist State Security, the infamous Durzhavna sigurnost (Lilkov and Hristov 2017). Among them were also socialists, who were thought to disagree with the methods of the new vanguard. These too were airbrushed from history as if they had never existed, suffering the same fate as the early Czech communist Clementis, described by Kundera (1983: 3).

The new leadership developed along the lines of the ideological orthodoxy of Joseph Stalin and with the support of his close aide, the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, who returned from Moscow to lead the transformations and the country, to falsify the people’s support for the regime’s actions, and to ensure its subordination (Znepolski ed. 2011: 77–78, Deyanova 2003: 202–203).

In this context the early communist idea of the role of women in the kitchen in Bulgaria was shaped, repeating the radical ideas of Clara Zetkin and the October revolution. Clearly articulated – and particularly pronounced in the post-war Stalinist years, when the communist industry was forced into life – was the intention to replace home cooking with affordable public catering on a national scale. It had to open the way to employing the female population in the state economy (Shkodrova 2014: 236–237, 2018a: 472).

Even if the idea of reforming women’s role in food preparation was one of the ideological pillars of the new rulers, the cookery advice did not change overnight. One reason was that it remained in private hands and its publishers, even if investing effort to align with the new power’s ideology, did not fully grasp the implications that ideology had for home cooking, or on lifestyle in general. One such example was the Obedineni Domakinski Spisania (United Household Magazines), a pre-war consortium of several women’s magazines, which continued its regular releases after 1944. Its post-war issues tried to convey support and collaboration with the new state: they featured women with ‘masculine’ jobs and texts in support of the government’s agenda. One of its last issues, in the spring of 1947 urged women to participate in the ‘shared enthusiasm’ to fulfil the two-year economic plan. ‘No woman should assume that since many others work to accomplish the [state economic] plan, she can avoid making a contribution. On the contrary, each woman should realize that precisely her input is needed to achieve the goals,’ advised an editorial article. The magazine though continued many earlier content lines: reporting on fashion shows from Paris, occupying pages with knitting or embroidering advice, or offering a recipe for ‘Swiss soup’ when cultural references to the West were becoming increasingly dangerous (Obedineni domakinski spisania 1947: 3–5).

In 1948, which marked the end of the liminal period and the establishment of the Communist Party in power, United Household Magazines were attacked in the central party’s newspaper Rabotnichesko delo (Workers’ Affairs) as reactionary (Rabotnichesko delo 1948, as quoted by Deyanova 2005: 14 of 26). Blamed for ‘irresponsibly’ featuring texts about women’s charms, ‘cheesy short stories’, and ‘not a line about the new woman–hero: brigadier and super-performer’, the magazine was soon shut down. At that time a government decision assigned monopoly to the state over publishing activities of any kind.

The only women’s magazine that survived was Zhenata dnes. Established in 1945, it was published by the Demokratichen Suyuz na Zhenite (Democratic Women’s Union), a communist women’s organization formed by the new political elite. Even if a brain child of the new regime, this magazine allowed for a certain continuity: it was founded with the support of Hristo and Penka Cholchevi, the publishers of the previously influential Vestnik za zhenata (Newspaper for the Women). The couple’s publishing activities made them part of the intellectual elite of the country before 1944. Different sources suggest they were quite reticent in regard to the new order. Their children later recalled that Cholcheva never addressed anyone with the standard communist drugar (comrade) (Malinova et al. 2015: 8), which was considered a stark sign of political disloyalty. It was probably the experience, connections and rationality of the couple that saw them through. It seems that they deemed the collaborating with the regime unavoidable. Cholchev was known to say: ‘It is neither socialism, nor communism, but it is our future’ (Milanova et al. 2015: 7).

The commitment to adapt is clearly visible in Cholcheva’s work. A comparison between two editions of a cookbook – the first from 1947, released by Cholchev’s publishing house, and the second from 1952 by a state publisher – offers a good illustration of the (self?)-censoring process of the early communist years. The striking change is in the direct references to Western countries/cuisines: from thirty-three in 1947, they are reduced to four in 1952 (Cholcheva 1947, 1952). Cholcheva’s winning strategy was to keep her cookery advice simple and accessible. The first editions paid attention to the hardship in Bulgaria and advised women to restrain from follies: ‘Do not buy anything you don’t need, or one day you will have to part with what you need’, she wrote, quoting a popular Bulgarian saying (Cholcheva 1947: 330). She admonished Bulgarian housewives for being wasteful with soap, water or energy, and fashioned new style rhetoric arguing that parsimony is beneficial not only to private budgets, but to the people’s republic’s economy (Cholchev...