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

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”.status: Published onlin