Abstrakt
Studies on cookbooks and consumption in the context of state socialism are not novel. Wendy Bracewell, for example, tackled the topic for socialist Yugoslavia in her 2012 article, "Eating Up Yugoslavia" (in Communism Unwrapped, ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuberger, 2012), and, more recently, Seasoned Socialism (ed. Anastasia Lakhtikova, Angela Brintlinger, and Irina Glushchenko, 2019) has taken up the subject for the Soviet Union. Albena Shkodrova's Rebellious Cooks and Recipe Writing in Communist Bulgaria contributes to this growing field.
The book is divided into an introduction and four uneven chapters. It starts by providing a broad context for Bulgarian gender policies, turns to scrapbooks as the medium for the transmission and preservation of cookery information, and then looks at the meanings assigned to cookbooks. Finally, Shkodrova attempts to put all these topics together to show cooking as an act of resistance to the regime.