„Традиционните” ястия и тяхната регионална принадлежност: названия с регионален произход в сборници с готварски рецепти в България
“Traditional” Meals and Their Regional Specificity: Identifications of Regional Origin in Cookbooks and Recipe Books in Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: The present text analyses the identifications of regional origin in names of meals, as they were reflected by cookbooks and recipe books published in Bulgaria after the first quarter of the twentieth century. By tracing the emergence of regional identifiers in dish labels, the article will outline the steps in the symbolic construction of regionally marked food, their distribution in cookbooks and recipe books, and their role in maintaining regional specificity through the culinary code. The goal of the text is – on the one hand, to reveal the construction of regional specificity in food items through the naming of regions and villages in food recipes, and – on the other, to trace the crystallization of the regionalism in the process of forming national cuisine. Grounded in abundant material from cookbooks published since 1930s (when they started including identifications of Bulgarian regions) until today (when such identifiers of regional origin increasingly abound), the article will shed light on the local, regional, and national memories, coded in the preservation and popularization of traditional recipes. Being above all products of urban and print culture, cookbooks are extremely convenient for undertaking an analysis in such a perspective. They are a very good example about the documenting of traditions, which undergo transformation at the processes of modernization, as well as of their reconstruction and imagining by means of indicators of “age-old,” “native,” and “authentic.”

• Details
• Contents