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The story of what happened on the Noah’s Ark after the Devil succeeded to sneak into it (AT 825) is well-known to both Christian (C) and Muslim (M) narrators in Bulgaria. It comprises of the following motifs – some of them have parallels in Muslim or Christian sources: (1) The Devil enters the Ark holding to the tail of the donkey/goat and is involuntarily invited by Noah himself; (2) The Devil in the form of a mouse makes a hole in the bottom of the Ark; or creates mice/persuades the mouse to gnaw the bottom of the Ark; in some variations mice act independently of Devil’s incitement (C); (3) A leak appears and two animals help to solve the problem: the cat who eats the naughty mouse (M); and the snake who stops up the leak with its body (curling up/using its tail – C+M). (4) The snake is rewarded: grateful animals and Noah promise that from that time on it could eat only “the most delicious meat/blood in the world”. (5) The mosquito is sent to taste the blood of all animals and to tell the others the results of the inquiry – human meat/blood appear to be “the most delicious”. (6) The swallow intercepts the mosquito on its way back and pecks out its tongue to prevent him telling the bad news. (7) The angry snake tries to catch the swallow but only takes hold of some feathers of its tail; (8) The mosquito can pronounce only “zh-zh-zh” and animals decide he wants to say that frog’s (Bulg. ‘zhaba’) is “the most delicious meat/blood in the world”. (9) Noah is angry with the snake and cuts its body to pieces and then throws it in the fire. The story is rife with etiological motifs of three types: 1) new animals appear (mice, cats, pigs – mainly in Muslim narratives; bloodsucking vermin – fleas, lice); 2) some birds, insects and reptiles change their appearance (swallow, mosquito, snake); 3) “natural” dietary habits of some animals are established (cats eat mice; snakes – mice and frogs; vermin – blood; pigs – waste products). Only the snake’s wish to eat human meat/blood seems to other animals “unnatural” and “sinful” and they unite together against the snake to prevent it. The motif of the snake-“perfidious helpful animal” who is, most probably, the snake of Genesis, 3: 1—5 is further analysed in the paper at the background of some common themes to the Abrahamic religions: the parallel between the Flood story and the story of the Creation; the sinfulness of the pre-diluvian generations and the violation of the hierarchy between man and animals; and finally – the prohibition to shed human blood and the establishment of new dietary laws in Noah’s Covenant after the Flood.
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Dwelling upon a dense resource of empirical materials related to the family dinner in the second half of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th century, the article analyzes the main aspects of the evening meal, which was the only clearly fixed and universally registered regular meal for Bulgarians in the respective period. Undertaking the theoretical and methodological perspective of historical anthropology, the text succeeds to reconstruct the specificity of social networks in Bulgarian traditional culture and to decode the meanings that family dinner they had for individual and groups in the past. The article analyzes in detail the main characteristics and structural elements of the evening meal, and highlights its role in maintaining the physical and moral unity of traditional family groups. The main functions of the family – physical survival, reproduction of biological, social, and cultural individuals, the formation of basic identity and the maintenance of the feeling of affiliation, communication (sociability) were concentrated in the ritual of the evening meal. Laden with economic, social, and psychological functions, dinner occupied a fundamental place in the “production” not only of the family, but also of the production and reproduction of culture. In satisfying major societal needs, which far surpassed biological and economic necessities, it was a group act, which was unrivalled in traditional Bulgarian culture.
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This article explores how the Bulgarian culinary symbol “shopska salad” appeared as a name of a dish in the mid 1950s. It is shown how it achieved its famous form, sprinkled with white cheese, not early than mid 1960s. The appearance of shopska salad is seen within the context of increasing growing of tomatoes and vegetables in Bulgaria since 1930s; the usage of fresh red tomatoes in the preparation of different salads; ideological linkage – both inside and outside of the country – between vegatables and Bulgaria. The social diffusion of “shopska salad” is traced in the second half of 1960s and especially in 1970s and 1980s. It is demonstrated how – through the restaurants of the state run institution “Balkantourist” and other different institutions of centralized public eating in communist Bulgaria – the salad became popular. The unquestionable success of this culinary invention of Bulgarian professional cooks is seen as a complex result of the influence of different factors as crucial developments in the formation of “Bulgarian national cuisine” between late 1950s and late 1970s; the international culinary requirements and fashion; the expectations of foreign tourists coming to Bulgaria; Bulgarians’ own self-identification of their country with sun and vegetables; the appearance in Europe of the so called “Mediterranean diet”; and the hidden symbolic meaning in colours of the salad that coincided with Bulgarian national flag.
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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.”
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Comparison of the manufactured and used nutrition products by the Sarakatsans in Bulgaria allows for the conclusion that nomadic stock-breeding on the Balkans is necessarily connected to the market, where the manufactured (predominantly dairy) products are being sold and wherefrom nutrition products are being bought for the everyday meal. Two distortions in manufacturing of food products and nutrition of the community are being studied – the pig-breeding and the low consummation of milk proving the close dependency of the typical Sarakatsans’ way of life on the specific natural environment and economic situation on the Balkan peninsula.
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In contrast to Ancient Roman, Byzantine and Western medieval written traditions, and unlike other genres of instructions (such as healing remedies, methods for ink preparation), cooking recipes had never been preserved in the Orthodox Slavic cultures during the Middle Ages. Yet, the diet of a medieval and post-medieval Bulgarian was possibly influenced by two systems, both attested in written sources – (1) the Church calendar, imposing fasts, and prescribing or prohibiting certain foods at a specific period of the year, (2) and a number of dietary texts based on the ancient theories, recommending the food appropriate for a particular month. The interest in the latter works increased in the post-medieval period, when for the first time the names of traditional Balkan meals appeared in them to indicate the increasing Ottoman influence on Balkan cuisine. With the view of the preserved culinary practices, this lasting Ottoman legacy seems to come to us in a rather distorted form: Christian population has been using pork in many of the traditional Ottoman dishes, responding rather to the economic conditions than exteriorizing a colonial “trauma.” When in the nineteenth century for the first time culinary recipes started to circulate in a written form in Bulgarian milieu, they did not record or memorize the existing traditional dishes, but presented unfamiliar, foreign recipes, and broadened the knowledge about ingredients, foods and technologies. The article studies possibly the oldest Bulgarian handwritten collection of three culinary recipes from the nineteenth-century Hilandar miscellany 680. The first recipe is for processed and smoked pork American style, the other two – for pickled fish. The manuscript, large part of which is an instruction for developing photographs, contains practical information of various kinds gathered by a layman. The texts display the linguistic features of Eastern Bulgarian dialect. Their lexis is a mixture of spoken Bulgarian, Church Slavonic forms, Turkish, Russian, and very occasionally Italian words. The heterogeneity of the texts betrays not only a copyist, uncertain of his communicative strategies, of orthographic and stylistic rules, but also mirrors a multicultural society exposed to diverse influences. Although similar in their ingredients and methods of preparation, none of the three recipes is identical to the texts of P. R. Slaveykov’s cook book. Rather, both P. R. Slaveykov’s and Hilandar collections reflect the shift in the interests of the changing town society and the growing educated public.
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The paper deals with the problem of food as an important element and symbol of cultural identity. It seeks to outline the main dimensions of the symbolic and mental construction of the Balkan region through the perceptions of “Balkan cuisine”. In order to examine how this cultural identity has been constructed and experienced on a daily basis by people visiting Balkan ethnic restaurants in Sofia, fieldwork was conducted in several “national” establishments. Three Serbian grill restaurants, two Turkish and one Greek-Lebanese restaurant, as well as a chain of Greek confectionaries, were studied in order to find out whether common dishes and tastes are able to create a sense of cultural proximity overcoming national rivalries, and to see how the symbolic construction of the region and regional identity are made instrumental by food. Resemblances and differences in meals, furnishings, festivities, music etc. revealed different levels of perceived cultural proximity between Bulgarians and their neighbors based on food and taste. Ethnic restaurants and the food they offer appear to be a suitable context for constructing national and regional identity.
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This article aims to overview briefly concepts of food and nutritional habits among some peoples living in different regions of the world. In this context, from anthropological point of view, food will be considered as a cultural element, as a pattern of culture delivering contributory study-material for a more holistic study of the cultures considered. Some models of classification and individual and cultural factors impacting the consumption, the abstention and the prohibition of fold will be presented at the beginning. These will be followed by an insight into some theoretical approaches of central meaning in the anthropology of food and nutrition, considering food as a cultural code, as a pattern of culture. As a conclusion the importance of food for the investigating of cultures will be pointed out, whereby food will be considered as a system, in which the single nutritional elements are valued with cultural meaning (Hess 2000: 23).
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