How did Richard Nixon get to be the inspiration for ham production in Bulgaria? How was the soft drink called Altai born, Bulgaria’s answer to Coca Cola? Which were the gastronomical hits in Bulgaria’s restaurants in the times of “socialism”? Is there a propaganda “curtain” in the world of gastronomy?

The answers to these questions are provided by a book – Socialist Gourmet – which offers an unorthodox look at life in this country behind the Iron Curtain. Its author is political journalist Albena Shkodrova.  Socialist Gourmet is the fruit of an in-depth study of archives and documents, some of them until recently classified as well as the recollections of close to 80 people. Without a trace of sarcasm but with a very keen sense of humour, the book takes readers back to the times when shop shelves were empty and making homemade preserves in an urban environment was a way to make it through winter. The Bulgarian cuisine back then is not so different from the Bulgarian cuisine now. The repertoire of the most popular homemade meals is the same: veal stew, meat-balls, meat-ball soup. There is one thing that is very different – choice.

“The limited choice compared to the abundance of today thanks to the access we now have to an immeasurably broader selection of products, but also our opening up to other gastronomical cultures,” Albena explains. “Bulgaria used to be so very uncurious about other cuisines. Our own, national cuisine has borrowed a great deal from Turkish and Greek cooking from the time of the Ottoman Empire but we now consider these dishes as our own. It was only after the changes in 1989 that the country started opening up to foreign cuisines. But technology has also changed everything. Modern kitchen appliances offer such a wide scope for experiments, the Internet is full of all kinds of recipes and that is the huge difference between then and now.”

The propaganda curtain served as a deterrent to any whiff of any cuisine from the Western countries. As Balkantourist developed, French cuisine slowly made its way into the country, but only just. Understandably, it was easier for Russian recipes to find a place on our menu. The Russian Club famed for its cuisine was one of the places to go back then. The Journalists’ Club was another trendy place – there was a pastry cook there who had learnt the trade all across Central Europe. As she conducted her studies Albena Shkodrova, came to the conclusion that in socialist times Bulgaria had more restaurants per capita of its population than New York has today.

“The reason is the state’s consistent policy after 1944 right up until the mid-1980’s of encouraging eating out, so, many restaurants were created,” she says. “The purpose was to have families eat out so they wouldn’t waste time in the kitchen. One of the first decisions the Council of Ministers of the new republic made was to obligate private enterprises - which were to be nationalized just a few years later – to provide canteens for their workers. That was how the catering system started, then the restaurants in Sofia’s city centre were stripped of all luxury – the bourgeois spirit had no place there, they had to be down to basics and feed the people. Then came Balkantourist which developed its own school with the last decade of the period ending in the ambition to create high-end restaurants, even though they had to be accessible to the man in the street.”

Albena came upon many strange episodes:

“One episode which never fails to bring a smile to people’s faces is the story of how the first industrial ham came to be produced in Bulgaria. Prof. Ivan Baichev, then employed at the packing-house in Rousse tells the story of how American President Richard Nixon inspired the production of ham across Eastern Europe, including Bulgaria. In his election campaign he had promised to put ham on the American table twice a day. So the whole of Eastern Europe went out of its way to produce ham in the hope of selling it to USA for convertible currency. Ham production was started in this country too but exports fell through for all kinds of reasons. In time the American side gave up the idea of importing ham, as for a country that size the imports were negligible and were simply not worth it. So the ham that had been produced was left on the Bulgarian market.”

English version: Milena Daynova