Taste of Trust: Documenting Solidarity in Soviet Private Cookbooks,1950–1980s 1

Abstract

Taste of Trust: Documenting Solidarity in Soviet Private Cookbooks, 1950-1980s

This paper investigates the problem of trust and solidarity as they were mirrored in private manuscripts on cooking and housekeeping, and traces the circulation of culinary information within specific social networks. Soviet handwritten cookbooks, though rooted in the nineteenth-century tradition, constituted a phenomenon in

and of themselves. They maintained and transmitted everyday knowledge on cooking, which was perceived as being opposed to state-published cooking books and brochures. Gastronomical models represented by The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food and other culinary writings were beyond reach of an average Soviet citizen. On the one hand, this inaccessibility aroused huge scepticism; on the other hand, it invigorated «invisible cuisine» – an informal exchange of routine culinary skills that had aimed to accommodate official quasi-reality to the Soviet everyday life, and to reconcile a dream with a real food basket. Up until perestroika, private cookbooks functioned not only as a corpus of personal skills that could both compensate flaws of economics of shortage and control everyday life, but also an important tool of gender socialisation that could be used to support social prestige, create solidarity and reinforce social bonds.