This popular non-fiction book offers a lively, in-depth look at how the communist regime shaped the everyday food experience of Bulgarians from 1944 to 1989. It explores the routines of acquiring food, cooking, and dining out, using the memories of both Bulgarians and foreign visitors from behind the Iron Curtain. How did Richard Nixon influence ham production in Eastern Europe? Why were communist shops always empty, with long shelves lined with the same product? While Delia Smith and Betty Crocker were household names in Britain and America, why did no one in Bulgaria even know what the country's leading culinary authority looked like? How did French aristocratic cuisine find its way onto every communist restaurant menu? Was the communist food industry genuinely concerned about consumers’ health? How did Sofia in 1975—at least on paper—boast more restaurant seats per capita than New York in 2014? Why were architects designing tiny kitchens even in large apartments? And how did Bulgaria, the Balkans' largest industrial producer of canned vegetables, still encourage city dwellers to rely on home preserves? Finally, how did a communist leader’s simple tastes influence restaurant menus?
Based on over 80 interviews and a wide array of historical sources, the book offers an Arcimboldian portrait of communist Bulgaria. It explores the impact of the communist modernization project on food by examining the ideology, policies, and management of the system, as well as the consumers' lived experiences.

Dimiter Kenarov, author for the Esquire, Outside, The Nation, The Atlantic and Foreign Policy among many others.

“‘You are what you eat,’ as the famous saying goes, and there is much truth to it. Yet, food creates not only individuals but whole societies, cultures, and political systems. In her well-researched and incisive study of food and eating practices in Communist-era Bulgaria, Albena Shkodrova has managed to give us a new and unconventional kind of history of that period, a history from below, or should we say, a history straight from the gut. This is an important contribution to food studies which tells us that in fact what we eat is politics.”

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Jukka Gronow, author of Fashion Meets Socialism and Caviar with Champagne

“Albena Shkodrova’s Communist Gourmet is both a fascinating story of the culinary history of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and an important contribution to the history of consumption and production of food in the East European Communist countries. Rich in historical detail, it highlights the inner tensions between the official goals and ideological declarations of the Communist Party and people’s everyday life.”

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Peter Scholliers, author of The History of Bread and Food Culture in Belgium

“Albena Shkodrova explores the everyday foodways of Bulgarians from 1944 to 1989 in a superb, challenging, witty, critical, ingenious, and personal way. The book is not only thoroughly informative but also absolutely enjoyable to read. The many stories, the instructive pictures, the fluent language, the unexpected topics, the humor, the clever usage of various source materials, and, above all, the very broad coverage (producers, managers, political leaders, workers, shoppers, cooks, diners, drinkers, tourists…) make it an essential contribution to food studies.”

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