Ingredients of Change

Book excerpt: Ingredients of Change explores modern Bulgaria's foodways from the Ottoman era to the present, outlining how Bulgarians domesticated and adapted diverse local, regional, and global foods and techniques, and how the nation's culinary topography has been continually reshaped by the imperial legacies of the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Russians, and Soviets, as well as by the ingenuity of its own people. Changes in Bulgarian cooking and cuisine, Mary C. Neuburger shows, were driven less by nationalism than by the circulation of powerful food narratives—scientific, religious, and ethical—along with peoples, goods, technologies, and politics. Ingredients of Change tells this complex story through thematic chapters focused on bread, meat, milk and yogurt, wine, and the foundational vegetables of Bulgarian cuisine—tomatoes and peppers. Neuburger traces the ways in which these ingredients were introduced and transformed in the Bulgarian diet over time, often in the context of Bulgaria's tumultuous political history. She shows how the country's modern dietary and culinary transformations accelerated under a communist dictatorship that had the resources and will to fundamentally reshape what and how people ate and drank.