Kada kuhaju bake… Tradicija i povijest u dvjema bakinim kuharicama
When Grandmamas Cook… Tradition and History in Two Grandmother Cookbooks

Summary/Abstract: The need for standardisation and canonisation of traditional Croatian cooking, and/or the creation of an identifiable brand, has found one of its expressions in the grandmother's kitchen syntagma. The grandmother function in the transmission of tradition in the broadest sense has already been highlighted in numerous papers, while the reception of grandmothers as the highest authorities in home cooking, legitimises their cooking as healthy, tasty and, above all, traditional. Numerous cookbooks and products that carry the 'grandmother' adjective speak in support of that thesis. Several untypical cookbooks have appeared in Croatia over the last few years. They are untypical since they depart from the basic precept of the cookbook genre as reference-book literature. Through analysis of two such grandmother cookbooks (Kuharica none Carmen [Grandma Carmen's Cookbook] and Kuharica bake Ivke [Grandma Ivka's Cookbook]), this paper shall try to show the way in which this cookbook genre incorporates historical content. The interesting nature of these cookbooks does not derive as much from the applicability of the given recipes and advice, as from the attempt made to show the broader cultural and historical framework of their emergence. The two cookbooks in question are actually private collections of recipes that these grandmothers accumulated over a period of some fifty years. Leaving the grandmother recipes as they were noted down, and endeavouring to describe their historical and cultural backdrop, the authors of these cookbooks perceive the grandmothers as witnesses to a particular time while, at the same time, the notations are both testimonies to and documents on the urban societies of Samobor and Trogir at the beginning of the 20th century. Fragments of family history, such as these straightforward, no-frills recipes, can have equal value with other historical documents and, as such, can serve in the reading off or revival of the lost past.

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