Recipes for escape: Cookbooks on foreign cuisines, scarcity, and culinary aspiration in late socialist Poland

This article provides a qualitative analysis of selected Polish cookbooks devoted exclusively to foreign cuisines, published in the Polish People’s Republic during the 1970s and 1980s. It pursues three main objectives. First, it explores how these publications addressed the challenges of ingredient scarcity under state socialism by offering practical solutions, including product substitutions, recipe adaptations, and creativity. Second, drawing on the work of Bracewell, Theophano, and Brzostek, it argues that these cookbooks provided a form of imaginative escape from the often monotonous reality of food in the communist era, allowing readers to engage with distant cultures at a time when both food access and international travel were restricted. Third, the article demonstrates that, while operating within the constraints of socialist society, these cookbooks also reflected Poland’s growing openness to the West, the rise of international tourism, and the shift toward consumer-oriented culture, signaling the gradual decline of socialist influence. Situated within the fields of culinary history, food studies, and history of everyday life, this study contributes to scholarship on postwar Polish food culture. It complicates existing understanding of Polish foodways under socialism by illustrating how these texts served as sites where scarcity, material constraints, and cultural aspirations intersected and were negotiated.