Bulgarian Manuscript Cookbook (Disbound, pre-1917?) [Digitization in progress--6/24/14]

Provenance and Condition: This MS was purchased in an EBay auction in 2012 from a seller in Israel.  The seller had no information about the provenance of the MS.  The appearance of a Cyrillic MS in an Israeli auction is consistent with the sale of an estate belonging to a Cold-War-era "refusenik" who won the right to emigrate to Israel at some point between 1967-90 or later.  Based on examination of sample images by a member of the Goucher College Russian Department, the language is Bulgarian, written in the same Cyrillic characters as Russian, and the document probably dates from before the Bolshevik Revolution because of the use of a character among those outlawed by the new regime.  In such a MS, though, the writer's orthography might well reflect habits dating from literacy acquisition decades before the document was composed.  The paper's browning and the leaves' brittled outside edges would be consistent with a cheap notebook purchased for the purpose in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.  The paper gatherings, blue-lined and stapled twice, are extremely fragile.  Some bifolia have separated and some of those have become torn. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the pages remain legible and would still have been useful, suggesting the extreme care with which the document was used in the hostile environment of a working kitchen. 

        The hand appears to be consistent throughout.  All the recipes appear to be deserts.  Most pages are stained with dark oils in patterns consistent with heavy use in the kitchen.  This and the document's meager provenance evidence suggest that it may have been a highly personalized wedding or emigration gift for a daughter or granddaughter from a parent or grandparent whose household she was leaving.  The penciled pagination in circles at the tops of pages were made by the current owner of the book corresponding to the numbers given the recipe titles in the table of contents on pages 197-208, and close examination of torn page edges to reconstruct separated bifolia.  At this time, one leaf (NP1r/v) has not been paginated.  See the table of contents pages for the fastest survey of the cookbook's contents.

Unpaginated Leaf: NP1r and NP 1v  (so far, the leaf's proper location in the codex sequence cannot be determined)

Loose Leaves of Gathering 1

Gathering 2

Loose Leaves of Gathering 3

Gathering 4

Loose Leaves of Gathering 5

Gathering 6

Loose Leaves of Gathering 7

Conjoint Leaves of Gathering 7

Loose Leaves of Gathering 7

Conjoint Leaves of Gathering 7

Gathering 8