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Paper short abstract

In Istrian farm restaurants cooks create value by producing foods guests recognise as traditional and homemade by detecting the manual labour within them. They must manage the tensions between these desired authenticities and the realities of business demands, keeping certain forms of labour hidden.

Paper long abstract

Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, life in Croatian Istria, as elsewhere, has changed dramatically. While some have embraced “fast” food, “street food” and other novelties now available, there remains mistrust in imported and new foods and a desire, especially among urban professionals, to enjoy “traditional”, “homemade” “Istrian” food when possible. Farm restaurants (agroturizmi) provide this, operating in a regime of value structured by a nostalgic past-oriented temporal frame. Whilst so much else changes, agroturizmi are expected to practise and perform the past.

Agroturizmi cooks create cultural and economic value by producing food their guests recognise as traditional and homemade, such as hand-made pasta, wood-fired oven-baked bread and slow-cooked stews—all time- and labour-intensive. Women, especially, must present as domestic and traditional cooks, with their manual labour detectable in the food. In practice, however, cooks must manage disjunctures between these desired authenticities and the realities of running a restaurant business.

This paper, based on fieldwork 2017-2019, examines how cooks do this by carefully combining “traditional” and “modern” foods, home-produced and bought ingredients, and laborious and time-saving cooking methods, keeping certain technologies and forms of labour hidden. I argue that whilst offering such hospitality affords some opportunities to supplement poor agricultural returns and challenge rural stereotypes, it requires (self-)exploitation of family labour and amplifies traditional gendering of food work. The paper contributes an analysis of how the temporal demands of “traditional” and “homemade” food values structure labour in a restaurant setting, and are themselves modified by the actual temporalities of this labour.