Paper short abstract:

For the last 12 years, I was working on a dictionary of Croatian food aiming to create a repository of our food culture. In the end, it has almost 20k words, showing not just lexical richness and the regional distribution of our food habits but also a diachronic image of Croatian food culture.

Paper long abstract:

For the last twelve years, I was working on a two-volume dictionary that was a part of the broader research project on the transformation of Croatian food culture in the 20th century. It as a repository of Croatian food culture, and its main goal was to gather all food lexica in one place. Besides the words from the standard language, dictionary wanted to present regional and local differences in food practices by collecting dialectal words and expressions. Such a wide research scope, presented in the historical timeline and spatial distribution for each word, was planned to be finished in five years with 10k words. Both span and planned number of entries were understatements of the richness in Croatian food vocabulary. After twelve years of research in primal sources such as historical and modern dictionaries and cookbooks, but also dialectal dictionaries, botanical and ichthyological handbooks, ethnographic texts and field research, Dictionary has almost 20k words; showing not just regional distribution of food habits but also their cultural and historical footprint.

This lexicological venture proofed that food vocabulary is strongly tied to the oral culture mostly because much of the food lexica resisted and still resists to any standardization process and witnessing how meanings (and food reality) changed through time and space. Read in this manner, dictionary becomes a starting point for ethnological, anthropological or similar food research helping to trace emergence or disappearance of diverse food phenomena but also historical context, cultural ties and influences that shaped our food culture.