Learning a region and its foodways

A while ago, Tomáš (Furtwangler) shared some insights with me on the attempt to revive Slovakia's "traditional" foodways after so many years of enforced conformity. I found these concepts to be interesting, and many of those ideas also carry over when attempting to learn or re-create foods from any region:

Tomáš wrote: In Slovakia, there are two big challenges when rediscovering our own cuisine. Most obviously, we had 40 years of communism, during which time the cooking had deteriorated drastically. But beyond that, there is also a problem with Slovak cookbooks. Firstly, we don't have great food writers like Elizabeth David, Curnonsky, Patience Grey or Diane Kochilas. We have, I think, lost the connection with good peasant cuisine or good classic bourgeois cooking and we're only rediscovering it now. What this means is that when I see a recipe in a contemporary cookbook listing cooking oil among ingredients, I use lard instead. Or when I see vinegar, I know they mean that distilled white vinegar, which to my mind doesn't have many good culinary uses. So I tend to use wine vinegar or cider vinegar or something like that. Something that simply makes sense in the terroir. For example, if the recipe comes from the vicinity of, say, Trnava, which is a wine-growing region, wine vinegar or verjuice is a safe bet. So, in many respects, I am trying to rediscover the cuisine. I am lucky in that I can still buy the traditional specialties such as plum jam, top-quality raw honey, raw cow's milk to make fresh tvaroh, unpasteurized 100%-sheep's milk bryndza in season, uncultured žinčica, good Slovak smoked bacon, and - if I am lucky - homemade jaternice or krvavničky from someone. But as far as recipes and general food culture go, it is quite a challenge and a learning experience. For instance, while zabíjačky still take place in the countryside, with all of the related culinary festivities, I live in a city and there is not a single restaurant cooking good traditional food.

Interesting how this pattern appears over and over again. After the demise of Franco, Spain went through a similar rebirth of interest in it's traditional foods, many of which had been suppressed

What would be really interesting is to see if the eastern European countries simultaneously develop avent guarde cusines side by side with re-emerging traditional ones, as happened in Spain.