Potica in America: Naming, Transmission, and the Printed Record of a Diaspora Pastry
Abstract
This paper documents the survival of the South Slavic rolled pastry potica/povitica across more than a century in the United States, read through its printed record: community cookbooks, fraternal publications, commercial bakery archives, and mediated recipes. Its principal original claim is that the two dominant American names for the pastry constitute a settlement isogloss — potica marking communities founded by Slovene migration (Cleveland; Minnesota's Iron Range), povitica marking Croatian-founded communities (Kansas City's Strawberry Hill), with mixed usage in mixed settlements (Butte, Montana) — so that the pastry's name fossilizes the demography of the 1880–1930 labor migrations.
The paper traces the documentary chain from the earliest written mentions (Trubar, 1575/1577) and the oldest recipe (Valvasor, 1689) through the mid-twentieth-century American community-cookbook literature, analyzed here as survival technology deployed at the point of third-generation transmission failure, and into the commercial and global era: mail-order bakeries as diaspora infrastructure and the 2014 Great British Bake Off technical challenge as the pastry's globalization moment. Every substantive claim carries an explicit epistemic label (Verified / Hypothesis / Open Question / Metaphor), and the isogloss claim is stated with its refutation condition.
The paper incorporates a July 2026 survey of active United States commercial producers of potica and povitica, maintained as a living census at https://www.poticas.com/makers/.
Cite it
Gonzalez, V. (2026). Potica in America: Naming, Transmission, and the Printed Record of a Diaspora Pastry. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21302923