Judging from that official cookbook that @slash2k linked to, it seems like they very deliberately did so in Czechoslovakia. Did they not publish similar official cookbooks in other communist states?
I’m not aware of similar cookbooks elsewhere, but I only know about that one because I came across the article awhile ago and remembered it when I saw your question; I am certainly no expert on food culture OR eastern Europe.
I’m not sure, though, how much that cookbook was a deliberate attempt to crush food culture as merely the crushing was the end result of not caring about food culture. The book seems to have been the result of viewing food in a purely utilitarian sense: you need proper nutrition so you’ll work hard for the glory of communism, so here’s how we can get you the vitamins and carbs and protein and whatnot as economically as possible within the constraints imposed by limited imports and what was readily available from Czech collective farms. Things like taste and variety were simply irrelevant.
Once a standard was imposed, however, the usual bureaucratic inertia and paranoia take over: granting an exception to the standard is Just Not Done, because it would mean somebody somewhere has to raise their head above the parapet to do something unusual, and that is dangerous in any bureaucracy but much more so in a regime where ideological conformity was emphasized. After a few years of this, food culture withers on the vine, killed by neglect and disinterest rather than deliberate effort.
I have a Kindle copy of a sausage-making book that’s basically an English language translation of an old Communist-era Polish sausage recipe book.
Apparently at some point, the Polish government codified all the various sausage recipes in the country and standardized the recipes into a published book. So if you got a specific sort of sausage, it was going to be the same around the country.
The interesting part is that the author’s contention is that the government basically preserved that piece of culinary history via the mechanism of standardizing the recipes, and that in the face of modern (Western) style sausage-making “advancements”, these old recipes represent a more traditional sort of Polish sausage, and furthermore are tested and successful recipes.
I would not be surprised if something similar happened all over the Eastern Bloc, with varying degrees of success and competence.
I’ll add that running a restaurant is a classically entrepreneurial activity and such behaviors weren’t encouraged in the Eastern Bloc. Communism is much better at heavy industry than providing consumer services. So the cookbook was only part of the problem.
Czech beer though was quite good (and ridiculously cheap in Western currency).
Have you ever been to the Czech Republic? Every town has its own local brewery!