Ironclad Apple Duff: Exploring Recipes from the American Civil War
By Jessica Eichlin and Amanda E. Herbert Food rations during wartime do not have the reputation for being delicious, fresh, or even edible, and this was especially true during the American Civil War....
View ArticleA Peculiar Late Babylonian Recipe For Fumigation Against Epilepsy
Strahil V. Panayotov, BabMed Project, Free University Berlin. Fumigation is a term for healing through the power of smoke. It is a wide-spread therapy in many traditional healing systems and it was...
View ArticleTeaching Recipes: A September Series
Amanda E. Herbert In January of 2014, I wrote a post called “Chocolate in the Classroom,” which described a special lesson that I’d designed for my undergraduate Tudor and Stuart Britain course: to...
View ArticlePen, Ink, and Pedagogy
Amanda E. Herbert I teach an undergraduate seminar on gender in early modern Britain, and throughout the semester, students learn about the ways that people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and...
View ArticleTranscribing in Baby Steps
Jennifer Munroe When I decided to have students work on transcribing a manuscript recipe book, I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into. After all, I have been transcribing manuscripts for...
View ArticleTeaching Recipes as Literary Practice and the Practice of Transcription
Amy L. Tigner As a founding member of Early Modern Recipe Online Collective (EMROC)—an international group whose main objective is to transcribe early modern receipt book manuscripts and upload them...
View ArticleCreatively Interpreting the Ménagier de Paris
Tovah Bender When I was handed an upper-level undergraduate course called Medieval Culture at Florida International University, I decided to push the concept of “culture.” I wanted to showcase all of...
View ArticleThe Pharmaca of Jozeph Coelho: A Family of Converso Apothecaries in...
By Benjamin Breen The apothecaries of early modern Portugal were tradesmen, and, although they were typically literate and well read, they left few archival records. The “Pharmaco de Jozeph Coelho,” a...
View ArticleFirst Monday Library Chat: Schlesinger Library at Harvard University
This month’s First Monday Library Chat features the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. We...
View ArticleFirst Monday Library Chat: The Huntington Library
The Recipes Project heads to San Marino, California this month, to learn about the recipe collections of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. We spoke with Alan Jutzi,...
View ArticleSwimming in Broth: Medicated Baths in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Amanda E. Herbert In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, mineral waters were considered to be wonderful cure-all medicines. The waters were taken both internally and externally, with some...
View ArticleSummer Recipes: A Recipes Project Round-up
Amanda E. Herbert Here in the southeastern US, the summer weather is sweltering, and it seemed like the perfect time to dig into the Recipes Project Archives for some posts on how best to survive the...
View ArticleTeaching Recipes: A September Series (Vol. II)
A year ago this month, we ran a special series at The Recipes Project, highlighting the ways that recipes could be used to teach students of all kinds – primary, secondary, graduate, and postgraduate –...
View ArticleCooking (Over an Open Fire) In Class
Ken Albala I often use recipes in various classes as primary documents, to examine social issues and gender roles, to explore the meaning of various ingredients and techniques and their movement around...
View ArticleGiving Welsh Pupils a Flavour of Antiquity
Evelien Bracke I organise a lot of events and classes on topics related to the ancient world for school pupils. But when two of my colleagues asked for my help in organising a one-day Technologies of...
View ArticleHistory Bound Up in Every Bite: Food, Environment, and Recipes in the Western...
By David C. Fouser I use food as much as possible in my surveys of Western Civilization and world history. As a cultural and environmental historian, I use food to give meaning to the lived experience...
View ArticleSpicing up the Victorians: Teaching Mrs. Beeton’s Recipe for Mango Chutney
By Erika Rappaport I love to teach with Isabella Beeton. Her biography and her opus, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) confound several popular stereotypes about gender, middle-class...
View ArticleVicarious of Dishes: Teaching the Question of the Recipe
By Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft Teaching food history via historical recipes initially flummoxed me. Of course I understood some of the cultural-historical lessons they can help us learn: the ways in which...
View ArticleHans Sloane: Eighteenth-Century Mixologist
Amanda E. Herbert When it comes to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culinary recipes, Hans Sloane (1660-1753), the famed doctor, naturalist, and collector, is best known for his chocolate. Sloane...
View ArticleSearcing, Sieving, Sifting, and Straining in the Seventeenth Century
By Kristine Kowalchuk “Take a pound of double refined sugar, searce it through a tiffainey sieve….” And so begins a recipe “To make sugar pufs.” As any scholar of early modern English cookery books can...
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