Powerful Bundles: The Materiality of Protection Amulets in Early Modern...
By Eveline Szarka If you shop around for a protection amulet today, you will most likely stumble upon ornamental jewellery. More often than not these pieces are round in shape, and pieces featuring...
View ArticleSnails in medicine – past and present
By Claire Burridge A treatment for teary eyes (Ad lacrimas oculorum): Grind together frankincense, mastic, and snails with their shells. Apply to the forehead in laurel leaves in two parts. It is...
View ArticleRevisiting Jennifer Sherman Roberts’ Little Shop of Horrors, Early Modern Style
Today, I wanted to visit the work of a long-time contributor and dear friend of the Recipes Project – Jennifer Sherman Roberts. Jen has authored more than a dozen wonderful posts on the blog covering...
View ArticleRevisiting Marieke Hendriksen’s Indigo or no indigo?
Today we revisit a post written in pre-Covid-19 times, when borders were open, planes were flying and we used to travel the world. In this post from 2018, Marieke Hendriksen recounts how her holiday in...
View ArticleRevisiting David Shields’ American Bitters
With summer in full swing, many of us are enjoying an Aperol Spritz (or 2) in our gardens or on our tiny balconies. To give you something to ponder as you sip your drink, today we revisit David...
View ArticleRevisiting Laurence Totelin’s Fevers and the Dog Star in Antiquity
Well, the Dog Days of summer are upon us once again…To help us cope with the heat, we revisit Laurence Totelin’s wonderful post from 2018. In “Fevers and the Dog Star in Antiquity”, Laurence tells us...
View ArticleRevisiting He Bian’s Fetch Me at Pearl Nest Street: Rhubarb Pills as Panacea...
Today we revisit He Bian’s fascinating post from 2018. Here, He tells us about the global trade in Chinese rhubarb (dahuang) roots, panaceas and notions of difference in premodern theories of the body....
View ArticleTales from the Archives: SNOWBALLS: INTERMIXING GENTILITY AND FRUGALITY IN...
I recently spotted these “schneeballen” at the bakery counter of my local supermarket. From Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Bavaria, these delicious cookies are actually made from strips of shortcrust...
View ArticleChristmas Cookies in Series: Recipe Booklets and the Annual Reinvention of a...
By Reinhild Kreis One of the early indicators that Christmas is just around the corner in Germany is the publication of Christmas cookies recipe booklets. Once it gets cold outside, readers are invited...
View ArticleCold Wombs and Cold Semen: Explaining Sonlessness in Sixteenth-century China
By Yi-Li Wu Throughout imperial China, a family’s well-being and longevity required the birth of sons. [Fig. 1] Sons performed the ancestral rites, inherited land, and were responsible for supporting...
View ArticleTrue Colors, or the Revelatory Nature of Cold
By Thijs Hagendijk Heat is transformative, brings about change, separates substances or bring them together. Every student of chemistry knows how to enable or enhance a chemical reaction by applying...
View ArticleCold! A Recipe Project Thematic Series
– it’s cold! A dreary chill and rain have just descended across Europe and perhaps most of you are also cranking up the heat and bringing out winter scarves and hats. December has arrived and it seems...
View ArticleHow Best to Treat the Heat in 1793 Beijing
By Marta Hanson Translating traditional Chinese medical terms into modern English forces one to consider dramatic changes in medicine over the past two centuries. Take, for example, the modern Chinese...
View ArticleTales From the Archives: A Recipe for Disaster: How Not to Distill Turpentine
In September 2018, The Recipes Project will be six years old. There’s been a lot of blogging on this platform, and we are so grateful to all our wonderful contributors. But with so much material on the...
View ArticleInterested in joining the editorial team?
Dear readers and friends, Are you interested in recipes of all kinds? The Recipes Project is looking for an editor to join our team! Responsibilities include: Connecting with and inviting potential...
View ArticleFrom the Hearth to the Gas Stove: A Study in Apricot Marmalade
By Marissa Nicosia The early modern hearth and the modern gas stove are rather different technologies for controlling heat. Again and again in my recipe recreation work for Cooking in the Archives, I...
View ArticleHEAT! A Recipes Project Thematic Series
As humans, we want to control heat. We want to create heat, temper or even extinguish it, depending on context and purpose. We have a very limited temperature range at which we are comfortable (some...
View ArticleTales from the Archives: Smelling ‘Violet’ in Renaissance Works
In 2017, The Recipes Project celebrated its fifth birthday. We now have nearly 650 posts in our archives and over 160 pages for readers to sift through. That’s a lot of material! (And thank you so much...
View ArticleRoman Recipes and the Senses
By Erica Rowan We do not have many recipes from the ancient world and certainly none presented in the user-friendly format found in today’s cookbooks with precise measurements, cooking times and images...
View ArticleGershom Bulkeley (1635-1713): A Sensory Chymist in Colonial Connecticut
By Donna Bilak Who was Gershom Bulkeley? (you may well ask). A Harvard-educated Puritan gentleman from an important New England family, Bulkeley spent most of his life in Connecticut as a colonial...
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