Day 2: What is a Recipe?
Good morning everyone – got your coffee ready? Welcome to the second event day of our ‘What is a Recipe?‘ virtual conversation. Join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook today to further discuss all...
View ArticleRecipes as a Connecting Thread: Reflections on Day 4
By Amanda Herbert and Elaine Leong Day Four represented the best of what our “What Is A Recipe” digital conversation has come to represent. Our contributors joined the #recipesconf conversation in a...
View ArticleReconstructing Recipes? : Day 7 of “What is a Recipe?”
By Amanda Herbert and Elaine Leong Here at the Recipes Project virtual conversation Day 7, reconstruction has also emerged as a main theme. What does “reconstruction” entail? Is it following...
View ArticleConsumers of the Exotic: summary of a workshop in Cambridge, April 5-6, 2017
By Emma Spary and Justin Rivest The project “Selling the Exotic in Paris and Versailles, 1670-1730”, running in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, and funded by Leverhulme Research...
View ArticleTales from the Archives: Testing Drugs and Trying Cures Workshop Summary
In September 2016, The Recipes Project celebrated its fourth birthday. We now have over 500 posts in our archives and over 120 pages for readers to sift through. That’s a lot of material! (And thank...
View ArticleTesting Drugs and Trying Cures
By Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin As readers of this blog well know, early modern Europe was aflood with recipes and drugs. One central question has long preoccupied many of us – just how did our...
View ArticleWhen Does a Drug Trial End?
By Justin Rivest The question I’d like to begin this post by asking is, When does a drug enter “normal use”? Is a trial a “provisional” phase, that reaches a definitive end, say when “proof” is found,...
View ArticleTrue but not Tested: Experimentation in the Apothecary’s Shop
By Valentina Pugliano Testing and standardization are firmly entrenched in the pharmacological imagination of western biomedicine and its public. Before a new drug can be put on the market, the U.S....
View ArticleThe Live Chicken Treatment for Buboes: Trying a Plague Cure in Medieval and...
By Erik Heinrichs While researching German plague treatises I became fascinated by one odd treatment for buboes that appeared again and again, despite sounding so far-fetched. One sixteenth-century...
View ArticleWater to Drink: Fit Only for Invalids and Chickens?
By David Gentilcore When the French Dominican Jean-Baptiste Labat was captured by the Spanish in the 1690s, and offered water to drink aboard ship, he informed the chaplain that ‘only invalids and...
View ArticleStorytelling and Practical Skills in Medical Recipes
By Ying Zhang What constituted a medical recipe in late imperial China? Literati physicians often touted the efficacy of a medical formula by contending that it conforms to traditional order of the...
View ArticleThe Wellcome Library’s Manuscript Recipe Books: Reflections on a...
By Richard Aspin Manuscript recipe books were at the forefront of Henry Wellcome’s collecting activities. Perhaps no other genre of European written artefact spoke more directly to his conception of...
View ArticleA Taste for the Rare and the Well-Done: Recipe Texts and the Book Trade
By Anke Timmermann Part I: If music be the love of food My most enjoyable and extensive experience with recipe literature as a book dealer to date was handling the conductor Christopher Hogwood’s...
View ArticleA Taste for the Rare and the Well-Done: Recipe Texts and the Book Trade
By Anke Timmermann Part II: The thrill of the hunt Rare book dealers working on recipe collections are in the enviable position to be able to do original work on unique and little-researched materials,...
View ArticleHappy holidays!
Dear Readers, It’s been a wonderful and busy year at the Recipes Project headquarters. We’ve featured more than 100 posts from contributors old and new covering topics from how to cure headaches the...
View ArticleRecipes and the Senses: An Introduction
By Hannah Newton Our enjoyment of food depends not just on how it tastes and smells, but also on what it looks, feels, and sounds like. Crispness, for instance, is perceived when we hear a ‘snap’ as...
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...
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 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 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...
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