GLOBALIZING EARLY MODERN RECIPES
INTRODUCTION
By Lavinia Gambini, Lucy Havard, and Amanda E. Herbert, Editors
The early modern globalization of food and medicine was also a globalization of recipes. As plants, animals, and people travelled the planet, women and men began experimenting with recipes of all kinds. The Autumn 2025 issue of The Recipes Project explores the global dimensions of early modern recipe crafting, fashioning, and collecting. In this edition, our authors ask how global entanglements, transcultural encounters, colonialism, and exoticizing fantasies shaped early modern recipe creation around the world, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
In the early modern world, recipes could be (co-)produced by Indigenous or migrant practitioners; some makers and craftspeople might deliberately incorporate new ingredients, or indeed resist the introduction of global substances. Some recipes travelled across mercantile, colonial, military, diplomatic, and migration routes, while others were fashioned by ‘armchair’ practitioners to reflect their own ideas of foreign lands and crafts. By asking how early modern recipes could be globalized, this special issue seeks to shed new light on the influence of multiple knowledge traditions, on the roles of ‘forgotten’ actors, on the lived realities of global mobility and displacement, and on the formation of ideas about scientific and medical alterity.
Our authors have analyzed the ingredients of global recipes; they have parsed the role of colonialism and empire. They have examined translating, transmitting, and collecting, and they have considered the expression of authority and expertise. Throughout, they have kept close attention to constructions of race, culture, identity, and/or ethnicity.
In organizing the issue, we considered several frameworks. As is appropriate for an issue on global entanglements, the posts could – and can – be read along geographic regions: Central Asia (Ebert & Sudhan); North America (Astbury & O’Brien); Mesoamerica and the Caribbean (Pino, Schmidt & Quinn); the Mediterranean world (Böttiger); South and Southeast Asia (Vikram & Taha). They can also be read thematically, with Pino and Böttiger speaking to transmission and orality; Quinn and Schmidt addressing travelling naturalia; and nearly all of the authors thinking through the implications of early modern European expansion, invasion, and colonialism.
Inspired by all of these possibilities, we have organized the posts alphabetically, by authors’ last names, in the hope that this will encourage readers to read the posts in creative, insightful ways which engage with the themes of the issue. The Autumn 2025 edition encourages all of us to consider the flexibility, utility, and durability of recipes, particularly in the midst of challenge and change; it also urges us to reckon with the things that so often accompanied those changes in the early modern period, including desecration, destruction, and theft.
Banner image: Manuscript notes on plants growing in the Americas in the early nineteenth century, including edible plants with wild origins both inside and outside of North and South America: breadfruit, coconuts, pumpkins, and sorghum. The artist has included an image of a Black man harvesting coconuts. In William Jowit Titford, Sketches towards a Hortus botanicus americanus… (London, 1811), Wellcome Library.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Recipes for Animals: Husbandry and Animal Medicine in Early Modern England and Anglo-America
By Leah Astbury
One group of actors has been relatively neglected in scholarship on early modern recipe books: non-human animals. And yet, farmyard animals were also members of the household-family, albeit in unequal ways… [read more]
Rhyming Recipes in the Early Modern Arab Mediterranean
By Leonie Böttiger
Why versify a recipe, let alone an entire recipe collection? Arabic, a language famed for its poetical tradition, also boasts its fair share of food-related poetry—but a curious North African craft recipe collection made up entirely of rhymed couplets might be a closer kin to the English playwright’s double trouble… [read more]
Bal-Po Stew: The Empire’s Recipe
By Lewis Ebert
The third entry of the section entitled “Strange Delicacies of Combined Flavors” in the medieval Mongol cookbook, “Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink,” is the Bal-Po stew, a recipe that exemplifies the multivalent food culture of the Yuan dynasty… [read more]
Theriac: An Imperial Recipe
By Barbara di Gennaro Splendore
Repeated by hundreds of authors over the centuries, the origin story of theriac and mithridate told by De theriaca ad Pisonem explicitly outlined the relationship between the state and the two remedies. The state was both the creator and the recipient of such outstanding drugs: a king (Mithradates) created the antidote; a general (Pompey) secured powerful medicines; and an imperial physician (Andromachus) modified the king’s antidote for his emperor (Nero)… [read more]
“All Manner of Fluxes”: Plants and the Natalist Conquest of British Colonial America
By Fiona O’Brien
The flows and fluxes of bodily fluids that determined an early modern woman’s embodied existence would need to be, if not controlled, understood by her. If we focus on the fluidity of the early modern reproductive body, we can begin to better understand the materia medica used to treat it… [read more]
Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Strew of Global Threads
By Alessandra Pino
Few dishes embody the entangled histories of empire, trade, and transcultural adaptation as vividly as ropa vieja, the “old clothes” stew that today stands as a culinary emblem of Cuba and the Canary Islands. Its name conjures up rags and scraps, yet its history is anything but threadbare… [read more]
The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method
By Serin Quinn
The enduring relationship between tomatoes and the chilis illuminates a path of cultural influence from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to eighteenth-century Britain. Understanding preparation methods and flavour profiles allows us to trace the movement of culinary knowledge over time and space and to reestablish the role of Indigenous American tastes in shaping European cuisine… [read more]
The King of Fruits: Pineapple and Class Culture in British Cookbooks from 1661–1850
By Elizabeth Schmidt
In 1789, John Taylor sent a pineapple to his mother Jean in Scotland; the pineapple was from his cousin’s plantation in Jamaica, where John lived and worked as a merchant. Not having seen the fruit before, Jean turned to friends for guidance… [read more]
Nun Chai: A Story from Trade Routes to Survival
By Garima Sudhan
Kashmiri salt tea or nun chai is well renowned. It is a hot, salty beverage with a pink colour that is quite different to sweet tea varieties prevalent throughout South Asia. Prepared with a thorough brewing of green tea leaves and a little bit of salt, it is known as nun chai or namkeen chai in Kashmir… [read more]
Lacquer Fantasies: Japanning as a Colonial Global Recipe
By Nur’Ain Taha
What can recipes reveal about how the world was imagined, handled, and domesticated in early modern Europe? To see how distant worlds become embedded in recipes, we might start in a seventeenth-century Oxford manual that made “Asia” reproducible in decorations and on the surfaces of English furniture… [read more]
Sound Recipes: Music as Medicine in Early Modern Goa
By Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi
In early modern South Asia, sound worked as a therapeutic agent that crossed textual, ritual, and oceanic worlds. European observers in the Jesuit entrepôt of Goa — one of the most prominent hubs of Catholic missionary activity in India — and household compilers across the Atlantic world translated, adopted, or rejected these sonic practices… [read more]
TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Eating Through the Seasons: Food Education in Japan
By Alexis Agliano Sanborn Seasons have been celebrated in Japanese society for centuries through poetry and prose. During the Edo-period (1603-1868) this appreciation of nature codified in the creation of the saijiki, or, poetic seasonal almanacs. These almanacs, notes Columbia University Professor Haruno Shirane, “systematically categorize almost all aspects of nature and much of human…
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Favorite Recipes: Social Networks in the Pages of a Regional Community Cookbook
By Rachel A. Snell In the late 1920s, members of the Mount Desert Chapter No. 20 of the Order of the Eastern Star compiled a cookbook of favorite recipes. During the peak of associational life, from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the Order of the Eastern Star was one of a number of social organizations…
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Needhams: Global Connections in a Regional Cookbook
By Rachel Snell In the late 1920s, members of the Mount Desert Chapter No. 20 of the Order of the Eastern Star compiled a cookbook of favorite recipes. During the peak of associational life (late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century), the Order of the Eastern Star was one of a number of social organizations that shaped civic life…
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Visualizing the Plate: Reading Modernist Mexican Cuisine Through Colonial Botany
Lesley A. Wolff The eighteenth century’s Age of Enlightenment signaled an era of standardization for the visual and textual colonial taxonomies of resources in the Americas. These illustrations were intended for export to European elites, many of whom would never touch foot in the Western hemisphere. In his late eighteenth century illustration of the species…
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