By Sarah Kernan and Helga Müllneritsch
Culinary Texts in Context began as an idea for collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were interested in working together, given our shared interests in early modern recipe books, and the new emphasis on Zoom calls and digital resources presented a great opportunity for us to easily collaborate, despite one of us residing, at the time, in Sweden and the other in the American Midwest. After several emails and Zoom calls, we excitedly began planning a collected volume from a decidedly international and collaborative perspective. Upon receiving wonderful proposals for contributions, we were able to construct a fresh take on recipe book scholarship: research from European manuscripts spanning a range of languages, social classes, professions, and perspectives. We have been excited throughout the process of writing and editing to reframe the recipe books genre as a European one, not just English. The wealth of research on English recipe books has provided a wonderful basis for examining European manuscripts; Culinary Texts in Context now highlights European exempla and invites researchers to more fully engage this large body of texts. We are thankful to Lino Mioni, Anil Paralkar, and Thomas Gloning for sharing their thoughts about our collected volume and its contributions to the study of recipe books. Here, we will reflect on these essays and our hopes for future scholarship.
Mioni brings his expertise in considering collections of texts to his examination of boundaries and recipe books within our volume. That is, boundaries in the research of recipe books as well as boundaries of definitions of the genre. Recipe books have so much to offer scholars; the possibilities for research are exciting and promise to break down traditional scholarly silos. Mioni rightly hopes that our expansion of scholarship to include a broad geographical area will further promote research of and with these books.
Paralkar’s contribution hones in on an important component in the creation of culinary texts, evident after we collected and read all of the contributions to our volume. We expected that European recipe books would provide insight into broader cultural interactions, particularly through the rapid spread of ingredients during the early modern period. However, we realized that multiple examples from manuscripts around Europe revealed how recipe transmission was an equally important marker of exchange. The cultural flow that Paralkar describes was present in a surprising number of recipe books, spanning manuscripts compiled from a single region or kingdom to those collected from international sources. As records of action and embodiment, recipes can reflect interest in other cultures and ideas. These recipes were transmitted to recipe book writers through many channels and their inclusion signified the knowledge, authority, and social networks necessary for acquiring and using such far-flung ingredients and preparations.
Gloning approaches the volume from his perspective as a linguist, acknowledging the multitude of perspectives presented in the volume as well as its wide spatial and temporal range, noting that it inspired him to approach manuscript recipe books from a new perspective. He raises the interesting question regarding what the essential topics in the analysis of culinary and medical manuscripts are, and which topics which can be explored separately in specialised studies. Seeing the volume as a starting point from which to embark on many more studies, the call for working from the broad and systematic to the individual study of certain aspects of the manuscripts is an important one. We hope to incentivise more work on collections of manuscript recipe books, especially if they are part of a wider collection, investigating the reasons for their inclusion. Furthermore, Gloning touches upon an important topic concerning projects dealing with manuscript recipe books and culinary and medical history; he mentions a now-abandoned project of his own, in which he aimed to provide a bibliography on the history of cookery, food and beverages. This is, unfortunately, the fate many similar projects suffer. It would be worthwhile to think about how to gather information on those projects, similar to webrings of the past.
In Culinary Texts in Context, the nine contributors introduce us to a variety of digital projects that they either use or have created themselves.
- Manuscript Cookbooks Survey
- Historic Recipe Database
- CoReMA – Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages. Corpus – Analysis – Visualisation
- Historiska recept
- The Sifter – A Food History Research Tool
We share these in the hope that the projects will have a long digital life and inspire even more digital recipes projects. These projects allow for more accessibility and international collaboration, so that research practices, insights, and data need not be limited to linguistic or national borders.
Sarah Peters Kernan is an independent culinary historian. She holds a PhD in medieval history from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the production and use of cookbooks in medieval and early modern England. She is a member of the editorial team for the Recipes Project. Sarah has been especially active as a public historian, working with institutions and organizations like The Met Cloisters, Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, and the Culinary Historians of Chicago. She collaborates frequently with the Newberry Library, assembling modules on food history topics for Digital Collections for the Classroom, teaching Adult Education classes on food history topics, and developing culinary history programming.
Helga Müllneritsch is an assistant professor in German at National Taiwan University with a research interest in female agency, manuscript cookery books, and book history in the long eighteenth century. Her thesis, ‘Memory, Education, Circulation, Prestige: Form and Function of the Austrian Manuscript Cookery Book in the Long Eighteenth Century,’ focuses on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century manuscript cookery book as object, its function, and female authorship and ownership. Helga was awarded her doctorate by the University of Liverpool in 2019.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Amanda Herbert (February 23, 2025). Culinary Texts in Context: Continuing the Conversation. The Recipes Project. Retrieved March 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13cy4