In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the historical dining collective, Edible History. She is the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023. Through these projects and her Substack newsletter, Victoria expertly communicates history through food. Follow Victoria Flexner on Substack and Instagram for updates.
Music
Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major
Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0
Mentioned in the Show
A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes
Edible History (Supper Club)
Edible History (Substack)
Lucy Schaeffer, photographer
Victoria Granof, food stylist
Transcript
Sarah Kernan 00:08
This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.
Today I’m speaking to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the historical dining collective, Edible History. Along with Jay Reifel, she is the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023. You can also read her work in her Edible History Substack newsletter. And I’m so excited to speak to Victoria today about her extensive experience recreating historic recipes and communicating history through food. Victoria, thank you so much for joining me today.
Victoria Flexner 01:37
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Sarah Kernan 01:40
Before you published A History of the World in 10 Dinners, you founded Edible History in 2014 as a way to share history through food and dining experiences. Could you talk briefly about the supper club events Edible History hosted for several years and how that eventually led to your book?
Victoria Flexner 02:00
Absolutely. I studied history as an undergrad and then also did obviously my postgrad in history as well. But I’d also worked in restaurants for many years. And so Edible History as the supper club was kind of a natural evolution of my work in those two spaces. And it began as sort of a small little indie supper club in Bushwick and Williamsburg around 2014 and kind of quietly grew into, you know, still kind of like a local supper club, but we had a nice loyal following of people. It was an interesting mix of foodies, people who are really interested in history. And yeah, we would host these dinners in different kind of pop-up spaces around Brooklyn.
Victoria Flexner 02:58
Each dinner was rooted in a specific time period. So, like Tudor England and all the dishes served that night would be from period cookbooks and manuscripts from Tudor England. And so then as each course would come out to diners, I would tell everyone about the dish itself, you know, where it came from, but then also use it as sort of like a window into kind of broader historical themes of the period. So the idea was always to use the food as just kind of a lens through which to approach the entire time period and kind of bring people in through the flavors and the smells and things, and then kind of get them hooked into the into the moment.
Sarah Kernan 03:44
Absolutely. How did that eventually lead to the creation of the cookbook? Was that a goal initially or just a product of the process over time?
Victoria Flexner 03:56
It was kind of a bit of both. Through a long series of events, as these things kind of often happen, someone came to a supper club who introduced me to someone who worked in publishing. And eventually I began working with my agent. And the idea for a book was sort of always there in the background, but the supper club was kind of operating full force at the time. We were doing a residency at the Museum of Food and Drink, MOFAD, when it was back in Williamsburg. And um and so it was one of those things that kind of just kept getting pushed down the road. It’s like, oh, when we have a bit more time, we’ll put some kind of a book proposal together. And then the pandemic hit and…
Sarah Kernan 04:42
You had time!
Victoria Flexner 04:45
It was a lot of time. Do things like write a book proposal, which is exactly what I did. It was acquired by Rizzoli and yeah. I guess. And then that became the book. So it was sort of a, I think Edible History, the supper club, really pivoted into sort of the written format during the pandemic, interestingly. That was like the pandemic pivot for Edible History.
Sarah Kernan 05:12
Does Edible History exist as a supper club anymore?
Victoria Flexner 05:15
It lives on in my Substack, which is kind of musings and individual histories of foods and beverages. And it lives on in the book. But I think the supper club, it existed in like a really unique time and space, also within kind of the food scene in New York. You know, it’s interesting post-pandemic. Everything is more expensive, which is so legitimate, but also it kind of changes the ways in which you can do a fun, affordable pop-up dinner. And I think that we have like a wonderful supper club that we can kind of like put our, you know hang the hat up on, or whatever the saying is. We did amazing events for almost a decade. And that feels like a really wonderful run for the supper club wing of the whole thing.
Sarah Kernan 06:15
Before I start asking you a lot of questions about the book, I do have one follow-up question about the supper club events, just because encountering historic recipes out in modern dining experiences is not very common. There’s only a handful of restaurants you can go to, for example, that serve historically inspired recipes or dishes on a regular basis. And so I’m wondering, what was the response that you got from diners who attended the event? Was it a little bit of shock and awe, or were they just more engaged in history after the experience? Did they think the food was just incredibly weird and off the wall? What did they think?
Victoria Flexner 07:02
It was a wonderful range of reactions, and it kind of depended on the diner, you know. If it was like someone who was at the tenth-century Baghdad dinner because they love reading about tenth-century Baghdad in their spare time, they’re probably there more for a bit of like the history chat, but some of my favorite diners were always like the friends and family members who kind of got dragged along by their foodie or history-loving loved ones and who would be kind of a bit shocked at first, maybe a little intimidated, maybe not super enjoying some of the flavors. But I think after, you know, maybe like a dish or two when they would understand that this isn’t going to be like a typical tasting menu that you would get at a restaurant and the conversation is kind of flowing about the period. You would, you would see them sort of almost start to like settle into the time period.
And it was really amazing. I mean, once when we did a Tudor England meal in Bushwick, this young guy came with like a friend of his and he was horrified when we brought out the cockentrice, which was one of Henry VIII’s favorite dishes, which is the front end of a pig, sewed to the back end of a partridge. And he was like kind of hiding behind his friend and, and like, and that’s great because you know what? He probably won’t forget the cockentrice like that.
Sarah Kernan 08:40
Exactly.
Victoria Flexner 08:41
Forever. And it also, I’m sure we’ll probably talk about this more, but one of the most magical things about recreating historical recipes is that you get to be in the same place, just for a moment, as someone who lived so long before you. And that shock and awe that, you know, that guy was having in reaction to the cockentrice is perhaps the same that someone else at Henry VIII’s court, centuries ago, also experienced when they saw the cockentrice being wheeled out of the kitchen. And that’s so cool to just witness and be a part of.
Sarah Kernan 09:23
For listeners who haven’t had a chance to read a History of the World in 10 Dinners yet, or even look at it, I just want to describe it for a moment. It is both a cookbook of historic recipes and an incredibly well-researched deep-dive into specific moments and places in global history. And it’s also a visually stunning book. The design and the layout are so thoughtful. The food styling and the photography are beautiful. They bring each chapter and dinner party to life, and it really makes you want to just start cooking the dishes that are in the book. It covers a very wide range of historical periods and places. And notably, many of the dinners and the recipes are from non-Western culinary traditions. So, to get started with talking about the book, how did you decide exactly what to include, the themes and the chapters, as well as even the specific recipes?
Victoria Flexner 10:25
We set out a large project for ourselves. I remember a few months after signing the book deal, I was visiting my godfather at his beach house and I was walking down the beach and I just started crying because I realized the magnitude of the project that I just sort of signed all this paperwork to do. Such an idiot, why did I decide to do this? Why not just like one place or one time period? It was tricky to kind of take the entire globe and then distill it down. It’s like, okay, we’re gonna, we’re doing ten time periods and places.
One of the rules that was sort of self-imposed, but I felt like was important was I didn’t want to include any recipes from any place that we didn’t like have recipes from. So, one could start in ancient Sumeria because there are cuneiform tablets that still exist to this day with recipes for bread and beer, but I felt like you kind of want a whole cookbook from a time period or a larger collection of recipes to work from that give a fuller image of what that culture and that place was like, because we are going to use these recipes as the windows into sort of doing a little kind of mini-history of each place. So, if we’re only going to cover places that, kind of, large culinary repertoire still exists from that that kind of cuts it down a large amount.
And the oldest cookbook that we know of in human history is a cookbook from ancient Rome that was compiled in the first century AD by a man named Apicius. And so this ancient Roman cookbook felt like a place to start and it’s, yes, perhaps a little problematic to start with ancient Rome, is like beginning of history. I hope that I did a good job of acknowledging in the text that just because we’re beginning with ancient Rome doesn’t mean that that is the start, quote unquote, of history. Because it often is in, kind of, more like textbook Western history, which is problematic as we sort of revisit the historical narrative writ large from a 2025 post-colonial perspective.
And then once we sort of had the start point, I knew that the end point was going to be New York City in the nineteenth century, because I did not want to include a time period that someone was still alive from. Because then you’re competing with memory and that, you’re never going to win.
Sarah Kernan 13:29
It’s challenging.
Victoria Flexner 13:30
Yeah. Like that’s not how my grandma made it. Or like I actually remember that, you know, I used to, my mom used to do it this way. Anyway, ending in the nineteenth century with New York and the birth of the restaurant, which felt like perhaps after the writing of the first cookbook in ancient Rome, the birth of the restaurant about two thousand years later is, in New York, is perhaps like another really pivotal moment in global food history. So that felt like a neat place to wrap it up. And then it was about trying to strike a nice balance between the Eurasian continent and the Americas, trying to be reflective of pre-Columbian American history, while also not working with a lot of written sources, and also trying to include some African history, again, not working with a lot of written sources.
There was quite a few cookbooks and manuscripts to choose from, from medieval Europe. There’s about 140 culinary manuscripts from medieval Europe that still exist either in libraries physically or kind of digitized versions. So that was easy. It was almost like an embarrassment of riches and one had to kind of cut down. Okay, we’ve already done, you know, France.
But Asia and the Middle East, also a fair amount of sources to work with. So that was just kind of juggling what recipes fit in with the other ones, you know? I chose Spain, Muslim-ruled Spain, Al-Andalus, because that felt like a nice way to touch on European history, but also Islamic history within Europe, which is not a subject people know a lot about.
For the African continent, it would have been amazing to do something from Timbuktu, from the empire of Mali. Unfortunately, all those sources were destroyed by Al-Qaeda in 2010s or so. So that knocked that out. And then it felt like we’d already done, you know, perhaps a good amount of, sort of, places near Egypt. So didn’t include Egypt. But yeah, it was just kind of an interesting, it was sort of like putting a patchwork together of different places.
But hopefully the, kind of, end result is, that as you move through the cookbook from ancient Rome through the Middle East back to Europe, and then kind of into the Americas, into Africa, back into Europe for a moment, and then end in New York, you feel like you’ve seen a lot of parts of the world in some of their most impactful moments and sort of follow the journey of culinary styles and ingredients. So you’re also following the kind of food itself around the world. And it’s only “a” history of the world, not “the” history of the world.
Sarah Kernan 16:30
Exactly.
Victoria Flexner 16:32
Hopefully protect ourselves a little.
Sarah Kernan 16:35
How many of these chapters, which are basically organized as dinner parties, essentially, if that’s fair to say, how many of these did you do as supper club events? I know that there’s at least a couple, like the Tudor England, which you had done at least some of the recipes from at events. Are a lot of these taken directly from your experiences with the events or was a lot of it brand new?
Victoria Flexner 17:05
Yeah, a lot of them are. Actually, I think Ethiopia and Al-Andalus might have been the only ones that were, and Versailles, weren’t done as supper clubs prior to the cookbook coming out. So, we had, I mean, we’d been doing the supper club for a number of years. So we had covered a good amount of, you know, space and time and geography. But which was also really helpful in in putting it together because we’d seen firsthand people’s reactions to different dishes and narratives. And, you know, you’re sort of evaluating like which stories are people really resonating with, but also simultaneously which dishes are speaking to people, which is so hard to kind of determine sometimes because even if it speaks to you, it might not really resonate with someone else. I mean, it’s so subjective in that sense.
Sarah Kernan 18:01
Yeah. Yeah. So when you’re putting together these recipes, how are you balancing what is said in the actual recipes, in the original cookbooks, the original texts, and balancing that with the modern kitchen setting, modern expectations of cookbook readers today? How do you accommodate all that? And how does that affect the final product that you’re putting out?
Victoria Flexner 18:31
Yeah. Well, the original recipes are pretty spartan. Often it’s just like, kind of, here are the ingredients and, you know, combine them and, you know, walk around a field and say fifteen Hail Marys and cook it until it’s done.
Sarah Kernan 18:51
And serve it forth.
Victoria Flexner 18:52
Exactly. Yeah. And serve it forth. So there is a fair amount of like kind of guesswork that you’re doing with measurements and cooking times and temperatures and things like that. I would say that recipes today are so much more detailed, which is fair enough because recipes for most of human history that were recorded weren’t recorded to be used by average people, you know, as a cookbook that you would look to when, you know, you want to make like a nice Friday night dinner for your friends or something.
These recipes were recorded by very elite professional chefs who were working for the nobility, the aristocracy, you know, the wealthiest individuals. And they were recorded more as kind of a record of what was occurring in that household, but also often as sort of like a manuscript to consult for kind of dietary guidance or medicinal guidance. In a time before our medicine was made in labs, what we ate was our medicine and how we, you know, heal ourselves or adjust our temperaments or humors.
And a cookbook that you might find in a noble house in Renaissance Italy wasn’t going to be used by the family to cook up a thirty-minute weeknight meal. It was there for the doctors to consult and also just kind of as a physical representation of the culture that was being exercised there. I mean, these are the same individuals that were having their portraits painted and who were commissioning churches and grand houses. You know, they wanted the way in which they experienced culture to be kind of codified and remembered.
Sarah Kernan 20:56
Could you talk a bit about what role you think food plays in connecting with and understanding history, since that is such a fundamental part of this book?
Victoria Flexner 21:09
Yeah. I think it’s only recently that food has, and I mean really recently, like the last decade or two, maybe that might be a stretch, maybe the last decade, that food has really been taken seriously as a medium to study history. I often compare it to kind of like what women’s studies or women’s history was in the 1970s and 80s, where it just wasn’t taken very seriously by traditional academia. I mean, even when I was doing my first master’s degree, I had to explain to my professors what food history was, which was kind of like mind blowing to me, but they hadn’t heard of other food historians, even though there were some who were out there practicing, like Ken Albala, who’s, you know, like a legend and a true OG in that sense.
But most history kind of comes to us either in the written format, or we look at a painting, or we go to an old historic site, and we’re kind of taking it in that way. But food is tasting the past, it’s deeply sensorial, but what makes it so critical to the study of the past is that it’s a way to access the lives of individuals who left nothing behind. Most humans who have lived on this planet left absolutely no trace of their life. And I think any of us would be really sad to think that you know once we pass, there’s nothing left of us.
And it’s not just individuals, it’s entire cultures and communities. And if we’re gonna be frank, this is, generally speaking, women and people of color. You know history is written by the victors and the victors have been white Christian Western men. So it is mainly their experiences that we have records of. But food gives us way to relate to people who weren’t literate, who didn’t write books or build buildings or make art that we still have today.
Victoria Flexner 23:17
And when we cook something that someone else cooks like five hundred years ago. We’re performing similar actions. We’re inhabiting a shared metaphysical space for a moment with this person. We’re smelling what they smelled. We’re tasting what they tasted. And maybe it sounds a bit woo-woo, and maybe that’s why the ivory tower is still a little bit on the fence about the entire subject, but it is a legitimate form of study. It’s anthropological in a lot of senses.
It gives us access into someone else’s life, not perhaps in the traditional sense of they were born on this date. This is you know how long they lived. These were the major events of their life. But you can share an understanding that’s very similar to the understanding you have when you go to a restaurant and you eat something that is mind-blowingly delicious. And you know, for a moment really are so grateful to the chef and the, and the, and the cooks who prepared it and the people who grew that food, you know, you’re connecting with someone else. It’s just connecting with others across space and time.
Sarah Kernan 24:24
One thing that I really like about the format of your book, when you look through it, the images and the layout, it is like a work of art. And that gets across in a very different way than if you’re just like reading these historic recipes on their own. When you’re seeing these images of the final products or the stages of cooking, you really get the sense that dining in the past and food of the past was a really beautiful sensorial experience in a way that you can’t really access through a lot of other historical sources. And I think that’s a real gift from this book. It’s a different way to appreciate these historical recipes and to consider dining in the past and a different way of thinking about that. So when I look through the book, I start thinking about how beautiful of an experience some of these dinners must have been hundreds of years ago in a way that I don’t necessarily get immediately when I’m just looking at the recipes and the historic cookbooks on their own. So I think that is a wonderful contribution that you and Jay have made through this cookbook as well.
Victoria Flexner 25:52
Thank you for saying that. Although I think that a lot of that credit has to be given to Lucy Schaeffer, who is the photographer for this book, and Victoria Granof, who is the food stylist. I mean, the two of them were, are, just legends, the absolute best. I mean, every day on set with them, you know, we sort of knew which dishes we were doing. And, you know, in your mind, you might think, oh, okay, well, it would look really cool if we did this.
And then they would just come up with something that was like a thousand times better than you could have ever imagined. They are two women who are supremely good at what they do and should get all the credit for really making this book so visually stunning. And Rizzoli also does. They know how to make a beautiful book. I have to say the cover of this book was Victoria Granof’s idea. She was like, I want to do a Roman floor mosaic. And so she had given me this like huge list of all these various things to buy before the photo shoot. So I spent like three mad days running around New York, like acquiring like half a red snapper and like an oyster shell that looked exactly like this and one bone marrow bone. And I was, it was before I’d met her and she’s a good friend now, so she’ll find this funny. But I was like, this woman is either completely insane or a genius.
The most random list: one peacock feather, four roses. And on the first day when we showed up, she had made this mosaic. They weren’t actual, kind of, like ceramic pieces. They were little pieces of paper that she had individually hand painted. And then she made this entire, kind of like, floor and then got all these random ingredients out and just sort of started, you know, kind of placing them around and her and Lucy worked together a lot. Lucy just sort of, you know, kind of instinctually knew where to go and how to photograph it. And you’re just standing there looking at it like, oh God, it’s like a lot of food scraps on like a piece of cardboard. This is weird. This isn’t what I thought. And you look at it on the screen and you’re like, that’s incredible. That’s absolutely incredible. It was the first shot we did of the whole shoot. And I knew immediately that it had to be the cover because, just, amazing.
Sarah Kernan 28:29
Yeah, I mean, it really does look like a Roman mosaic when you look at the cover. I mean, so much of it. For anyone who actually makes or attempts to make historic recipes, I think we all run into the same problem. The final product is often just a different shade of brown and it doesn’t look all that attractive yet somehow like everything in this book is so colorful and just beautiful to look at. I mean, there’s so many colors and textures and none of it looks boring or just all different shades of brown and is really exceptional. Kudos to the whole team that worked on this.
Victoria Flexner 29:14
Yes. Thank you. The team came together and yeah, and magic happened in the kitchen and the studio.
Sarah Kernan 29:21
Well, if I could switch a little bit to asking about more recent work. Your most recent food history writing is on your Substack, Edible History. What sorts of things do you write about in that space? And do you have any plans for what that will become or what you want to do in that specific writing space?
Victoria Flexner 29:42
Yeah. So the Substack looks at individual foods and beverages, and it’s covered a really broad range. Again, it’s kind of like taking one singular dish or ingredient like the pineapple or the tomato or Dr. Pepper or, you know, the New York City cup of coffee in that kind of classic Anthora blue and white cup. And then using that as, again, a way to kind of look at a kind of bigger moment of history or a bigger theme within history. And they’ve been really fun to put together.
It’s been fun to work in a way where I’m still kind of wearing my historian hat and doing a lot of research, but it’s also a way to reach, I think, an even broader audience. And it’s been really interesting, kind of this whole new audience that I’ve been able to engage with over Substack, which is also its own interesting kind of entity at this moment in time. If you’re anyone who’s writing in any way, I think Substack is just kind of an interesting place to be.
But it’s pop culture. It’s, you know, it’s now, but it’s also history. And so I’m really enjoying writing about food in a way that perhaps feels like a bit more immediate, but is still very much tied to the past. So, it’s been really wonderful. And hopefully somewhere in those Substacks, there might be a future book. I can’t say, but yeah, absolutely kind of continuing to work in that sort of style, I suppose.
Sarah Kernan 31:25
Wonderful. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate your time, Victoria.
Victoria Flexner 31:31
Oh, thank you for having me. It was really wonderful.
Sarah Kernan 31:35
Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Kernan (August 14, 2025). Around the Table Podcast: Edible History with Victoria Flexner. The Recipes Project. Retrieved March 9, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14h2x