Welcome, welcome, welcome. Please pull up your chair and make yourself comfortable. We have a wonderful week ahead, with something going on every day.
We’ve had some great conversations already. On Day 1, we wondered what is a recipe, considered their sensory and experiential nature, and appreciated their wildness. On Day 2, stories emerged as the theme du jour: from favourite recipes and family history, to big stories, to reading and literacy…

And this week, we dare you to take a crack at writing your own recipe story, with the ‘Cooking with Anger’ Netprov event on all month. Emotions as story ingredients, anyone? Perhaps in the ‘Henri’s Kitchen’ series, which is back on Tuesday with time-travelling cookery and a lively master-servant relationship in the kitchen. And in a podcast that considers cosmetic recipes in Ovid’s poetry (Thursday), Marguerite Johnson further blurs the boundaries between literature and recipes.
Experiments are another theme. Siobhan Clarke’s 1791 potato growing experiment continues both days on Twitter and Instagram and Sietske Fransen tweets on Tuesday about her trawl through the Royal Society archives. Also on Twitter (Tuesday), Emily Thompson takes a look at some seventeenth-century instructions for growing saffron.

Taking a turn away from written stories and recipes, we’ll also be considering the oral functions of recipes. Peter Jones (on this blog, Tuesday) examines the oral and written transmission of medieval recipes used by medieval friars interested in alchemy. Véronique Ginouvès of the MMSH will consider (in an English and French blog post on Thursday) the uses of collected oral recipes within the context of a sound archive.
There are many other recipe treats on — such as Louise Cilliers’ blog post (here) on ancient recipes for breast engorgement, Simon Walker’s YouTube video and Twitter chat on a First World War recipe from the trenches, and my own reflections (Twitter and blog post) on teaching early modern recipes.
Once again, we have several institutions joining us to tweet, insta, facebook, and blog about their collections: Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives (Monday); Folger Shakespeare Library (Tuesday); Wangensteen Historical Library (Wednesday); and Provincial Archives of Alberta and Royal College of Physicians, London (Friday).
It’s going to be a recipe-packed week for us, and we look forward to more recipe chat with you.
PROJECT DETAILS
‘Cooking with Anger Netprov’, Mark Marino and Rob Wit
This week-long event is modelled on TV cooking competitions. Cooking with Anger is a netprov where storyteller chefs improvise a tale and a recipe from a given basket of ingredients. Many have written about cooking with love; now it’s time for all the other emotions.
- Get a basket from the Protag-o-Matic ingredients machine. Copy and paste your basket at the top of your tale.
- Create a small dish of a stirring story — 300 words or less — using ALL the ingredients from your basket. Use people places and things as narrative; use food items for a recipe folded into the fiction. Season the tale with the emotional spice packet.
- We encourage you also to post a video in which you either tell the story, tell about the story, or tell how you made the story.
Eyes expressing extreme emotion, from coldness to rage, c. 1794. After: Johann Caspar Lavater and Thomas Holloway.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
Website: Cooking with Anger
Twitter: @markcmarino and @Netprov_RobWit
Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives
Will be sharing recipe-related material from their collections on Twitter.
Twitter: @CUSpecialColls
“Spuddenly Farming: A reconstruction of Rev. Mr. Cochran’s Potato experiment, 1791”, Siobhan Carlson
Following the American Revolution, the British crown gave Loyalists land to farm throughout the Canadian Maritimes. This migration gave rise to the emergence of an English print culture in the region that included agricultural recipes. Amongst these entries, on the 24th of March, 1792, the Royal Gazette and Miscellany of the Island of Saint John, printed the experiment entitled, “To determine whether it is best to plant large or small Cuttings of Potatoes; in a Letter from the Rev. Mr. Cochran to the Secretary of the Agricultural Society for the County of Hants, dated Winsor, Feb. 1791.” The experiment outlines the best methods to grow Prince Edward Island’s famous export – the potato. The goal of this project is to reconstruct the experiment, to think about/consider the experience of Maritime Settlers.
Instagram: @SpuddenlyFarming
Twitter: @Spuddenly_Farm
“Recipes in the Early Royal Society Archives”, Sietske Fransen
The seventeenth-century fellows of the Royal Society were interested in every part of the natural world. They collected and reproduced a large variety of recipes, from the making of pigments to finding the recipe for the best French bread, to a recipe for universal medicine. During my research days in June, investigating the visual practice of the early Royal Society (www.mv.crassh.cam.ac.uk), I will tweet the various recipes I encounter in the archive of the Royal Society. At the end of those weeks the found recipes will feature in a blogpost on recipes in the early Royal Society.
Twitter: @sietske_fransen and @MVCRASSH
Blog: www.mvcrassh.cam.ac.uk and recipes.hypotheses.org
“A Relation of the Culture, or Planting and Ordering of Saffron (1678)”, Emily Thompson
She will look at a recipe by Charles Howard as a recipe (an atypical one to be sure, but a sound set of step-by-step directions for attaining a particular outcome i.e., the production of saffron). She argues that Howard’s recipe may be identified by its purpose, ingredients, procedure, equipment and administration. The recipe can be contrasted with later treatises and gardening manuals that build on his work and flesh it out into something beyond his dispassionate and precise step-by-step approach.
Twitter: @joiedelivre
Folger Shakespeare Library
Will be sharing its extensive recipes-related holdings via social media.
Twitter: @FolgerResearch
“Henri’s Kitchen”, Harry Hayfield
Harry Hayfield, a resident of Ceredigion in Wales, has long had an interest in the stories of the Musketeers which are set in early 17th century France, this led in turn to an interest in the Stuart period of history and joining a living history group. However, as a registered carer for his grandparents he is unable to get to many of the events and yet wanted to do something to help. One day he was watching “The Little Paris Kitchen” broadcast on the BBC and thought “These are recipes designed by the French, therefore could they be converted in the 17th century versions of themselves?”. Doing some research he found that they could, and therefore will contribute four of the recipes as shown in the programme as if cooked by Henri de Ceredigion (Harry’s Stuart persona) a cadet member of the Musketeers, with able assistance from Planchet, his manservant cum stable lad.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
“Distilling and Deflowering”, Peter Jones
He will discuss alchemical recipes associated with English mendicants, collected in the Tabula medicine text of 1416-25. The word ‘deflowering’ is a term that describes the way that they culled recipes from various sources—written and word-of-mouth—before recording it in the book. His blog post will appear at The Recipes Project.
“Historical Chocolate Tasting Events”, Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine at the University of Minnesota
Animated gif of chocolate bar with link to the full article in newsletter and additional link to historical choc tasting events at GYST Fermentation Bar, a collaborative effort with the Wangensteen Library. Also links to their digitized collection of recipe books.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/umnbiomedlib
Twitter: @umnbiomedlib
Instagram: @umnlib
“Recipes from the Sound Archive”, MMSH
The MMSH sound archive blog has a monthly feature on old recipes collected through interviews. In English and French, Véronique Ginouvès discusses what is a recipe when it comes to the sound archives.
Twitter: @Bagolina and @phonothequemmsh
“Theodorus Priscianus and Women’s Ailments”, Louise Cilliers
In a post for The Recipes Project, she considers the recipes of a 4th century physician from Constantinople: what did he use to treat women’s ailments?

Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
“Recipes for Beauty in Ovid”, Marguerite Johnson
Recipes for beauty were commonplace in the ancient Mediterranean and among the most comprehensive sources for cosmeceutical blends was Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae – 100 lines of which remain extant. When Marguerite Johnson translated the lines for her recent book, Ovid on Cosmetics (Bloomsbury 2016), she approached the task by taking the embedded lists of creams and treatments as recipes, and discussed the ingredients of each one and the methods of preparation. In this podcast, Marguerite will discuss the five recipes in the Medicamina with a focus on the ingredients – from honey to the mysterious alcyonea – and their properties for beautifying and preserving the skin.
Twitter: @MMJ722
“Introducing the Margaret Baker Project”, Lisa Smith
Over the year, my students on The Digital Recipe Book Project module read about early modern recipes and their wider social and cultural framework. We worked alongside other classrooms in the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective who were also working on Baker’s book. Along the way, they learned how to read old handwriting, transcribed several pages of a seventeenth-century manuscript recipe book by Margaret Baker, and built a website about Margaret Baker’s recipes. In this presentation, I’ll discuss the challenges of teaching recipes and working with Margaret Baker, as well as share the students’ insights from the year.
Blog: drbp.hypotheses.org
Project site: UofE Baker Project
Twitter: @historybeagle

Credit: Science Museum, London.
‘Hard Tack Lemon Pudding’, Simon Walker
He presents the YouTube cooking series Feedingunderfire wherein he cooks trench food recipes and tests them on guests. This episode focuses on an ‘apparently’ yummy dish.
YouTube: Feeding Under Fire
Facebook: Feeding Under Fire
Twitter: @Dark_Nocterna
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Canada
Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, the PAA will be highlighting some its holdings on food history over the month with Facebook posts and on Twitter.
Facebook: Provincial Archives of Alberta
Twitter: @ProvArchivesAB
Royal College of Physicians, London
We’re interested in approaching the theme of ‘What is a recipe’ by considering one of the RCP’s most important publications, the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1st edition 1618). Depending on how you define it, the Pharmacopoeia probably isn’t a collection of recipes, though it is a collection of instructions for making medical prescriptions. It was translated into Nicholas Culpeper, with explanatory text added, in 1649, and Culpeper’s version may have more claim to recipe-ness. We also have manuscript recipe books in our collection that include similar prescriptions or recipes, so we’d like to explore the issue by bringing these three sources together, and by illustrating a couple of the recipes with examples from our collection of English apothecary jars, and specimens from our medicinal garden.
Blog: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/news/
Twitter: @RCPMuseum
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lisa Smith (June 12, 2017). What is a Recipe? Week 3. The Recipes Project. Retrieved June 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/td0k
One thought on “What is a Recipe? Week 3”