
A lovely summer day ahead–what awaits us on Day 8 of ‘What is a Recipe?’ Lots of videos! And also bread and gingerbread, and more!
Let’s kick off with a blog post that takes us on a trip to Wales… Lisa Tallis, from the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Cardiff, offers a blog post on their delicious collections, from brewing to farriery. She examines recipes from the perspective of Welsh-English bilingualism and cross-cultural travel between the two countries.
The Wellcome Library will be joining from around 11:30 on Twitter (@WellcomeLibrary) to consider: what is a medieval recipe? How did medieval people create and use recipes?
Siobhan Carlson’s eighteenth-century potato experiment, ‘Spuddenly Farming’, continues on Twitter and Instagram. She includes some videos of her experiment to show the differences between the cuttings. Spoiler: it’s very noticeable! It certainly seems like there just might be a recipe for growing better potatoes…
Molly-Taylor Polesky has a lovely ‘Interview with a Baker’ on YouTube. She visited a historical bakery in Berlin (Alte Bäckerei Pankow) and spoke to a master baker there, who tells us (among other things) that ‘Recipes are an art.’ Make sure to turn on the Close Captioning for English subtitles!

Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
Over at her new blog, Cooking up the Archives, Deborah Lawton will be exploring ‘A Recipe is a Tasty History Lesson’. Indeed. In this she looks at a gingerbread recipe and how it provides opportunities to discuss wide-ranging historical information. (She also has a taster from last week in which she ruminates on #recipesconf.)

Edith Snook and her team at the Early Modern Maritime Recipes project (Annabelle Babineau, Karim Baccouche, and Siobhan Carlson) will have a video on ‘Edward Winslow’s Receipt for Gingerbread Cakes’. They will prepare a nineteenth-century recipe found in the account book of Loyalist and early Fredericton settler Edward Winslow. Along the way, they will think about recipes and communities, how recipes bring things together—ingredients, tools, methods, flavours, tastes, people—and the tensions in these migrations across political, geographic, and cultural spaces. (Link here.) You can also follow their discussion about the video on Twitter, with @BellePepper1, @Spuddenly_Farm, and @Pamphilia2.
Maria Galanaki shares video of ‘A Hippocratic Menu’ on YouTube (here). In this, she demonstrates the preparation of three recipes–a starter, a main course, and a dessert—using ingredients reported in the Hippocratic Regimen.
And from ancient Greece, we head to the trenches of the First World War with Simon Walker who will have a video on ‘Classic French Soldiers’ Food’ for his series Feeding Under Fire. (Link to the video here.) He will also be joining in to discuss his video on Twitter as @Dark_Nocterna.
If you haven’t yet tried it, I encourage you to try ‘Cooking with Anger‘. Get your list of emotional ingredients from the Protag-o-matic and write a VERY short story in the blog post comments. After all, as the German Master Baker says, ‘Recipes are art.’
Lots to keep us busy at #recipesconf today. Please do come join in the conversation in the comments below, on Twitter (@historecipes and #recipesconf), or at the individual projects. We’d love to hear from you!