Tales from the Archives: DISTILLING THE ESSENCE OF HEAVEN: HOW ALCOHOL COULD DEFEAT THE ANTICHRIST

In September 2016, The Recipes Project celebrated its fourth birthday. We now have over 500 posts in our archives and over 120 pages for readers to sift through. That’s a lot of material! (And thank you so much to our contributors for sharing such a wealth of knowledge on recipes.) But with so much material on the … Continue reading Tales from the Archives: DISTILLING THE ESSENCE OF HEAVEN: HOW ALCOHOL COULD DEFEAT THE ANTICHRIST

Distilling the Essence of Heaven: How Alcohol Could Defeat the Antichrist

by Tillmann Taape In my last post, I introduced Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Small book of distillation and considered how it presented medical knowledge. Here, I explore how Brunschwig’s reading of alchemical ideas shaped his concept of distilled remedies. Like anyone living in medieval or early modern times, Brunschwig knew that the world was strictly divided into … Continue reading Distilling the Essence of Heaven: How Alcohol Could Defeat the Antichrist

Early Modern Research with Britain’s Favourite Organic Producer

By Grace Palmer In the spring of 2023, I undertook a deep dive into early modern British (and some European) recipes for a project with Hexhamshire Organics, an organic farm near Newcastle in the North East of England, focused on creating short sentences on the historic uses of herbs, fruit and vegetables, designed to pique … Continue reading Early Modern Research with Britain’s Favourite Organic Producer

Food for Thought: A Medieval Experiment with Ale Pastry

By Florence Swan Whilst digging through medieval English cookery collections for my thesis I came across a curious fifteenth-century recipe that suggests using ale to make pastry short and supple: ‘Yf ye will have your past short and sopill that ye bake with, knede hit with good ale and it will be short’.[1] Intrigued by … Continue reading Food for Thought: A Medieval Experiment with Ale Pastry