All posts by Michelle DiMeo

Michelle DiMeo is Curator of Digital Collections at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. With Sara Pennell, she is co-editor of Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550-1800 (Manchester University Press, 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Warwick. You can follow her on Twitter at @MichelleDiMeo

First Monday Library Chat: Wellcome Library

Welcome back to the First Monday Library Chat! Today we’re featuring the Wellcome Library in London, one of the world’s major resources for the history of medicine. The Wellcome Library is free and open to the public once they’ve registered for a library card, but some of their historical recipe book highlights may be viewed online. Today I’m chatting with Helen Wakely, Archive Project Manager.

The Wellcome Library has just undergone a significant transformation over the past five years. Can you tell us more about this?

We’ve been busy implementing our five-year plan to transform the library from a physical resource into a global digital library. Alongside the targeted acquisition of new materials, and active interpretation of our collections, our core objective has been to make strategic digitisation business as usual.

In case that wasn’t enough, over the last 18 months Wellcome Collection has undergone major redevelopment to open up 30% more gallery space and double its event capacity. As part of this plan, the library’s Reading Room will reopen in spring 2015 as an interactive space that we hope will open the library’s rich collections to new audiences.

What is the scope of Wellcome’s recipe book collection? 

In addition to a small number of early leech books and a scattering of apothecaries’ recipe books, we hold over 270 domestic recipe books. A handful date from the 16th century, roughly half date from the 18th century, and the rest are split evenly between the 17th and 19th centuries. Our collection is predominately English language-based, but we do hold a dozen or so volumes in French, German or Italian.

We continually add to our collection. Hardly a month goes by without a volume – usually 18th/19th-century – popping up for sale. I have been challenged by recipe book agnostics (yes, they do exist…) to defend the purchase of “yet another one”, but we believe it is vital to keep extending the corpus of accessible recipes in order to provide a sound evidential base for researchers.

Do you have some tips for how we might search the catalogues?

The easiest way to find the recipe books in our catalogue is to browse our “Domestic medicine and receipt books” subject guides  and follow the link for each manuscript.  Alternatively, if you wish to limit your search by date/language etc., try searching the archive catalogue on terms such as recipes/recipe/receipt/receipt book/recipe book. This will bring up non-domestic recipe manuscripts too, which may or may not be helpful depending on your perspective.

When the Wellcome Library began its digitization program, your 17th-century recipe books were among the first items to be digitized. Why? 

The reasoned answer is that our recipes formed a perfect test case: there was growing demand for them from a broad range of international researchers; it was feasible to digitise a comprehensive subset of our entire collection; the majority were in good physical shape; and the project meshed with the Wellcome Trust’s key research challenge to connect “environment, nutrition and health“.

The intuitive answer is that I’d fallen under the spell of our recipe books! I was hooked by the parallels and differences in experience between the early modern world and today, and full of curiosity about the thoughts of the people who wrote them. How did the anonymous 17th-century owner of MS.4051 react to their book being badly singed?

Burnt pages in Wellcome Library MS.4051, ff.67v-68r
Burnt pages in Wellcome Library MS.4051, ff.67v-68r

What enormous sadness lay behind the lines from John Donne’s funeral elegy “Obsequies to the Lord Harrington” tucked away at the back of Bridget Parker’s unassuming 1663 manuscript?

Bridget Parker,  ‘Quotation from John Donne in Wellcome Library MS.3768, f.77v’
Bridget Parker, Quotation from John Donne. Wellcome Library MS.3768, f.77v

What’s the easiest way for us to search and access the digitized recipe colletion?

The digitised images are indexed by recipe title term and subject. The easiest way to access them or search them for specific terms is explained in our subject guide “Finding recipe manuscripts online“. Each manuscript is accessible both as a single PDF embedded in its catalogue record, and as a series of indexed PDFs (one for each double-opening).

As part of our transformation plan, we are currently working to make all these images accessible via our Player, our bespoke interface for displaying digital content. This upgraded access will greatly enhance researchers’ interactions with the online recipe books: it will be possible to choose from a flexible range of download options, or embed a digital manuscript in another website. Index term searches in the catalogue will take researchers straight to the relevant pages in the Player, from where they can move seamlessly on to the rest of the volume.

At the moment, index searches still take you to the original PDF image, not the Player. But already you can view (and download or embed) all 77 digitised manuscripts as entire objects. To get a flavour, try searching on ‘Grace Acton’ in the archive catalogue. Click ‘Request or view this item’ > View online and off you go.

Do you have plans to digitize any more of your recipe books, or other materials that might be of interest to our blog readers?

Extending digitisation and recipe title indexing to our 18th-century recipe books is definitely on our wish list, but unfortunately we don’t yet have a firm timeframe. But we are currently digitising an exciting new acquisition from 2013, a culinary and medicinal recipe manuscript owned by Grace Carteret, 1st Countess Granville (1654-1744) with close ties to our Ann Fanshawe recipe book (MS.7113). We’ll let you know as soon as the original volume and the digital version are accessible.

"To Make Icy Cream" MS.7113, f.158r
Lady Ann Fanshawe, “To Make Icy Cream” MS.7113, f.158r

Scholars make active use of your recipe books for research and teaching, but the Wellcome also has excellent public engagement projects. How do you use recipe books for exhibits, blog entries, or public lectures?

One of the reasons I love being an archivist is that I get to nose about in the everyday stuff of other people’s lives. I suspect this is why our non-specialist audiences find our domestic recipe manuscripts so engaging – their contents evoke laughter, fear, a sense of physicality, and allow us to empathise in a very personal way. Over the last few years we’ve offered many recipe-inspired public events to build on this appeal.

We have invited external speakers to mediate their academic research to a general audience. In collaboration with the Wellcome Collection gallery team we have run guided explorations of gallery objects, rare books and manuscripts on topics such as the place of the 17th-century household in global economic and intellectual networks. We have even dared to hold a Feast to Cure Melancholy right in the middle of the library!

And next spring we will get the chance to engage audiences in new ways via the Reading Room interactive space. The associated engagement programme will have an emphasis on participatory, drop-in events, so one idea we are playing with right now is a freestyle story-telling game in which the narrative is driven by historical or contemporary recipes offered up by willing visitors.

Over in the virtual world of the Wellcome Library’s blog, we post a steady stream of recipe-related snippets, such as this piece of advice that will soon be topical once again. We don’t claim quite the same breadth and depth of research as our friends here on The Recipes Project, but we hope our broad-ranging readership enjoys its taste of unfamiliar concoctions.

Thanks, Helen, for chatting with me!

You’re welcome. Drop in to see us and our recipes soon, either virtually or in person! You can find more information about visiting the Wellcome Library here, and if you have any comments or queries please do get in touch.

First Monday Library Chat: University of Pennsylvania Library

Last month, I was excited to meet with Mitch Fraas, PhD, Curator of Digital Research Services, and Katie Rawson, PhD, Bollinger Fellow in Library Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. We met in the newly renovated Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts on the top floor of UPenn’s Van Pelt Library, where they displayed recipe-related collection highlights dating back to the 14th century.

Katie Rawson and Mitch Fraas with rare books
Katie Rawson and Mitch Fraas at UPenn. 3 September 2014.

Please give us an overview of the scope of your collection of recipe books. Roughly how many do you have? What tips can you offer to help users find them via your catalog or finding aids?

The Penn Libraries have over 7,500 cookery books in its collections. We have several large collections of books and other material relating to cookery and the history of food. Researchers can find lists of these materials in our online catalog under the following names:

Chef Fritz Blank Culinary Archive and Library (over 2,000 items cataloged)

Laurie Burrows Grad Collection (over 5,000 items cataloged)

Esther B. Aresty Collection of Rare Books on the Culinary Arts  (over 500 items cataloged)

The Aresty Collection is also accompanied by the Ester B Aresty papers which document her life as cookbook collector and culinary historian. See the finding aid for more information.

UPenn has quite a large collection of some very significant recipe books. Can you tell us about your history of collecting recipe books? What are some of the major collections you have, and why were these a collection priority?

In the 1990s Lynne Farrington, the Curator of Printed Books in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library here, saw the potential in growing the collections around food studies. Over the last twenty years she helped bring in three major collections relating to cookery as well as many more individual acquisitions. These three large collections come from Chef Fritz Blank (who passed away last month), Laurie Burrows Grad, and Esther Aresty. Though related to food and cooking broadly, each has a particular strength. The Esther Aresty collection has a host of rare early printed books related to food, including one incunable. The Blank collection includes cookery pamphlets, community cookbooks, menus, and other items as well as manuscripts and printed cookbooks, some going back to the 18th century. The Grad collection documents the explosion of cookbooks in the late-20th century, many of which focus on diets, celebrity chefs, and international cuisine.

Have you collected recipe books that fall outside of these significant collections?

In addition to our named cookery collections, Penn has built a collection of manuscript recipe books over the years which record cooking practice at the level of the individual or family. The majority of these come from England and the United States and date from the 18th century to the mid-20th.

Regalia Cucumbers Manuscript
Kidder, Receipts of pastry and cookery, UPenn MS Codex 625

Can you give us a few highlights from Penn’s collection?

We had a hard time choosing from the collections, but here are a few pieces to show its range:

“Ms. Codex 625 – Kidder, Edward – Receipts of pastry and cookery : for the use of his scholars” (pictured above) seems at first glance to be a printed book of recipes; however, the recipes in it are handwritten by a person who would have been enrolled in a cooking course in the 18th century.

The New-England cookery, or, The art of dressing all kinds of flesh, fish, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plumb to plain cake : particularly adapted to this part of our country, compiled by Lucy Emerson, is a wonderful exemplar of the regional cookery books in our collection, which give readers a sense of early American cuisine construction, through its recipes and front matter.

We also have recipes as parts of archival collections, including a cache of documents relating to the Waldorf Astoria in New York as well as its sister hotel in Philadelphia. Within the collection are notes, ingredient lists, menus, recipes and correspondence from the hotel restaurants and their chefs.

Recipe for the Waldorf Hotel
Waldorf-Astoria recipes, UPenn MS Coll. 332

Though it doesn’t include a recipe, we couldn’t resist showing off this sixteenth-century table setting regulations for the pricing and sale of bread.  See the illustration of bread shapes above each loaf!

16th C table setting regulations for the pricing and sale of bread
Assise of all man[n]er of breade, UPenn LJS 238

Have your recipe books been digitized? Are there any digital exhibitions we should know about?

We have digitized over 40 manuscript recipe books and we plan to digitize more, including printed cookbooks. We also have several older digital exhibits that explore our cookbook collections.  From the Penn Culinary Collections page, users can find “A Chef and His Library: An Exhibition Selected from the collection of Fritz Blank” and “Household Words: Women Write from and for the Kitchen“, which explore two of our major culinary collections, including images of menus, pages, and other materials from the collections. While they were created in an earlier moment of web exhibits, the content in these pages, especially Janet Theophano’s discussions in “Household Words”, still offer helpful frameworks for exploring culinary collections.

Do you know of any recent research or outreach projects featuring your recipe books that might interest readers of our blog?

Our collections are being used in a few research projects right now. Lauren Klein, a food studies scholar at Georgia Tech, is using three of our digitized manuscripts for her students to research and create online exhibits. Penn graduate students Marissa Nicosia and Alyssa Connell have been cooking recipes from our early modern cookbooks and discussing modern and early modern culinary practice at Cooking in the Archive. Bollinger Fellow Katie Rawson is working on a project that connects NYPL menus to their context, including a collection of business records and handwritten recipes from the Waldorf Astoria. In addition, the collection has seen use in the reading room from Penn and beyond.

Thanks, Mitch and Katie, for chatting with me! If you’d like to visit the Kislak Center, please email them at rbml@pobox.upenn.edu. Visitors to the Van Pelt Library should consult the Visitor Information page to learn how to access the collections. 

First Monday Library Chat: Wangensteen Library

Welcome back to the First Monday Library Chat. Today we’ll be learning more about the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine  at the University of Minnesota. Dedicated initially to the history of medicine and surgery, the collection has grown considerably over the past fifty years to cover all academic health center disciplines, including nursing, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, and the history of biology. The collection has 80,000 rare books, manuscripts and serials ranging from 1480-1930. Today I’m talking with Lois Hendrickson, curator, and Emily Hagens, PhD Candidate in the History of Medicine.

Can you give us an overview of some of the rare and unique items in your collection?

Having just finished installing our most recent exhibit celebrating the 500th anniversary of Vesalius’s birth, we’ve re-examined many books from our deep and rich anatomical atlas collection. We have an especially complete collection on Vesalius and the history of early modern anatomy, including a rare German edition of Vesalius’s Epitome (1543). I’m especially taken with items that resonate with other materials in the collection. A recent manuscript acquisition, an inventory of an unnamed apothecary shop in mid-17th century Toulouse, has the potential to shed light on our growing collection of medicinal recipe books and our pharmaceutical materials.  Divided into sections, it lists merchandise, equipment, and client accounts, all offering a rare picture of the activities and contents of a pharmacy.

Manuscript describing a 17th-Century apothecary shop in Toulouse
Inventory of an apothecary’s shop in Toulouse, 1645. Courtesy of Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine.

The history of biology (natural history) materials are also compelling. Many rare books from our conchology, bird and insect collections have been borrowed and featured in recent  exhibits on Audubon, shells, butterflies. A particular favorite is Danish physician Ole Worm’s Museum Wormianum (1665). The frontispiece of his catalog depicts a cabinet of curiosities ranging from native artifacts to fossils, and inspires many conversations with students about collecting and classification.

I’m fascinated by the Pamard archives, which represent the work of seven generations of a French family of opthalmological surgeons founded in Avignon in the late 17th century. Are there any recipes in here? Are there related letters and diaries that might help us contextualize these recipes?

Among the  extensive personal and professional papers, students’ notes, correspondence, hospital records, public health notices, statistics, and poetry, there are remedies, recipes, and diaries. In particular, the papers of Nicolas Dominique Pamard (c. 1702-1783) contain numbered remedies, lists of items related to them, and dosing advice. Another of his undated bound books is labeled as a “Collection of Secrets and Remedies of Experienced Knowledge.”  His grandson, Jean Baptiste Antoine Bénézet Pamard (1763-1827) used local interactions and experiences to study the health needs of the general public. He published a medical topography of Avignon including observations on climate, water supply, and the nature of the local people.  His personal notebook, which he referred to as his ”journal of observations on myself‟ is a mix of medical etiology and family observations.  It was a place of self-reflection, and shaped the way he viewed himself.  It may be interesting to see if there are parallels in medicinal recipe manuscripts; how did the authors view themselves, and did they have similar experiences to physicians when distinguishing between symptoms (a patient’s report) and signs (markers of disease). These records have been the basis for the masters thesis Constructing Identity in the Romantic Age: The Medical Writings of Jean-Baptiste Antoine Bénézet Pamard (1763-1827), but much more could be gleaned from this rich collection.

I understand that you have a growing collection of manuscript recipe books. Can you tell us more about the scope of your collection? Why do you consider this genre to be of importance?

We collect manuscript recipe books with a medical focus.  They range in date from 1552 to 1890, and while many are in English, we also have some in French, German and Chinese. The Wangensteen Library’s primary identity is as a teaching library. On a very basic level, manuscript recipe books are powerful resources that resonate with students because they contain tangible evidence of actual historical people. The evidence of practice helps students connect with early modern history, and leads them think about how individuals formed relationships with particular kinds of knowledge, as well as knowledge producers around them, and how they applied this to everyday problems. Students come to the Wangensteen Library with a background in a variety of disciplines, including the expected (History of Medicine and Science) and the unexpected (English as a Second Language, Art, and Rhetoric). Because of this, we’re always trying to think of new ways to make the collection relevant to a broader group of disciplines. Knowing that recipe books cover so many topics, we have planned an interdisciplinary workshop on recipe books for spring 2015. Funded by a small grant, we expect graduate students and faculty from the departments of Spanish & Portuguese, History, the History of Medicine, as well as special collections staff to participate and see what we can uncover together within the same sources.

Can you highlight one or two of your favorite items?

It is hard to pick just a few books to highlight! Emily’s favorite book is a 1542 De Historia Stirpium by Leonhart Fuchs that is completely colored. The way readers have adjusted the images and heavily annotated the text helps students understand the fluidity of, what they view as, obvious botanical knowledge in another time period. Lois likes our collection of patent medicine almanacs which  promoted and sold compounds as medical cures.  The intersection of medicinal recipe manuscripts, pharmacopeia, herbals, botanicals and self-help manuals juxtaposed against the variety of patent medicine almanac’s promotional styles – color comic books, song books, and calendars helps students understand the continuum of ‘cures’ and the nuances of scientific inquiry coupled with the influences of social sciences and humanities.

Fuchs, 16gh-century herbal, hand colored
Leonhart Fuchs. De historia stirpium commentarii insignes, 1542. Courtesy of the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine.

Will any digitized versions of these manuscripts be available online?

Yes! The Wangensteen recently won a grant that will allow us to digitize a subset of the recipe books. They will hopefully become available online in the next year.

That’s great news! And have you found pedagogical value in these recipe books? Do any U of M undergraduate or graduate students use these manuscripts in their coursework?

We frequently use the Mary Pewe’s recipe book in history of science and medicine courses that visit the library. It is convenient to teach with because it is in English, but more importantly, the handwriting is easy to read and students can recognize a lot of what they see in it. We always try to have it open to the page that lists a recipe from Queen Elizabeth, a name that always gets some ooh’s and aah’s. We also have an 18th-century recipe book from the southern United States that is useful in class visits. The combination of medical and culinary recipes in it forces students to reevaluate their own ideas about the intellectual space that both practices occupied.

17th century manuscript recipe mentioning Queen Elizabeth I
Mary Pewe. Medical Receipts. 1637? Courtesy of the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine.

Emily frequently uses the recipe book collection. When she became interested in them as a genre, it was great to have access to several items from different time periods to work with for course papers. The scope of the Wangensteen Library in general has provided her with access to many supporting materials as well, such as printed recipe books, herbals, and medical manuals that early moderns probably used when compiling their manuscript recipe books. Other graduate students have used the Pewe to investigate sugar, moving beyond global trade, to thinking about its’ use and availability to the general populace as evidenced in recipe books. Still others have used it to brush up on their paleography skills of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts.

Thanks, Lois and Emily, for chatting with me! The Wangensteen Historical Library is available to students, alumni, and the general public. Please contact the Wangensteen for more information.

First Monday Library Chat: Rijksmuseum

Today’s First Monday Library Chat will kick-off a series of blog posts featuring the Rijksmuseum, the museum of the Netherlands, located in Amsterdam. Within the main building is the Rijksmuseum Research Library, which holds the most extensive art history library in the  Netherlands. Like the museum, the Library’s primary collecting focus is Dutch art and history from the Middle Ages onwards.

Today I’m chatting with Geert-Jan Koot, Head of the Rijksmuseum Research Library, and Dr. Marjolijn Bol, University Lecturer for Conservation & Restoration and Art History at the University of Amsterdam and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hamburg.

The Rijksmuseum has just undergone a significant restoration project. Can you tell us a bit more about this? How has it affected the Research Library?

New spaces have been designed for the Rijksmuseum, and old spaces have been given a new meaning. It was recognized that the building had been neglected. The museum had been turned into a labyrinth. Every aid to orientation had been cut away or camouflaged.  The library too, was completely hidden, and not accessible from the main building. Visitors had to go outside and use a separate entrance.

The restoration of the library hall was part of the concept of the New Rijksmuseum. This means that the alterations that were made in the past were reversed and the original features, which were still largely discernible, properly restored. For the first time in history, the general public can now access this part of the museum. The use of the library will now be closest to the architect’s conception of the building being more accessible.

Could you talk about the relationship between the Rijksmuseum and the Rijksmuseum Research Library? It strikes me that Art History is a discipline where access to both museum and library collections would be equally important to and utilized by your patrons.

According to the Rijksmuseum’s vision, the reading room in the library hall is intended for visitors who, inspired by what’s on offer in the museum, want to go into further detail on the history and art of the Netherlands and elsewhere. Museum visitors are welcome to look something up or linger to enjoy their visit a little longer. There is no doubt that it is a unique experience for visitors of the Rijksmuseum to get a look inside this magnificent space. Nowadays one might find more museum visitors in the library hall than scholars. However, compared to the time before the reading room in the library hall opened its doors, the number of scientific library users grew as well. In the attached study room the special collections can be examined: rare books, prints, drawings and photographs. Because of its lighting conditions and calmness, the study room is also ideally suited for scholarly research.

In 2014, the Rijksmuseum launched an extensive fellowship program for pre-doctoral students to pursue dissertation research that shows a clear relation to the museum’s collections and expertise. The library will become the meeting place and the research center for the ten fellows we hope to welcome this and in following years.  The aim of the library is to provide research resources and to facilitate research, thus strengthening international research on Dutch art.

Rijksmuseum Library Reading Room
One of three tables in the reading room in the Rijksmuseum’s library hall

Your artists’ recipes are, of course, of great interest to readers of this blog. What recipe-related items do you have in your collection? Are they primarily in print or manuscript?

The Rijksmuseum collection of art technological sources covers primary documentation concerning the practical aspects on the application and use of techniques, materials, tools and machines for the making of objects of art and culture from the middle ages until today. The extensive collection of artists’ manuals and drawing books is also of eminent importance.

This collection lists over 950 printed and written art treatises, dating from 1525 to the present day. Most of them are printed, only a few are manuscripts. A list of these titles is available in our web catalogue.

Many decades ago the museum started collecting these books and this collection is growing annually with a few dozen titles. New titles are publicized in our lists of acquisition highlights.

A fine example of a recently acquired early and rare German recipe book is the Künstbuechlin, gerechten gründtlichen gebrauchs aller kunstbaren Werckleüt (Augsburg, 1535).

16th century recipe book
Künstbuechlin (Augsburg, 1535)

Why does the Rijksmuseum have this special collection of artists’ recipe books?

Visitors to the museum and people interested in art and culture often like to know how objects were made and also from what materials they were made. To stimulate these questions, the Rijksmuseum performs research into the history of artistic materials and techniques. This research improves conservation methods and the restoration of the objects in the museum. The library contributes to these goals by bringing together a collection of international artists manuals and instruction books and recipes.

How are these recipes helpful for learning about artists’ processes and materials?

The study of art technology is increasingly recognized as an important source of information. This is not only to determine the material history of an art object and its conservation, but also to contribute to knowledge about the cultural aspects of the production of a work of art: aesthetic, economic, social, religious, etc.

Our aim is to make the collection of recipe books in the library more widely and freely available. A project to digitize these practical treatises is about to be realized. The proposal to connect the artist’s recipe book collection to the ColourContext database of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin has been well received.

I understand Dr. Marjolijn Bol’s recent course Art Technological Source Research at the University of Amsterdam held some classes at the Rijksmuseum Research Library. Can you talk more about the pedagogical value of bringing student groups to a special collections library? What extra value does this offer?

In an age in which more and more historical sources are made accessible online, it is of great value to be able to confront and familiarize students with original source material. This teaches them not only where to find the originals, but also why it is still very important to study them in situ.

Thanks, Geert-Jan and Marjolijn, for chatting with me!

The Rijksmuseum Research Library’s reading room is open Monday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm. If you wish to view rare or fragile works, please email studiezaal@rijksmuseum.nl to make an appointment.