All posts by Sarah Kernan

Sarah Peters Kernan is an independent culinary historian. She holds a PhD in medieval history from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the production and use of cookbooks in medieval and early modern England. She has published in the journal Food & History and regularly contributes blog posts for The Recipes Project. Sarah collaborates regularly with the Newberry Library, assembling modules for Digital Collections for the Classroom, teaching Adult Seminars, and developing culinary history programming. She has also worked with organizations including The Met Cloisters and the Culinary Historians of Chicago.

Around the Table Podcast: Teaching Manuscripts with Sara Charles

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

Sarah Kernan speaks with Sara Charles, a medieval book historian at the University of London. Sara recently published The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2024). She incorporates “historical remaking” into her research practices and she shares her knowledge with broader audiences through workshops, social media, and her website, teachingmanuscripts.com. Follow Sara on Bluesky 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

Patricia Lovett, professional calligrapher

Christopher de Hamel, medieval manuscript expert

Oak gall ink

Theophilus, On divers arts

Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook

L. Cornelissen & Son

Sara Making Parchment

www.teachingmanuscripts.com

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

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.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

I am thrilled to speak with Sara Charles today. Sara is a medieval book historian at the University of London. In addition to serving as the editor of the academic journal, Historical Research, at the Institute of Historical Research, and journals manager for the University of London Press, she also recently completed her PhD at the Institute of English Studies, researching medieval martyrologies. Sara incorporates historical remaking into her research practices, and she generously shares her knowledge with broader audiences through workshops, social media, and her website, teachingmanuscripts.com. Last year, Sara published to wonderful reviews The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages with Reaktion Books. I am excited to speak to Sara today about her many experiences recreating inks and materials for making medieval manuscripts. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today.

Sara Charles 01:59

Thank you for having me. It’s pleasure to be here.

Sarah Kernan 02:01

Could we start by speaking about your interests in medieval manuscripts and how you go about examining and researching your interests? You really seem to have such skill for combining traditional research in special collections and archives with historical remaking. And I would love to hear more from you about these two methodologies.

Sara Charles 02:26

Thank you. That’s very kind of you to say. I think I have a background in working in museums and art galleries, as well as libraries. So, I think that kind of experience of public environments and communicating with a general audience has helped me a lot. Also, I trained as a librarian, which I think I really learned the importance of doing good research through that, understanding how knowledge is organized, the importance of cataloguing, and knowing how to use catalogues for research.

And I think that kind of all combined together with my research in book history. I also still work at the British Library on Saturdays in the manuscripts reading room, so I still have that kind of like, hands-on experience that every week of dealing with requests and talking about manuscripts and just being in that kind of the same physical space as them, which I do love. And I think for me, when I sort of first started coming into book history, there’s a, some of it is kind of, there’s a bit of an old fashioned air to it. And I thought, sometimes I felt quite intimidated by it. And I thought, if I do, then other people do. And I don’t want other people to, because it’s such a joyous world to experience. And so I guess I just wanted to share my enthusiasm and just to tell people, you know, it’s not scary. It’s for you. It’s for everyone. You know, it’s not just for academics.

Sarah Kernan 03:53

How did you become interested in the making side of things, making the inks and the other products, like the quills, for making medieval manuscripts? And where do you find the recipes and the instructions and actually source all the materials you use?

Sara Charles 04:10

I’ll try and work through all of those. So I first became interested in manuscripts when I was doing the library course, the Library and Information Studies Masters, and there were modules on manuscripts, and also rare books. But I just found manuscripts just so much more interesting because they were so, you know, everything was handmade. And there’s just something about that that is just so interesting and amazing.

And I think a large part of it was that I was really scared of touching manuscripts. When I went into a reading room, I was so scared because like the parchment wasn’t familiar to me. I didn’t know how to handle them. And I wanted to understand those materials to really get to grips with them, so that I so that I would be able to go into a reading room and feel confident handling a manuscript.

And so that was part of it. I wanted to kind of really deconstruct how they were made just so I could understand them. Patricia Lovett, who’s a really amazing calligrapher and illuminator, she does courses. So, I went to one of her illumination classes.

And that again, then opened up a whole new world of possibilities of like, wow, we can we can actually do this now. And that kind of like set me on my journey. And then I just started researching, you know, other people’s blog posts, books by Christopher de Hamel, and things like that. I started small. The first thing I did after the illumination class was I thought about making my own inks using oak galls, which are found on oak trees, the small round growths that found on oak trees. And I just happened to go to a small woodland that’s behind my house. And literally the first tree I looked at had them. And I was so thrilled.

And I’m not sure, perhaps if it hadn’t have been such a serendipitous moment, I don’t know if I’d have been so enthusiastic. But it was so exciting. It was this whole new world that was opening up to me. And so then I came home and I made the ink and it works. And it was just like, wow.

Sara Charles 06:13

And that encouraged me to want to do more and more. Now, I tend to go to the primary sources first to look for recipes and things. So, there’s things like Theophilus’ On divers arts. He was a twelfth-century German monk who wrote down a load of recipes. And he was a practitioner as well. So, you know that he’s writing these things down from his own experience.

Also, Cennino Cennini, in his Craftsman’s Handbook, that’s from the fifteenth century. And he was an Italian craftsperson. Again, he’s writing down what he knows, which just gives that air of authenticity, which is really great. So, I tend to start with the primary sources now, if I want to do something, and then kind of work from there now that I have that experience of, you know, maybe filling in the gaps between what is missing or converting what they’re saying when they’re using strange terminology and things like that.

And where do I source my ingredients and materials? I can make it myself, I do. And there’s things like for plant pigments. So, for woad, which is an indigo, dark blue. Madder, which is a reddish color. Also weld, which is a yellow color. You can grow those quite easily, certainly where I am here in in London. Grow those quite easily in the garden and harvest those. It sometimes takes a few years, but if I can do that, I will. Things like the black ink, so the iron gall, as I say, was luckily easy to source those. Carbon black as well, that’s a very easy one because you’re just collecting soot from an open flame. Also verdigris, the kind of them the green turquoise pigment, that’s a very easy one to do at home as well. You just need some copper strips and some vinegar. So things like that. If I can do it myself, I will.

But there’s also very dangerous pigments like orpiment, which is arsenic-based, or vermillion which is mercury sulfide, so I’m happy to use specialist art shops like Cornelissen for things like that. And then I’ve also prepared parchment and made hand-tooled leather and things like that, and paintbrushes and fox tooth burnishers, so yeah, if it’s possible I will do it myself, but I’m happy to, you know, if it’s dangerous, I’m happy to let the experts do that for me.

Sarah Kernan 08:37

Absolutely. I would too. You’ve had an experience with recreating and remaking a lot of these different materials. How does this making process help you understand better the training and the labor and the output of medieval scribes or any other craftspeople that were involved in the making process? Have you gained any surprising or unexpected insights because of your own experiences?

Sara Charles 09:09

Yeah, I mean, the thing that always stands out to me is just the amount of work you have to do before you even start putting anything on the manuscript. You know, you have to plan everything out in advance, what you need to buy. But also, you need to make sure things like trade networks are in place. So, you would need to import lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.

You’re also relying on the weather and the environment. Like I say, a lot of the pigments are plant-based, so you need a good crop. You’d need such a vast array of sources from many different places. They come from the ground, from the workshop, manufactured in a workshop, or from the merchants importing stuff. So, you’d need to be able to access all these. You’d have to work out how much parchment was needed before you started.

Then you’d have to think about how much decoration to include, what pigments you were going to use, how much gold. It just would have been such an immense task. So, you’d need to access the resources. You’d need to know if you could afford the resources.

And also if you had the skilled artists and scribes to carry those out. So, I think the thing that always really stands out to me is just how much work would have needed to be done before you even started writing anything on the parchment. You would have needed such a lot of planning for the process and it blows my mind.

Sarah Kernan 10:25

Can you talk a little bit more about your work with remaking and specifically how it has impacted or informed your research? And I’m thinking here, if you could at least touch upon this, your recent book, The Medieval Scriptorium, every chapter begins with this wonderful narrative of a medieval scribe in a different place and time. And to me, it feels like those narratives are so richly informed by your experiences and talking not only about the weather and the room and the space that they worked in and the amount of light, but also the process of writing or what they were doing with their hands or their bodies at that time. And that just seems so informed by personal experience. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that?

Sara Charles 11:18

Yeah, yeah. And thank you for picking up on that, because that’s something that I really try to get into my writing. And I think actually the process that I enjoyed and learned from the most was making parchment. It was a really quite sobering experience because I had to go to the abattoir in the morning to collect the skins, and they were still warm.

So that was like really kind of like brings it home. Just what a visceral process it is. And then just going through that process. You soak it in lime to remove the hair. You stretch it on a wooden frame and then and then you scrape it with a lunellum.

It just gave me such a profound connection to the material. And it’s really amazing to be able to understand how the skin fit around the animal and you can still see the spine and the veins. that You can see imperfections where the animal had been bitten by insects. So, you’ve just got all those traces still on the parchment.

And you can feel how the different thicknesses as well. The skin’s much thicker around the sort of the shoulders and the neck area, and it’s much thinner around the tummy area. And you can feel that as you’re working around the parchment. And I found it really funny, and I did actually put this in my book. But when I went to bed that night after working on the skin all day, I could still feel it on my fingertips, I could still feel the texture of it.

And that really stayed with me. And I thought, well, that must have been, you know, how they felt as well. And it’s such a tactile process by necessity. But I think in turn that lends to a greater understanding, not just of what it would have been like to be a parchment maker, but also that relationship between humans and animals, and working with the natural materials to create these things of beauty. And as you say, it’s also interesting to see what parts of the body come under stress while you’re doing these things. Parchment’s very physical, making parchment, because you’re lifting and you’re scraping and you’re doing all of this with your arms. But the thing that I struggled with the most was my fingers not being dexterous enough when you’re tying it to the frame. And I didn’t expect that, you know, that was unexpected.

And then that leads me to wonder whether parchment makers would have suffered from arthritis in their later years, you know having to be so dexterous. Which, of course, is pure speculation, but it’s interesting how these practices can kind of like open your mind to pathways like that.

Sarah Kernan 13:41

Absolutely. That’s a really interesting observation. I’ve certainly thought about when I’ve sat and written things for a long time. I’ve thought, oh, I’m glad I’m not doing this for a living, writing out by hand. You know, I would have arthritis very early, but if you’re using your hands in the same way as a parchment maker… What inspired you to start posting all of these experiences on social media and on your website? Was it mainly for yourself or to inform other scholars? Or were you were you trying to reach out to a broader public, as you had kind of mentioned before?

Sara Charles 14:20

Yeah, I think what it was is, I was just so delighted when these things worked, that I just wanted to share it with people, you know, just want to say, wow, look at this, this is amazing. I was so thrilled when something actually worked. So, and I think as well, I’m doing it at home in my kitchen or whatever. So, it can be a bit lonely sometimes. So, you know, when something works, worked, I just wanted to, to share that. I don’t think I quite expected it to have the traction that it did. I didn’t expect people to be so, kind of, to come along with me as well. But it’s been really fantastic.

I think, maybe my cats, the inclusion of my cats might have had something to do with it, which I had no control over. They just invited themselves into these things. But you know that makes for a much more natural experience. It’s in a domestic setting.

And there would have been cats wandering around medieval workshops. So, you know, I think it just adds to the experience of what it would have been really like rather than something done in in a lab, you know, where everything’s very sterilized and things like that. I think it’s much more fun to do it and in a domestic environment.

Sarah Kernan 15:28

Has your cat made any paw prints, like we have evidence of?

Sara Charles 15:32

Yeah, I have had incidents of that. And also, as well, there was another time when I was copying something and the doorbell rang and the ink was still wet. And as I went to answer the door, one of my cats, she’s a rag doll cat, so she has this huge fluffy tail, and her tail just swept through the wet ink and smeared all over the lines above. So yeah, you have to watch them. It’s all part of the experience, I think. And medieval scribes have documented, yeah, the nuisance that cats and other animals can do to manuscripts.

I would say it’s the general audience that I have, which is, you know, always what I was aiming for. But I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how many academics have been supportive of what I do, as well. And I think there’s much more of an appetite now to bring these processes into the classroom. Certainly, you know, I did a summer school recently and I do a lot of workshops. And so, I think, yeah, there is definitely at the moment more interest in bringing that type of learning into the classroom. And I think also as well, everything now is kind of so artificial and overproduced and everything is digital. So, it’s just a real human instinct, I think, to want to connect with these natural produced items. Yeah, I think that’s why it appeals to people.

Sarah Kernan 16:55

Do people ever reach out to you with special requests of things to work on or things to post about?

Sara Charles 17:03

Sometimes, yeah. Yeah. And I’ve had a few people that have sort of come across strange recipes or strange recipes for things and they’ve wanted me to recreate them. So yeah, that’s always good fun.

Sarah Kernan 17:13

That is. What advice would you give anyone, particularly these students and teachers and researchers who are interested in incorporating craft and historical making into their research and teaching?

Sara Charles 17:27

I would say start small. Start with something that’s easy that you can do at home. You don’t need specialist equipment, or you don’t need, you know, dangerous equipment or materials for that matter. And do your research. Try to get as close to the original things as possible. When I’m making iron gall ink, I always go and source the gall nuts myself. I know that’s not possible for everyone, but I’ve only ever bought galls off of the internet once. And that’s the only time my ink didn’t work. So, you know, that was a lesson for me. Just do what you can within your means, but try and keep it as sort of authentic as possible.

Enjoy the process. You know, don’t focus on the end result on making like a perfect batch of ink or a perfect pigment, but just enjoy the process. Take time to think about how your senses are engaged, you know. What parts of your body are you using? How does your body adapt to different tasks? It’s amazing how often you will use your mouth as a third hand without even realizing it when you’re doing other things. And I just think that’s so interesting, the way your body just automatically puts itself in the right position for you to be able to do what you need to do.

Also say, don’t worry if it doesn’t work. You know, that it’s all part of the process. Then you can kind of have your own troubleshooting guide and you learn from that. The other thing I would say is document the process. Make notes, take videos, take photos, everything, because it’s amazing how much you forget when you step away from it. But if you’ve got that, photos and videos, I think work best for me. And then that just allows me to go back and look closer at what I was doing. Sometimes quite unconsciously, I was doing these things. And so, you want to look back and think, oh, right. So yeah, that’s how I added it. I added it gradually rather than quickly and things like that.

But yeah, it’s just a tremendous amount of fun. And it really just gives you so much greater insight into how things were made that I think it’s a great thing to do. I would encourage anyone when to do it according to their means and what they could do in their environment.

Sarah Kernan 19:34

Well, I have one final question for you. Are there any upcoming projects or collaborations you’re particularly excited about and want to talk about?

Sara Charles 19:45

So, I’ve just finished my PhD, so I’ll probably get a few things out from that. The Medieval Scriptorium book comes out in paperback in September. So, if anyone wants to get hold of a paperback copy, they can.

I am thinking about my next book, very much thinking about, rather than doing anything about. But what I’m really interested in is certainly after the manuscript making moved away from the monasteries and out into the workshops, the urban workshops. And there’s a street in Oxford called Catte Street.

And that’s where all the illuminators and scribes and bookbinders, they all lived in this one street. And I just think it’s a wonderful microcosm of everything that was going on. And we have surviving records of the people that live there. We have the tenement records. So, I just think it would be wonderful to just explore all those lives and all the people that were living there and how they interacted with each other.

I just think it must have been such a wonderful hub of creativity, especially at that time in the thirteenth century, I’d like to look at. When it was moving away from the monasteries and new ways of doing things was opening up. So, I’d really like to do some research and write a book about Catte Street in Oxford in the thirteenth century. But it’s still early days.

Sarah Kernan 21:08

That would be so interesting to read. I hope that you do work on that. I just kind of wonder what evidence there is of their own interactions or what you can glean.

Sara Charles 21:22

Yeah, they often, you know, they married each other. There’s brothers, sisters, parents, you know, all living in there. You know, they would be witness to documents and things like that. And they’d be like, you know, Thomas the Scribe or Roger the Bookbinder, so you know who they are or by their trade. And it would just be wonderful to kind of weave all those stories together.

Sarah Kernan 21:41

Absolutely. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Sara Charles 21:47

Thank you. It’s been very enjoyable.

Sarah Kernan 21:49

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.

Around the Table Podcast: Cooking in the Archives with Marissa Nicosia

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

Sarah Kernan has a conversation with Marissa Nicosia, an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington. She teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. Marissa speaks about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website, Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen. Follow Marissa on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and Facebook 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

Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

Folger Early Modern Measurements

The Sifter

John Locke’s pancakes recipe tested by Marissa

Sage Pudding recipe tested by Marissa at Pottsgrove Manor

Penn State University Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections Library

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.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

I am so excited to welcome Marissa Nicosia to Around the Table. Marissa is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington. She teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. In addition to a voluminous body of journal articles, book chapters, and essays, Marissa has also co-edited two collected volumes and in 2023 published her monograph, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660. Today, though, we’ll be speaking about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website launched in 2014, Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen. In it, Marissa curates, transcribes, and updates recipes from early modern English recipe books, including historical information alongside detailed step-by-step instructions and photos of the updated recipes. I’m thrilled to speak with Marissa today about her wide-ranging experiences cooking and writing about early modern recipes. Marissa, thank you so much for joining me today.

Marissa Nicosia 02:17

Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I love talking about this work with other people.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

Can you share how Cooking in the Archives started and how it has evolved or changed over time?

Marissa Nicosia 02:29

So, Cooking in the Archives started with paleography, the practice of studying historical handwriting. I was a PhD student in English literature, and I was learning to read secretary hand, and also round hand and italic hand, the kind of dominant forms of sixteenth-, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century handwriting. And one thing that we read a lot to practice learning these letter forms that looped below the line in strange ways or had interesting abbreviations, we learned by transcribing, copying out each letter of recipes.

And recipes were great because you get excited about seeing sage or chicken, or you’d have, like, interesting verbs like mingle. And there were also numbers in there. So, they were really good for learning how to read handwriting that you would encounter doing archival research as a literary scholar, as a literary historian.

And me and my initial collaborator on the Cooking in the Archives project, Alyssa Connell, we kept saying, oh, this sounds tasty. Oh, maybe we could try to make this. So, we applied for an internal grant at the University of Pennsylvania where we were studying for interdisciplinary innovation. And we said we would like to innovate by actually cooking these historical recipes instead of just reading them to practice our handwriting skills and all of that.

So, we were awarded this grant, which was excellent because we needed a way to pay our rent in the summer of 2014. And we dove in. And at this point, my research had been in book history and manuscript studies and in thinking about Renaissance temporality and history. So, I felt like this recipe recreation was a different kind of time travel, but I wasn’t quite sure what. And, while I knew a lot about early modern manuscripts, I didn’t know that much about food studies, food history, or culinary manuscripts in particular, because that hadn’t been like one of my major fields of my research at that time.

So, we started feeling our way through what it was like to read and research and prepare these recipes, Alyssa and I initially. And now I’ve continued that practice by reading and learning so much for people in the broader community, of historical reenactment, of food studies, of chefs who practice, scholars who practice, about how to take historical recipes and make them today in all sorts of different ways.

Sarah Kernan 05:04

That’s a great segue into the next topic I’d love to talk about. How do you approach that process of identifying what recipes you actually want to prepare and then researching and cooking and updating them? What all goes into that for you?

Marissa Nicosia 05:20

The process always begins with me reading something and saying, ooh, that’s interesting. It might be that I want to taste it, or I’ve been reading a menu, or a household account book where a dish gets mentioned and now I’m like, oh, there are this is a recipe for smelts. It’s not just that that household was buying smelts.

So, there’s always something that piques my interest. And I’ve to date never done a project where I’ve cooked through an entire recipe book. I’ve always just kind of been more of a gadfly about it. I go with what is interesting to me. And that’s part of what’s enabled the project to last for eleven years and for me to not get bored with it or burn out on it. So, I start with something that’s interesting, either because I want to taste it or I want to know about it.

And at this point, eleven years into this work, I find that if there’s a recipe I’m curious about, I have to cook it. Even if I’m not going to be publishing a recipe for it in, say, the journal article I’m writing, I feel like I need to know about it through cooking. I need to use my embodied method, my practice as research method, to fully understand what it’s saying. Because I found that like I don’t exactly understand what the difference between peeling or not peeling the mushrooms are until I’ve tried it. Or, using sugar instead of honey. Or, white wine instead of red wine. All these kinds of variations that I’ve seen in recipes. I know what they mean a little bit more through the process of trying it. And I wanted to speak a little bit to updating as well. But I wonder if that gets into the question of historical accuracy too.

Sarah Kernan 07:06

Absolutely. Obviously, like anyone who tries preparing historic recipes of any kind, there are real challenges with translating that to the modern day. So how do you balance historical accuracy with the practicalities of modern kitchen and dining settings? I mean, it’s a very different environment than what was available the early modern period. So how do you handle that?

Marissa Nicosia 07:33

I begin from a position that what I make will not be authentic, but it will be in a open dialogue with that original recipe. So, if the recipe calls for flour, butter, sugar, and cloves, like a recipe for cakes that I’ve made before and that I’ve been writing about recently. The strains of wheat and the strains of sugar that are cultivated now are not the same as the sixteenth-century ones. The cloves have gone through different production processes. The climate is different. The milling and the processing is different. The butter is from a different breed of cow that’s also like fed in a different environment.

And, I’m also constantly dealing with the fact that I am based in Philadelphia and North America and my specific climate and foodways. And the recipes I’m talking about are English recipes most of the time. So, there’s also that removal. So very simple ingredients like butter, flour, sugar, and cloves raise all of these ways we already can’t get back to what they would have been like in 1616, or thereabouts. But we can still get something that is the modern equivalent of that thing.

And then I’m baking them in my oven. I’m baking these cakes in my oven. And that is quite different than the bread oven that’s described in the recipe. So, this particular recipe describes drawing your brown bread out of your bread oven, which could have been a kind of beehive bread oven, or it could have been one of the pocket bread ovens on the side of a hearth, but it would be some more enclosed baking space. So, the recipe has a lot of information about how to watch the cakes so they don’t over bake using that kind of radiating heat technology. And that’s something that they’re telling the cook to use instinct, but also use observational skills to do it.

And there, it’s a little different than me setting my oven to 350 in a timer. But, like as a historical recipe recreator, I’m using my like I’m like, is it getting too brown? Are they setting? Like, has the, am I seeing the signs that I was supposed to look for in the bread oven?

So that’s one way that these forms of attention translate across early modern cookery practices and my recipe recreation practices. So, in many ways, I see myself as a person in a long line of recipe users who is adapting what I’m doing to the current realities of my situation in a way that’s trying to honor the many people who prepared, compiled, circulated, and preserved these materials to bring them to us today.

And it’s important to me that most of what I put on Cooking in the Archives can be prepared with ingredients from your local grocery store, plus rose water. Because I can’t eliminate rose water and be truthful to the foodways. But a lot of the other things I want you to be able to buy at your big box supermarket, because I think people have a right to be able to access this kind of material, that it shouldn’t just be for people who can buy specialty products or have immediate access to specialty products.

Sarah Kernan 10:51

Yeah, making these recipes more accessible to a broader audience, in addition to translating them for a modern audience, but making them accessible for anyone to be able to cook. Yeah, I think that’s really important and kind of helps you understand the historical moment a bit more and have a grasp on that, no matter your ability to go to all these specialty markets or order food online.

Marissa Nicosia 11:14

Yeah, I mean, maybe I could try roast swan, but that would be very difficult for me to arrange. So, it would be very difficult for most of the Cooking in the Archives readers to arrange, although perhaps maybe someone will write in and say, I have a line on roasting swan, give me a recipe.

Sarah Kernan 11:31

How do you go about researching and filling in some other aspects of recipes, some of the trickier parts? There’s always missing pieces and recipes. How do you figure out the things that are left unsaid, like the ingredients, quantities, or the timing? What are ways that you fill in those gaps?

Marissa Nicosia 11:52

Yeah, there’s variation or implied knowledge in amounts, in methods, in temperature, and in timing. So sometimes there’s something like a reference for using a porringer or something like that. And then I consult resources like the Folger’s amazing, like weight and measurement resources, to figure out like, well, maybe a porringer is about three, I think it’s about three quarters of a cup.

But porringers also vary wildly. So, a person’s porringer in their house might not be what a porringer is in another house. Or a posnet, like a little three-legged cooking pot that you would use to make a posset or something like that. So, for some of these, there’s a material culture of cookery implements that we can turn to for some information. And there are certain resources I now know to go to for that.

There’s also, spice prices sometimes become really important. So, I found some resources for deciphering spice price rates. There’s occasionally putting the spices on top of a coin, as well. So, it’s sometimes unclear if it’s the price or the coin that’s being called for in those situations. Those are a little tricky.

If I have a sense from when I’ve prepared the dish, if I’m like, oh, that actually is like a meringue, or that actually is like shortbread. Then I turn to modern recipes that tell me what’s a good temperature for a meringue to go into my oven, what’s good temperature for shortbread to go into my oven. And I look at the timings on those modern recipes. And I set a lot of timers. I set so many timers when I’m recipe testing. If I have something going on the stove, I always have a stopwatch going.

But it’s interesting how there are certain descriptions for preserves that you can kind of approximate to candy height or other kinds of things you might see on a modern candy thermometer. There are descriptors like a gentle fire or a soft fire. And there you’re putting your pot just over like a kind of low flame. And learning what that method vocabulary is like is interesting. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Oxford English Dictionary, not just looking up ingredient nouns, but also looking up some of the verbs, to think about what is this? Is there a sense here in this word that I’m not totally getting?

I’m trying to remember the name of this particular resource. Oh, The Sifter. The Sifter also is a place where I sometimes look up cooking implements and that sometimes has volumes on it as well. It’s a great resource.

Sarah Kernan 14:31

Could you talk about any surprising or interesting recipes you have found while working on Cooking in the Archives?

Marissa Nicosia 14:40

One of the most fun recipe recreations that I’ve done started with a social media post that a bunch of people sent me. So, a scholar who works in political philosophy, was doing research in the John Locke Papers at the Bodleian. And he posted to social media a recipe for John Locke’s pancakes from the Locke Papers.

And a bunch of people sent this to me. I was very excited to see it. And I prepared this recipe and they’re really luscious, crepe-like British pancakes with a lot of cream in them, and also orange blossom water, and butter, and half a nutmeg grated into the batter.

So they are extremely expensive pancakes because nutmegs were very expensive during Locke’s lifetime. And I did the recipe recreation. And after that, I had the opportunity to go to the Bodleian and look. And it looks like he’s actually working through a couple of different recipes, one of which he received from a social connection to develop this kind of peak recipe. And the recipe that I shared with half a nutmeg is his, like, edited, best version. So, it’s just such an interesting way to come at the life of this very important historical thinker who’s had a lot of impact in the modern world, to see that he also was interested in this negotiation of developing the best recipe in the kitchen for this kind of dish.

And there’s something funny about it being up pancake, right? It’s not like a roast beef. It’s not a celebration piece, but maybe it is a, it maybe it was a celebration piece being served at a special occasion, but it doesn’t have the grandeur of certain other historical recipes. It’s a pancake, but oh boy, is it delicious.

Sarah Kernan 16:34

Yeah, I’m really intrigued now. I saw those posts and I saw you working on that recipe a while back, but I haven’t recreated those. And the fact that it has half a nutmeg in it really piques my interest. That is probably a pretty intense flavor.

Marissa Nicosia 16:48

It’s also one of the few recipes I can say that I’ve actually cooked using slightly more historical materials. So, Anne Mumenthaler invited me to Pottsgrove Manor, and we prepared that recipe on a flat surface over a brazier of coals, which is likely how that kind of pancake would have been cooked because you can do more detailed work over a brazier of coals than you can with other kitchen heat setups. It was one that we got, I got to try using a more historical technology than I normally have because everything I do is for the modern kitchen.

So was fun to see this recipe that I’d updated for the modern kitchen taken back into a historical kitchen and used. And the people who came to that event at Pottsgrove Manor really enjoyed these pancakes cooked in that way. We were surrounded by wood smoke, so that changed the sort of ambiance of eating, which was nice. It was very delicious. I can’t say if they were more delicious in my kitchen or in that kitchen, but both were delicious.

Sarah Kernan 17:46

Well, I think we’ve kind of hinted at this in a couple of my questions and your responses. Could you talk a little bit about what role you think food and recipes, this historic food and recipes, plays in understanding or at least connecting to moments in the past, the history, cultures of a specific time and place. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Marissa Nicosia 18:11

People really care about food. Because it’s something that they have to deal with every day. It’s something which they already have a history with through their family, whether their family is a like robust food traditions family or not. Food isn’t so important, but they’ll have a memory, whether it’s like a highly advertised snack or a traditional family recipe that links them to time and place.

So, I love showing people recipes from a more distant history because there’s an immediate connection with like, yes, I also eat food every day. I also have to think about these things. I also have some sense of food traditions, right? Whether that is like a favorite mass-produced drink or a family dish.

I think with something like jumbles, or these kinds of historical cookies, or the historical hot chocolate that I’ve made from later seventeenth-century manuscripts, people are like, oh, that’s like a thing that I have consumed, but this is a very different version of it. And it makes sometimes the historical lessons go down a little bit more easily or people leave with something that they immediately want to go tell someone else.

I’ve had students in class where I’ve made historical hot chocolate, have all sorts of different connections to other hot chocolates that they’ve had in their lives and tell me, oh, I need to go tell X family member, X friend, that I had this recreation of a seventeenth-century hot chocolate in class.

So, it really gets people excited. And I think it’s an amazing touchstone for showing people why the study of the past is important and what purchase the past might have on what we do now, and how we think about food now and how we think about history today.

Sarah Kernan 20:14

Well, you just mentioned preparing some of this food for your classes, or students preparing it. Do you do that very regularly? Do you incorporate historical cooking and recipes into many of your classes? How do you put the process of making into your own teaching and your own research outside of the Cooking in the Archives project?

Marissa Nicosia 20:36

It’s grown and grown and grown. So, it started out with, I end up talking about food more when I’m teaching a Shakespeare play, or a Margaret Cavendish poem, or something like that. And then it became, well, why don’t I have my students transcribe a little bit in class? Or we’ll read something from a manuscript in the round so they can see the handwriting.

And then I’m like, well, I can get this little grant and I can buy goose quills and then we can write out the recipe together. And then, oh, I have this other little pot of funding that’s connected to some undergrads who I have now transcribing. I’ll buy a hot plate. I’ve made historical hot chocolate in the classroom a lot in literature classes. And I taught a Shakespeare in the Kitchen class about my book in progress where we made strawberry preserves on a hot plate in the classroom. That was a little more involved.

And I’m now teaching, most semesters, classes where students are transcribing from mostly eighteenth-century, later seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century, recipe manuscripts that are held in Penn State Libraries, Eberly Family Special Collections. That collection has grown over the ten years that I’ve been a faculty member at Penn State through long-term collaborations with special collections, with curators, with the people who work in the digital library, digital collections side of special collections.

So, at this point, I’m teaching out of my food history work and out of my Cooking in the Archives work every semester. But in the beginning, I wasn’t. I had to learn a lot more to be ready to teach like that.

Sarah Kernan 22:11

Do these practices go more into your research and writing as well as your teaching?  Do you find that all this has become very interconnected on that side of your professional life as well?

Marissa Nicosia 22:24

It really has. So, I think I said earlier that I don’t want to write about a recipe unless I’ve tested it, even if I’m not actually like publishing the recipe test as part of the article. Like if I write an article where I’ve tested a recipe, I’ll test the recipe and I’ll put that up on Cooking in the Archives when the article gets published to say, hey, I wrote this thing over here that maybe you want to read, maybe you don’t. But here’s the recipe recreation for anyone who wants it.

And all of this work over the last decade or so has led to me writing a book called Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’ve been cooking the historical recipes for Cooking in the Archives, I’ve been writing these other pieces., and I’ve also been teaching Shakespeare pretty much every semester over that period of time. So, I have written a book that has ten recipes in it. And in the chapters, I use those recipe recreations to show that Shakespeare’s food metaphors are not just fun linguistic work, that they’re connected to this larger culinary culture and that preparing the recipes in the kitchen has a lot to teach us about these food references in Shakespeare’s poems and plays.

So that’s the project that I’m finishing right now. I never would have written a book like this if I hadn’t started Cooking in the Archives in 2014. And I’m really excited for this book to be material that I get to teach in the classroom because each chapter is written with the idea that I’d want to give it to undergraduates when I was teaching them the play.

Sarah Kernan 23:59

Do you want to tell us exactly when the Shakespeare book is coming out? Anything you want to plug?

Marissa Nicosia 24:05

I believe Shakespeare in the Kitchen will be coming out in 2026, but I will update you all with a fresh link and at a true date once I, once I’m clear with the press about exactly when that’s happening.

I’m also writing a number of different articles and book chapters that think about the seasons, and the way that seasons change, and how different literary works and different recipe works reference the changing of the seasons. So that’s something I’m very interested in, and it kind of links all my work about temporality into my work about recipes.

And I’d also note that Cooking in the Archives has been a little quieter over the last couple of years, in part because a lot of my recipe testing efforts have gone towards my Shakespeare in the Kitchen project But I have a lot of other ideas about food references in Shakespeare that I did not have a chance to deal with in Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’m thinking about continuing a sort of complete works of Shakespeare in the Kitchen on Cooking in the Archives in the coming years, where I’ll get to share some of the recipes that that didn’t make it into the book and that were exciting to me in a shorter format than what I’m doing in my book chapters. So, there’ll be more material adjacent to that huge exploration I’ve done in Shakespeare in the Kitchen coming to Cooking in the Archives soon.

Sarah Kernan 25:40

Wonderful. Well, I can’t wait to see that, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be very excited to see that as well. Marissa, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Marissa Nicosia 25:48

Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Kernan 25:51

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.

 

 

Around the Table Podcast: Early Medieval Embroidery with Alex Makin

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

Sarah Kernan talks to Alexandra Makin, a textile archaeologist specializing in early medieval embroidery. She is a professional embroiderer, trained at the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and also holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon Studies. Alex is a Third Century Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic: Analysis, Interpretation, Re-creation (2024) and The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power of Embroidery (2019). In addition, Alex also runs a YouTube channel, Early Medieval Embroidery. Follow Alex on 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

Shrine of St. Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral

Bayeux Tapestry

Elizabeth Plenderleith’s study of the Cuthbert maniple: Plenderleith, Elizabeth, Hohler, Christopher and Freyhan, R., “The Stole and Maniples,” in Battiscombe, C. F., ed., The Relics of Saint Cuthbert (Oxford, 1956), 375–432.

Alex’s Cuthbert Maniple Recreation Project Videos

Early Medieval Embroidery YouTube channel

Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard Project

Woolen Strap from Female Burial Site in Iceland: See Michele Hayer Smith, Kevin P. Smith and Karin M Frei “‘Tangled up in Blue’: The Death, Dress and Identity of an Early Viking Age Female Settler from Ketilsstadir, Iceland,” Medieval Archaeology, 63(1), 2019.

EXARC 

The EXARC Journal

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.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Alex Makin, a textile archeologist specializing in early medieval embroidery. She is a professional embroiderer trained at the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and also holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon studies. Alex is a Third Century Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, leading the project “Entangled Textiles: Senses, Connections, Power in the Early Medieval North Atlantic (450-1100 CE).” She has also published widely, including several articles and chapters, a 2024 co-edited collected volume titled Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic: Analysis, Interpretation, Re-creation, as well as a 2019 monograph, The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power of Embroidery.

She regularly lectures and runs workshops for academic and public audiences. In addition, Alex also runs a YouTube channel, Early Medieval Embroidery, where she posts videos about different aspects of early medieval embroidery and her research. I am thrilled to speak to Alex today about her multitude of experiences studying and re-creating early medieval embroidery. Alex, thank you so much for joining me today.

Alex Makin 02:20

Oh, well, thank you for asking me.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

Your work requires such an interesting combination of skills. You are both a professional embroiderer and a textile archaeologist with a PhD. Could you tell us about your journey into medieval textile studies and what first inspired your fascination with embroidery from this period?

Alex Makin 02:41

Yes, it’s quite a long-winded story. I’ll try and keep it short for everybody. Over in England, which is where I’m based, I know the school system is different to in America. When I was at school, a long time ago, you could either leave at 18 and go to college or you could stay on at school and do A-levels. I mean, sorry, leave at 16 and go to college or stay on at school and do A-levels, which is what I did. And then after I completed my A-levels, I went down to, as you mentioned, the Royal School of Needlework and I did their, completed, the three-year apprenticeship in embroidery.

And I mean, I enjoyed it, but it was really intensive, much more intensive than people realize, I think. And when I left, I was thinking, that’s it. I never want to hold a needle, look at an embroidery ever again. That’s it. I’ve moved on. So, I went to university and I did an undergraduate degree in archaeology, which is my second love. And I was based in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is in the northeast of England.

And my brother, who’s a bit younger than me, was doing his degree in history at Durham Cathedral, which is literally just down the road. And I had a car, so we used to meet up and go out, and mainly to historical places. And one day we went to Durham Cathedral and there’s a tomb there, a shrine, from the early medieval period, which holds still the remains of St. Cuthbert, a very famous saint over here.

Alex Makin 04:12

And when that tomb was reopened in the, I think it was 1827, they discovered amongst lots of beautiful, beautiful objects, these amazing silk textiles and these fabulous embroideries, a stole and a maniple. A maniple is a narrow length of textile embroidery that a priest or a bishop would drape over one of his wrists during particular services.

And they were embroidered in silk threads and couch gold metal threads and I was looking at them. I can vividly remember it now looking through the glass in the display case thinking, this is unbelievable. The skill of these people is… It was, yeah, it was just an enlightening moment. And on the apprenticeship we had gone back as far as the twelfth century to Opus Anglicanum, but we’d never gone further. And at that point when I was looking at the Cuthbert embroideries, I was thinking to myself, well this came before Opus Anglicanum. How did this happen? Where, how did all this all develop? Why has nobody done anything about this? Have people done things about this? Why do I not know about it? All these questions were milling around in my head and that was the start, really. So it’s all my brother’s, Durham Cathedral’s, and St. Cuthbert’s fault.

So I went back to university, and I thought, right, I’m going to do my undergraduate dissertation on early medieval embroidery and I realized that nobody had actually done much about it. A wonderful lady, Dr. Elizabeth Coatsworth, she had done some work on embroideries from that period, but really nobody had done a detailed analysis looking at everything and that was the start of it really that sucked me into the black hole, and I’ve been at it ever since.

Sarah Kernan 06:04

That is really incredible. I love those sorts of stories where you have this real-world experience and it just ignites a passion for a topic. And you want to spend all your time working on it.

Since this was a field that you learned had not been explored very much, where are you finding your evidence and your research basis? Is it mainly material evidence? Is there any written evidence or images from the period? And how are you gathering that sort of evidence to re-create and make these items?

Alex Makin 06:43

So this is one of the really cool things about the early medieval period. It was an era of flux, really, particularly within the area we now call Britain, or the United Kingdom. So, the Romans had left in around 450, or just before, actually. And the native Britons, which included people who were in the population before the Romans came, but then people who’d come over through the Roman Empire as well, were calling on the Germanic tribes of continental Europe to come over and help them fight against the Picts who were in Scotland, the Scoti who were in Ireland, and other tribes who were coming down. So now the Romans had left, they thought it was easy pickings.

So you have this melee of people and cultural ideas coming together. And that’s resulted in a vibrant material culture, some of which survives today, some of which is embroidery. The majority of pieces really are what we would call archaeological pieces. So they’re very small. They look brown, nowadays, various shades of brown, and they survive in various conditions. So sometimes you will have the actual fibers, the threads surviving, but sometimes they’re what we call mineralized, where they’ve been placed in the ground, mainly burials, but other contexts too, and next to a metal object. And as the metal object has changed, the chemicals of that object have changed in the ground, they’ve leached into textiles and the embroidery. And while the fibers have disappeared, disintegrated, these chemicals have kind of a casing that show you what was there.

So, we have that type of material evidence. But then we have evidence from things like St. Cuthbert’s shrine, where you have these beautiful surviving pieces. But then you have the Bayeux Tapestry. Of course, that’s why I finish my period in 1100 and not 1066, which has survived, well, I mean, it’s just survived everything, really. It’s amazing that it’s come down to us the way it has. We don’t know how long it was originally, but it survived at just over 68 meters now. So it’s huge, really is.

So that’s your material evidence. But then you have documentary sources. And sometimes they are very specific and they will write about gold work or something else, in or they’ll be describing something. And that’s very much from the later period, items that are given to churches or ecclesiastical centers, things like that. But sometimes you can read between the lines and you can get hints of what was there.

You also have art historical sources as well. So, you get these lovely illustrations in manuscripts. And sometimes you get carvings that were crosses or other sculptures and monuments. And you can see things through those as well. And it’s, this is one of the things I love about my period and what I study, because it’s about putting all of that together and then reading between the lines and approaching it from so many different angles that you can uncover lots of different aspects to it.

And that’s also why archaeological theory is a good thing, because that gives you a way in. So, for example, the set, using what we call sensory archaeology, where you think about embroidery through the senses, or something called, oh gosh, it was there, it begins with E, it’s just gone.

Entanglement theory, where you look at all the different ways in which things can come together and mix up and then move on their journeys, and object biography theory, which tells you the story of an object. And that they all give you different ways into looking at these small surviving examples and of telling their stories, really.

Sarah Kernan 10:30

Do you think that your experience as an embroiderer kind of gives you some advantage over other scholars in the past in looking at these items, and your experiences actually knowing how to perform the craft and what stitches might have been used in certain places, or something along those lines?

Alex Makin 10:49

So, I wouldn’t say an advantage, being correct here. I would say it enables me to look at things differently. But yeah, definitely. Because sometimes people will look at something and they’ll say, oh it’s been made like this, because they know the theory of it. But actually, when you’re able to make it and then you re-create it, you realize, well, no, it can’t have been made like this because it doesn’t work. The practicalities of what is being suggested don’t work.

Or, the equipment isn’t right for making it in that way, both textiles and embroidery. There’s also things that you find where you think, oh, yes, this is this stitch. It’s definitely made that way. And then you analyze it on the actual piece and you realize, and then you do a bit, and you realize, no, it wasn’t made like that at all. They had a completely different way of making this stitch that we work in a certain way today. So it gives you, I think it gives you other openings and ways of looking at things that perhaps people who haven’t got that practical side wouldn’t do automatically, let’s put it that way.

Sarah Kernan 12:01

Are there other challenges that you face when you’re trying to re-create some of these historic embroidery items or methods, things like the types of fabric or thread or the dyes that are used? Is any of that a hurdle or just a challenge as you are working on these projects?

Alex Makin 12:22

So, yes, I’m hesitant to say a hurdle or a challenge in the sense that, for me, when I’m looking at creating a piece, I know that I need things that, materials, that are as closely related to the originals as possible. And when I say related, so the spin, and the dyes used, how it’s being woven and things like that. And that’s because when things are, let’s take, for example, dyes. When fibers are dyed with chemical dyes, the fibers react differently to how they’re dyed with natural pigments. And then the dyeing processes that are involved will alter the yarn, the finished yarn, et cetera, again on top of that.

If it’s not just about re-creating something that looks the same, which is fine, in some circumstances that’s all you need. And I don’t know, say for example, you want something to hang in a museum exhibition so that people have a visual understanding of what an object looks like, then that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you are trying to understand the properties of the fibers and the materials you’re working with and how they worked with certain needles and equipment, and then how that affected the embroiderers and how they were working and thinking about things, then you need things to be as close to the originals as possible. And so that’s why I go down that route and commission fabric and threads and things.

Sarah Kernan 13:59

That’s an excellent segue into my next question. What are you learning from re-creating these items? What are you learning about the materials and the techniques and the cultural context and significance of these items from your re-creations?

Alex Makin 14:14

So, for me, it’s really interesting because when I first started this, it was about exploring really, how these things were created, and the processes involved in that. And it and it’s still that up to a point. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the fact that for people who don’t embroider, this is going to sound really weird, but for people who do craft or bake or things, they’ll know what I mean. When I sit there and I do these embroideries, you kind of get in the zone and you find yourself getting into the embroiderer’s mindset, obviously up to a point. Because I mean, I live in, you know, in a house with central heating and nice lighting and all of this kind of thing.

But you find yourself just, I’m thinking of when I did the Cuthbert maniple, the segment that I re-created from that, and I was doing this the gold work, the background couching. And you just really get into that, into the zone, where you don’t really need to think about that. And I was thinking, well, this is how the early medieval embroiderers would have been thinking about it. And they could have been doing this, and they would have known the materials worked this way. And that’s, oh, and that’s why they stitched it like this, and oh, and that’s why this has turned out like that.

And that’s what intrigues me more now, is the fact that I can sit down if I’m not disturbed and I’m in the right frame of mind. I can begin to think a little bit like the embroiderers themselves and understand the decisions they made and the fact that their fibers and threads and needles were working in this way. And that’s why they did it the way they did. And I love that, really more so, I shouldn’t say this, more so probably than just re-creating the piece.

Sarah Kernan 16:01

Could you share any particular moment, maybe, or a project where working directly with creating a textile or embroidery technique revealed something very unexpected to you?

Alex Makin 16:16

I think the one that sticks in my head and comes to mind most is that re-creation of part of the St. Cuthbert maniple. So, I went into that with a number of aims. So, the amazing Elizabeth Plenderleith had analyzed these embroideries and her report was published back in the 1950s in a huge volume. It’s famous among people who like Durham and St. Cuthbert and who study our period. It’s a volume edited by Battiscombe. And she didn’t make, she just analyzed. And I can’t, nobody really knows her background, really, apart from the fact that she was married to Harold Plenderleith, who set up and ran what was then the science lab at the British Museum.

And the embroideries had been sent down there for cleaning and she had the opportunity to analyze them. I mean, how cool is that, really? So she wrote this report. I mean, it’s an excellent report, but she wrote things, in particular, about the fact that the silk threads that were used for the filling, filling in the clothes and the faces of figures and things, were flat threads, they were floss. And then she says that the threads, the silk threads used to outline these areas, were slightly twisted and they were a completely different thread.

And you take that at face value and you think, yeah, okay, that makes total sense. But then when I was doing the embroidery, I was thinking, well, the measurements that she gives for that thread, the outline thread, are not really double the width of the single flat thread, which is what it would be, if it was two threads twisted together, which is what she’s saying it was. And the twist, the way the thread was spun, it wasn’t regular. And if it had been spun into a yarn like that, the spin and then the ply would be regular. Why is that the case?

And so I was working with this and I realized that it wasn’t a completely different thread at all. They were using the same type of thread that they had used for the filling, but double. And then they weren’t consciously twisting it and before they were working it. The irregular twists and ply that was happening, was happening because of the way as an embroiderer, you turn the needle. So, I’m sorry this is a podcast because you can’t see me. I’m actually mimicking, turning the needle as I talk. They regularly turn the needle as they’re making the stitches. And that created exactly the same thread that you see on the original pieces. And for me, that was just like, you just wouldn’t know that.

Alex Makin 19:05

You wouldn’t even think about that, would you, unless you were making it? So that was one thing. The other thing was, I said originally I had some specific aims and I never told you what they were, but one of those was, Plenderleith talked about the gold thread that was couched, that was stitched in place, for the background on the maniple and the stole.

And she said that it had this weird, the holding stitches, had this weird interlocking thing going on on the back, which isn’t normal. And so she did a sample with completely different threads, much larger scale. And she was saying, this is inevitable. It’s just the way it works. You know, there’s, they didn’t do it on purpose.

So, I was thinking, well, is that true? Because you’ve got to, for me, you’ve got to use materials that, as I said before, are close to the original as possible. And so, I was doing the stitching and she was right. It is just the way threads are worked. And it’s because you sew two gold threads to one strand of thread on the ground fabric. Whereas nowadays we don’t stitch, we only stitch, well, don’t stitch one gold thread to one thread on the ground fabric. You just put them up next to each other and then sew them down.

It was interesting that, yes, she was right. Her experiment was correct. And that was one of the things that I was looking at. But it was also, it told you so much more about the way the embroiderers were working and the ground fabric and how that was interacting with the gold threads and things like that, which I also found quite fascinating.

Sarah Kernan 20:41

Your work has been engaging both academic and public audiences, broader audiences, especially your work re-creating the embroidery, and I’m thinking of your YouTube videos here. You have produced both traditional scholarship on re-creation and analysis and peer-reviewed items, but you have these YouTube videos. And how do you approach making and this craft when you’re creating content for a wider audience that is not academic at all, as opposed to creating content for a solely academic audience?

I will put little note here. I know nothing about embroidery and I find your YouTube videos absolutely fascinating. I just started watching one and I just got so sucked in for quite a while watching all the stitching on both the back side and the front side. I mean, it’s just beautiful to watch you working and to see something come to life out of just some fabric and thread. You just have this image come to life. So how are you thinking about creating that content and engaging people like me who know nothing about that?

Alex Makin 21:58

So, it’s funny, really, because, you know, I’ve never really thought about it in detail before. And so, for me, I treat academic audiences and the general public the same, when it comes to the kind of content. It’s just that, I think that there are certain people around the world who are interested in this sort of thing, and they can’t access academic publications for lots of different reasons.

And the idea for the YouTube was to enable that access and to enable that people to engage with that without having all those barriers in place. And for it not to be dumbed down, but to have intelligence and discussions about it. And so, when I create those videos and I’m chatting over the top and things, a lot of that is a stream of consciousness coming out. And sometimes like when I’m there editing it afterwards, I say, oh my God, that is complete drivel. But you know, I leave it in and hope for the best. But it is about giving people that same information and data, but in, like I said, in an accessible way.

And when I write these things up for academic publications, writing is a different medium. So you don’t have those images and you can’t embed videos into a journal article or a book. So that makes a difference. So the way you write things is very different. I don’t write my videos. I know a lot of YouTubers will script their things out beforehand. I don’t do that because I don’t know what the embroidery is going to say, or so to speak. And I don’t know what my brain’s going to think when I’m actually doing the stitching.

So, it is more of a stream of consciousness. And I do sometimes use that to inform things that I’m then going to write about later on. So, it’s a two-way, I think it’s a two-way process, really. And it’s about, as I say, getting it out there to a wider audience, getting people interested in this sort of thing. And, and treating people like they’re intelligent. There’s no question that’s too silly.

So, I don’t mind, I mean, I am rubbish at replying at the moment because I’ve got a lot on, but I do try and answer questions. And I do say in the videos, you know, ask these questions. No question is too silly. That’s what it’s all about, really. That doesn’t answer your question, does it? Sorry.

Sarah Kernan 24:24

Well, it does. And I really like the idea that you are really trying to bring the same information to a broader audience and kind of remove some of those barriers and these videos are a really great way to do that. It is making a lot of what might be difficult to understand in writing very clear when you’ve seen it demonstrated right in front of you in a video. I certainly wouldn’t understand reading a description of some of these stitches and the output. But when I’m seeing it on the screen and you doing that, it makes total sense.

Alex Makin 25:00

You know, it’s funny you say that, actually, because I have had academic friends watch the videos and have actually said that it does complement the written descriptions and things that they perhaps they innately know because of their discipline, but actually seeing it does change their perspective on the way they perhaps understand what’s been on the written page, not just by me, but by other people as well.

Sarah Kernan 25:27

Yeah, I think reading something about the historical consequences of what you’re doing, or the context of what you’re doing, that that can make more sense in writing, but actually seeing the embroidery happen and seeing what you’re doing, it just comes to life in a very different way.

Could you talk a little bit about your current project that you’re working on, that you’re leading, “Entangled Textiles: Senses, Connections, Power in the Early Medieval North Atlantic (450-1100 CE).” The description on your university page, it sounds incredible. And I’d love for you to just briefly give us an overview. And I know you’ve only been working on it for around a year, or less than a year now. But if there’s anything that you have, any ideas or discoveries that are emerging at this point, I’d love to hear about it.

Alex Makin 26:20

Yeah, so well, I can give you the background to it. So, before I started at Man Met, Manchester Metropolitan University, I was a postdoctoral research associate. And that’s a step that once you’ve done a PhD, you can go on to do this, be a postdoctoral researcher, or you can go, if you’re able, you can get a job within a university. But most people now do this postdoc step.

So, I was ah a postdoc researcher on a Arts and Humanities Research Council-, that’s a big funding body over here in the UK, funded project called “Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard.” And this was hoard that was found in the area of Dumfries and Galloway in what’s now Scotland. But it was probably buried around 900 CE. And at that time, that area was part of the kingdom of early medieval Northumbria. And it’s a very special hoard because the contents of it, is very mixed and different to, let’s say, all other hoards, really, that we know about. And as part of that, there were different textiles within it. And that’s what I was doing in my, as my part of the project. I was analyzing and writing about these textiles. And one of them was a wool fabric and it went off to be radiocarbon dated.

And it came back as being around about 100 years older than when the hoard was buried. So, this is really exciting, obviously. But it got me thinking because it reminded me of another piece of textile that was probably an apron strap on like a pinafore-type dress that was found in a female burial in Iceland. Please don’t ask me to say the name because I would just ruin it. But I can give the link to the article.

Sarah Kernan 28:12

Absolutely, we’ll put it in the show notes, yes.

Alex Makin 28:15

Brilliant. And then people can read it properly. And this piece of wool was radiocarbon dated and it, too, was and around about 100 years old when it was put in the ground within this female burial.

And so, as the way my brain works with these things, I was like, well, what’s going on here? We know textiles were precious. They were one of the most expensive things that people owned because of the time involved and the effort involved in producing them. And we know that they were in circulation for a long time and that they would be recycled and reused and handed down until they were no longer of viable use.

But the fact that these were that old, 100 years old, so you’re looking at a good few generations, to me, pinged in my head, and made me think, well is there something else going on here at this time? Are there certain textiles out there that are in circulation and being held within female contexts? So let me explain that a bit more. Obviously the female burial in Iceland, obviously female gendered, but the Galloway hoard…The amazing Mary Davis, who was another person on the research project, she was doing a lot of research on different aspects of it. And she realized that quite a lot of, not all, but quite a lot of the objects within a certain part of the hoard, within which this wool textile was part, had female connotations and female gender linked to them.

In my head, I was thinking, well, is there something going on here where you have certain, probably wool, textiles that are being kept in circulation within the female community and have they got special meanings and things associated with them? So, I think the examples we all know are named swords. You know, you’ve got King Arthur’s Excalibur, you’ve got the swords in Beowulf, to name some of the famous ones. And they’re named and these swords have their own histories and biographies and powers. And they have to be given to the right person. And if they’re not given to the right person, disaster ensues, you know. But when the right person gets them, everything tends to go well and amazing feats of whatever occur.

And I was wondering, well, okay, could textiles, certain textiles, be a sort of female equivalent to what’s going on with these swords? And they are, they’re woven, they are gathering stories to them, and as they’re passed from one person and one generation to another, they’re gathering more mystique and supposed power around them. And, I mean, with the Galloway Hoard, for example… Other examples of this type of woven textile are found in different parts of what’s now England.

Alex Makin 31:23

And so this particular textile has travelled a long way. And you can imagine the further it travels away from where it was made, the more mystery and power and mythology can surround it. And so, therefore, I think, wondering, well, is this a form of soft power that’s being wielded, and how does this fit into early medieval society? And is this giving women a tangible way of controlling the world that they didn’t understand because they didn’t have the science that we have today?

Yeah, like I say, a soft form of power within a very masculine world. Well, as we view it today, a very masculine world. And so, that’s how the project started. And now I’m reading about different types of textile to see if I can find ones that I think, oh, that could be one.

If they’ve been radiocarbon dated and they give a nice date, that would be fantastic. If not, I’m hoping that maybe I will be able to talk the owners, the institutions who own these things into doing little radiocarbon dating. Always a bit of a discussion needed around that sort of thing. And a lot of the time they’ll say no for obvious reasons, but you never know. And to see if there’s any pattern. Obviously, we’ve got to work with the surviving textiles, which are very small in number.

Alex Makin 32:39

But I’m also going back across the sources, so primary sources from the period, reading, rereading them from this point of view to see if anything pops out. And I’m going back through work that people have published to see if there’s anything that that comes out from that as well.

I started last November. That’s when I started my job at Manchester Met. But as everyone knows, when you start a new job, lots of other things kind of crowd in the way. So, I’m not working on it all the time because of everything else that I’m doing. And then there was another, I don’t know what to call it really. Well, I’ll just tell you what happens and then you call it what you like.

So, at Christmas, an academic friend sent a Christmas card saying, oh, congratulations on your new job. Your new project sounds really exciting. But I had said that the women curate these textiles. And in my head, I kind of know what that means. But she said, I don’t believe women ever curated textiles. And I was like, oh, OK, that’s an interesting concept.

I don’t agree with it. And we’ve had a laugh about it since. But was like, I don’t agree with that statement. But actually, what do we mean by curate? Because this individual is coming more from a museum kind of background, really. And I assumed that’s what she meant, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was thinking about curate a different way.

Alex Makin 33:57

So I’ve actually gone off on a massive tangent to try and find out, well, what do I mean by curate? Because I now think I need to add a whole chapter about the idea of curation. And I’ve discovered that from an archaeological perspective, the word curate is not a good word. And it’s avoided quite a lot. Or they use it in italics and then skip on to the next bit, but don’t explain why they’ve put it in italics. But I’m hoping to get back on course very soon. So I think it’s a case of watch this space. And I haven’t really got any results to tell you. I’m so sorry.

Sarah Kernan 34:29

No, no. I think the detour sounds very interesting to explore the word curate in this particular context and the implications for archaeological research and methodology. I think that’s really interesting.

Alex Makin 34:45

Yeah, yeah, it is, because there’s a whole thing that goes on about how things can be heirlooms. And things can be relics. And the word curate is used more often with things that are relics, that people seem quite comfortable with that sort of thing. And obviously the word is used within museum contexts and things like that.

But the idea of curating something just generally within everyday life seems to cause a bit of, let’s say, a bit of a stumbling block within people the way people think about things. So, we’ll see. I’ve kind of gone with the Oxford Dictionary’s very broad definition of what curate is for now, and then if something pops up or if I can come up with a different explanation then that will send off on another tangent. But at the moment let’s hope we’re going back to the main road now.

Sarah Kernan 35:35

Well, if I could end with one final question. What advice would you give anyone, but particularly students and researchers, interested and incorporating hands-on craft and making into their research practices?

Alex Makin 35:53

Just do it. Just, yeah, just, yeah, just get on with it, and do it. Because, there is a lot of theory out there about experimental archaeology. It doesn’t really talk about embroidery, though sometimes it includes weaving. A lot of it is aimed at ceramics or lithics or building structures and things like that. That’s really useful background and important, as well, because you need to embed your work within a theory, even if, say, on YouTube, I don’t talk about the theory because I don’t think people are interested. But if they are, then I will do an episode on theory.

But for me, it depends what your research questions are. So if it’s something about how do the materials work, how did they react when they’re being manipulated, the kind of things I’m interested in, you need to be using research. I mean, it took me a year to find the right threads and materials and somebody who could weave the fabric for the Cuthbert maniple project. And that was a lot longer than I anticipated. But, in the end, I got the right materials. And I hope that the results that have come through that project now are as accurate as they can be as a result of that.

I know there’s a cost implication in that. So, look up small funding bodies who will give you grants to help you with these things. There are these groups out there who will give small grants to help fund it for you to get the right materials and the right equipment. Join groups like EXARC, exarc.net. That has a lot of practicing experimental archaeologists and historians in there. Talk to people about their approaches and why they do things the way they do, as well. But overall, it’s be brave and just dive in there because you never know where it’s going to end. And you might take some steps back and go, oh, that one was rubbish, I’m going to rework it, or that didn’t turn out how I expected. That’s, well, that’s not a bad thing. And it’s all about that learning experience and building up confidence.

Sarah Kernan 38:01

That is such a great way to end today. Alex, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Alex Makin 38:07

Well, thank you for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Sarah Kernan 38:10

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.

Around the Table Podcast: British Food History with Neil Buttery

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

A content warning. Please note that this episode contains a detailed description of the death of eels in preparation for a meal.

In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Neil Buttery, a historian of British food. He is an award-winning author of several books, including A Dark History of Sugar; Before Mrs. Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper; The Philosophy of Puddings; and Knead to Know: A History of Baking. Neil blogs at British Food: A History, is the host of The British Food History Podcast, and collaborates on another podcast, A is for Apple: An Encyclopaedia of Food & Drink. Follow Neil Buttery on Bluesky 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

The British Food History Podcast

A is for Apple Podcast

British Food: A History

Neil’s Amazon UK Author Page

Jane Grigson’s English Food

Neil Cooks Grigson Blog

Neil on Steak, Kidney, and Oyster Pudding

Neil on Eels

Museum of Royal Worcester

Delicious Legacy Podcast

Serve it Forth Festival

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:00

A content warning. Please note that today’s episode contains a detailed description of the death of eels in preparation for a meal.

Sarah Kernan 00:17

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.

Sarah Kernan 01:11

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Neil Buttery, a specialist in British food history. He has extensive experience cooking food from the past as a professional chef. He is also an award-winning author, blogging at British Food: A History, and writing several books, including A Dark History of Sugar; Before Mrs. Beaton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper; The Philosophy of Puddings; and Knead to Know: A History of Baking. Neil is also the host of a very successful podcast, the British Food History Podcast, and has even been collaborating on a new one, A is for Apple: An Encyclopaedia of Food & Drink. I am so excited to speak to Neil today about his wide-ranging experiences cooking and writing about British food history. Neil, thank you so much for joining me today.

Neil Buttery 02:03

Thank you very much for asking me to come on.

Sarah Kernan 02:05

You have a very interesting background outside of food history. In many of your podcast episodes, you’ve talked about your life as a scientist and a secondary school teacher. What inspired you to switch gears and delve into British culinary history and start cooking historic recipes and start blogging about British food?

Neil Buttery 02:27

Well, yes, I had been a secondary school teacher, science, biology, specifically. So nothing really to do with food or history. But I did want to go back to university. I got interested in evolutionary biology and ecology, conservation biology, and things like that. So I went back. I did a Master’s, and then I was very lucky and very pleased to get on a PhD course. But then, I was terrified of having to write. You know, the fear of the flashing cursor in the top corner. So, I thought, well, how can I practice doing this? And it being something that’s got nothing to do with the new day job of being a PhD student, because I knew that’s going to be quite intense.

So, I wanted something that was going to be a bit lighter. A friend of mine had bought me Jane Grigson’s book, English Food, and it sat on my shelf for a few years, unread. But I was looking through it and I thought, brainwave, thinking I was being very original, I hadn’t heard of Julie and Julia, oh, I know, I’m going to cook every recipe in this book. It’d be a good de-stress, good project. I’ve always been a hobbyist.

Then a friend of mine says, oh, well, why don’t you blog each one as you go? And then you’re practicing the writing. And of course, knowing that you’re putting it out there onto the internet, I wasn’t expecting very many people to be reading it, but I thought, well, that’s just upping the ante. It’s going to make me try a little bit harder.

Neil Buttery 04:04

So, that’s how it started. I didn’t know what the blog was going to be. It was just me basically cooking the recipe and saying what I thought the recipe was. A couple of paragraphs, and it developed from there. And without realizing it, I was popping in more history.

I got more interested in people who were writing the recipes because Jane Grigson always provides lots of information in her cookbooks. And it went from there really, and I became obsessed. I ended up getting a postdoc position after the PhD in the US. I was in Houston, Texas. And then I was a little bit further up in St. Louis in Missouri. And I was continuing cooking all this English food for my American friends who hadn’t ever eaten the jam roly-poly pudding or something before.

And it all went down really well because we eat weird food, right? We Brits, going to America without toad-in-the-hole and toast. Turns out, not that weird. And that’s really when the penny dropped, and I moved, I basically resigned from my job in the sciences because I like got a little bit disillusioned with it. And yes, two weeks after I moved back, I did my first artisan market stall because I hadn’t realized I’d taught myself how to cook all this traditional stuff. That was 2012. And I kind of haven’t stopped since, really.

Sarah Kernan 05:21

Do you think that your background in the sciences has shaped how you approach these recipes and looking at food in a certain way?

Neil Buttery 05:32

Certainly from the point of view of organizing myself. I can use a spreadsheet. That’s very useful. Things like number skills is very useful. You know, there’s all these weird conversions, different imperial measurements that change through the centuries. The size of pints change, the weights of pounds changes. So, of course we go into metric only just recently really in Britain compared to the rest of Europe. So, it really helps with that. And I convert everything into metric now because it’s just so much easier to do, especially if you’re multiplying up or if in some cookbooks you have to really reduce the size of the thing that you’re cooking.

So, from that kind of sort of day-to-day skills, really useful. And then I suppose what when I started moving on to writing books, writing papers really helped. Because there’s usually a lot of information, you don’t have many words to get that information across in, and it’s usually a complex thing. So it’s basically a storyboard. What direction is all of this going in? And I could apply that organization, really, especially when you’re in the beginnings of writing a book and you’re just overwhelmed with information. It can be overwhelming.

I mean, the downside is being in the sciences. Well, I suppose it’s the same all of academia, really. But being in sciences, everything you write has got to be so watertight. So, I’m very used to be saying, oh, this is wishy-washy. This needs development. No, you can’t say that conclusion. You can’t say that. That hypothesis is true. What you found out isn’t it actually backing it up. So I’ve learned, don’t always get it right, but I’ve certainly learned to let the research determine what I’m saying rather than already deciding what I’m going to say and bend the research to fit my own hypothesis or idea or sometimes misconception.

Sarah Kernan 07:25

When you are sitting down and tackling some historic recipes and you’re deciding to cook something for the first time, how do you go about figuring out what you need to do to actually cook the recipe?

Neil Buttery 07:39

Well, I rewrite the recipe usually in my own words in the notebook to say what I’m going to do. There’s a lot of gap filling in. I think I’m lucky in that cooking through Jane Grigson’s cookbooks, she’s a fantastic recipe writer and she’s very concise, but she wouldn’t get away with those recipes today.

It would not be detailed enough. But for me, it’s the right amount of detail. I think more, the problem with a modern recipe is where it says, oh, cook this for two minutes, this for three and a half minutes on this heat. It doesn’t help you become an instinctive cook. You might have cooked the food and eaten and it was nice, but you probably really haven’t learned anything.

It’s bit like when you’ve got a satnav, a GPS telling you where to go. You often don’t remember the route because it’s just telling you what to do. You learn the route when you’ve got a map. So, it’s helping you get to where you’re going, but you have to fill a lot of it in yourself. And I’m very lucky in that with Jane Grigson, I had to fill in a lot myself. Didn’t realize I was doing it. But now when I went to older cookery books, it’s the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, the gaps were bigger, but it didn’t seem so scary a task to fill in the gaps.

Sarah Kernan 08:55

Makes total sense. Since your initial foray into food history was through cooking, and then you got interested in bigger themes and bigger ideas and topics, I think you’re in a really great position to talk about this. What role do you think food plays in how we understand history and connect with history?

Neil Buttery 09:16

Well, from the basic point of view, everybody eats. Simple as that, really. And of course, it’s not just keeping us alive, although sometimes when there’s not enough food, it’s just as interesting as when there’s lots of food.

But it tells us so much about the social standing, age, gender. Was it a good harvest year? In the case of Britain, of course, it’s a lot about empire and how that empire was functioning. How prices change. All this stuff that’s kind of boring when you sat in a history class. I don’t care about how expensive corn was in the early nineteenth century. You don’t when you were a kid.

But suddenly when you’re actually are having to research this for a reason, suddenly it all becomes very exciting. So, it is important. The problem is it’s fine if you are looking at things like corn or tea or sugar, which is really, well, the commodity products now, but you know they are run, they’re a good measure of how well a country is doing. What it’s buying and selling, how it’s treating its customers, how rich it’s becoming. But it’s all kind of fits into economics and stuff about taxation and stuff like that, which I’m not necessarily interested in.

It’s much more difficult to find the minute details because no one bothered writing that stuff down. No one thought it was worthwhile writing down what servants were doing. It happens behind the closed doors. We’re not interested in that and servants, usually are either too busy to write any of that down, and why would they even bother writing it down anyway?

Neil Buttery 10:51

Possibly some of them couldn’t read anyway. And a lot of the skills we’ve lost, especially when it comes to dairy. Yeah it’s very different in Britain compared to France, where everything’s meticulously written down. Over there, people can trace their cheese recipes centuries and centuries, whilst we can look back about 150 years, because everything before that was done by illiterate young women.

And it’s just lost. So going back to your question about filling in gaps, sometimes you have to go, okay, I’m going to make an educated guess here because I’ve done this kind of thing before. And sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and going, do you know what? I’m just going to do this. I don’t know if it’s going to work. So therefore, at the end of your bit of research in the kitchen, the thing that you’ve made might not be very much like the original thing. And you’ll never know that. But I try not to get too worried about that. Whether that’s a problem or not, I don’t know. Some people would say it is.

Sarah Kernan 11:56

I think if you’re honest about it and, you know, saying you’re not entirely sure if this is how it was or not, then that’s totally fine and appropriate.

Neil Buttery 12:07

But I think sometimes it, in the fact that it isn’t valued, maybe at that time or sometimes by academics today, tells you a lot in itself, tells you lot about the attitude. So sometimes a lack of information actually tells you quite a lot.

Sarah Kernan 12:25

As you have continued to cook and prepare all these different historic recipes from a wide range of different time periods in Britain, how has that impacted what you decide to write about and what you decide to talk about on your podcast?

Neil Buttery 12:43

When it comes to the podcast, I really like to get… Actually, I suppose when it comes to research, especially on the blog, because if I wasn’t doing the blogs, I wouldn’t be doing what I am today. I very much like to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. That’s what I find most exciting. I start getting a bit tetchy if I’m staying in the same place for too long. So I like to learn about a wider variety of things as possible.

And the same, to some degree, goes with the books as well. Of course, they’re bigger topics, so you have to know a bit more because you have to write book proposal and things like that. But usually the reason that I’ve got interested in them is because I didn’t know much about it.

And then the penny will drop. Usually because, oh, I want to find something out more about whatever it is that I’m reading and find, oh, nobody’s written a book about it, which is what happened with the Elizabeth Raffald book. I assumed somebody would have written a popular history book about her and there wasn’t anything there. So yes, it comes from a place of not knowing.

And I quite like that. I like that journey. It’s a little bit like, what’s the saying? Yeah, it’s more about the journey than the destination. So once I’ve arrived at the end of a project, yeah, it’s time to move on to a completely other subject.

Sarah Kernan 14:05

Understood. I think we all get that feeling once in a while. This ties in rather nicely to one of the next things I wanted to ask you, which was how has your understanding of British culinary history evolved as you’ve gained more experience cooking and researching? Have you just become more and more interested in filling in all those gaps, as you’ve said, and trying to understand the entirety of it? Or has this just been leading you in different, more distinct directions?

Neil Buttery 14:35

It’s kind of a mixture of all those things. It’s the great thing and it’s the bad thing about looking to food history, because largely anyway, apart from a couple of maybe Master’s degrees across the world, there are no, there’s no course. There’s no one-on-one food history course that you can do. There’s no textbook. There’s no curriculum or anything like that. So you have to come from your own direction. So it means you’ve never been told how to think about something like we are when we’re in a classroom. You know, but we haven’t been taught how to answer exam questions on this subject or anything like that.

So, we’re always learning because, at least from my point of view, even if it is a subject I know something about, it’s always useful to see other people’s perspective. I don’t think you can be an expert in anything until you’ve heard everybody’s perspective. You can learn the facts. Fine. But that’s not the interesting stuff. It’s assembling it all and interpreting it.

And different people do that in different ways. So, yeah, it doesn’t matter whether I’m broadening my knowledge and skills or whether I’m focusing on one very small, tiny thing. It always feels diverse because like I said, you’re not done learning until you’ve heard everybody’s opinion. And you’ve and you can never achieve that, which I think is an amazing thing.

Sarah Kernan 15:55

That really explains quite a bit about your approach, I think, to the podcast in particular, and how you how you structure some of your seasons. You choose a range of guests and they’re often getting at the same kind of topic from a lot of different approaches. Or, you’re asking their opinions on the same sort of theme or idea. So that’s really interesting that that’s filtered into so many different aspects of your of your work.

Neil Buttery 16:22

Well, but my favorite question is, I guess, something that we’ve sort of been getting at today is, I love to ask people how important authenticity is. And usually I’m met with them rolling their eyes at me. Oh, this question again. Because it’s funny, I never care about authenticity. I think even if you get twenty percent of the way there, you’re going to learn something really important. Usually something you weren’t expecting. Maybe it’s just something as simple as a flavor combination or a technique that you’ve ever used.

I don’t worry about getting one hundred percent there that because that’s not achievable. So, some people I speak to, and this is very broad brushstrokes here, I guess they had to fall into my category of, oh, just have a go, it’s fine. So you’ll learn something. Whereas some of the people go, no, there’s just no point in doing it because the animals are different. They’re farmed in a completely different way. It’s not comparable. There’s no point in doing it. So they’re never going to get more than zero percent then, in their score, authenticity score. Well, I’d rather spend a whole day wasting my time making something inauthentic that just gets me ten percent of the way there. Because you’re going to learn something.

And the thing that I most commonly use is, especially when it’s something that sounds a bit strange, is, oh, that’s quite nice. Food from the past is actually really quite delicious. And food today, it’s a shadow of its former self, really. Yeah, we think the food of the past is awful. It’s probably moldy, or rotten, or gross. You know, it’s all eyeballs and pig’s tails. All this kind of stuff, you know, stuff we wouldn’t eat and we’ve progressed so much, but it’s not the case at all.

Sarah Kernan 17:59

I would actually love if you could delve into that a little bit more. Could you talk about some of your favorite or most memorable, maybe, cooking experiments with historic recipes? You’ve mentioned a few throughout your podcast, and I would love to hear more.

Neil Buttery 18:18

The memorable ones are ones that fall into two categories. One is a bit like what was talking about before, something I was expecting to be awful, but was delicious. But, you know I’d signed up to cooking all these book, all these recipes in this book by Jane Grigson. So, once I say I’m going to do something, I do it. But it did mean I was going to have to have calves’ brains. And it did, I wasn’t very good with shellfish, with seafood, anything bivalvy, like mussels and oysters. Not, so I really had to get over a bit of a mental hurdle with a lot of this stuff.

And this is when I realized, oh, the food of the past is amazing. And the first time that happened was when I made the steak, kidney, and oyster pudding. Because not only does it take forever to make, not only is it a steamed pudding, which I hadn’t really made much in the past, it had oysters in it, which I’d never eaten because they looked terrifying. And it was absolutely delicious. I just thought, oh, this is a thing.

And going back to podcast, actually, because done all this on my own with my mates from work or whatever and friends. It was just so nice. It’s so nice to do the podcast because I get to meet with the other people, which I hadn’t previously done, which is probably the best thing about the podcast, really. So, yes, and so there’s that there’s that first category of stuff, the penny dropping.

Game is another one, especially woodcock and snipe and things like that, you know, things that I would just never have dared try and absolutely delicious. So those are the memorable ones.

Neil Buttery 19:41

And then the other memorable ones are the disasters. Or things that wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster, but there was some kind of trauma attached to it. And the one that stands out is the first time I cooked freshwater eel, because that was just traumatic for everyone involved.

Yeah, because I remember asking the fishmonger for some eels, and he just said, nobody eats eels anymore. But he says, I’ll see what I can do. He phoned me back about ten days later saying, I’ve got a friend who’s caught some eels. I’m off collect them. So I went to collect them. And when I arrived, he said, I know I’m a fishmonger, but everything arrives dead. I’ve never actually had to kill anything.

And he pointed to three eels swimming around in a sort of polystyrene box. So I had to take those home with me. I didn’t drive, so I was in a taxi on the way home with these eels on my lap, sloshing around. It didn’t even have a lid, sloshing around in this taxi. I can’t believe they let me in. My friend came round earlier in the day to dispatch the eels and friends were coming around later to eat them. And they would they just wouldn’t die.

It was awful. It was, we were crying. It turns out later, actually, because I thought, got to be humane about this. I did my research. Nothing told me, oh, when you whack their head, they carry on moving for a couple of hours. So I thought we were whacking them and weren’t dying, but I think they were dead. They just move around, because you take the skin off, you take the guts out, you take their head off, and they’re still swimming around.

Sarah Kernan 21:25

Oh my goodness.

Neil Buttery 21:26

It was awful. Yeah.

Sarah Kernan 21:27

Yeah. After you had that experience, have you paid particular attention to eel recipes when you’ve come across them to see if they talk about this at all?

Neil Buttery 21:39

I did find it. And you know, I did find them after the event, but not in the places you would expect. And this is about what I was saying before, actually, about coming from different, everyone coming from different directions. So, I relatively recently found out that there’s a quote in, I think, King Lear, Shakespeare, by Shakespeare. And there’s a line in there about people making eel pies and the fact that the eels are still moving under the pie when they put it into the oven. So there were little references there, but for some reason not in the cookery books, where they should have been. But it was a thing where that people did know about it because, obviously, Shakespeare’s plays were going be watched by everyone, so it was going to be something that everybody could understand and know what it meant by a phrase.

So yeah the wriggling eels, yeah, that was a thing that everybody knew, but we don’t kill things anymore, or most of us don’t kill things anymore, and none of us really eat eels in this country anymore, either, so. But now I do know and that’s the other the amazing thing is you you’re learning these tricks and I guess hacks you’d call them now, that people have passed on orally throughout the generations that have just vanished and I like to think I’m doing my little bit anyway in trying to, yeah, just try and have us reconnect with the food of the past. Because the route the food to the past is delicious. It’s not weird. It’s great. And it’s our problem that we think it’s weird. The people buying the cookery books and eating the food from those cookery books ate that food because they liked it.

They weren’t doing it because it was weird. They were doing it because they liked it. In fact, cookery books a few hundred years ago were very expensive. So this was good food. And you got to get over that mental hurdle. If you went to a different country and reacted in the same way as people do to historical food, or what they think historical food is going to be like, I mean that would be so offensive. And I think we should apply the same rule in time as well as in space. That’s very Doctor Who.

I mean, mostly I don’t think about it. It’s only because you’re asking me these questions, I think about it. So there’s not some philosophical…I’m not sat in my ivory tower there doing some kind of food philosophy. It’s just, I’m just doing the stuff that I find is interesting at the end of the day. And that’s what informs me what I’m doing.

Sarah Kernan 24:01

Do you find that a lot of your readers and your listeners get in touch with you with their own hacks and tips and things that have been passed down in their families after they’ve heard episodes with you? I know occasionally that’s referenced in the postbag editions that you do, but does that happen on a fairly regular basis?

Neil Buttery 24:26

People send things in all the time, sometimes whole handwritten book, manuscript books that they’ve scanned in for me, or just book ideas, things that their parents did. All the time. And those are the things that are really interesting because especially when it comes to people’s own household that they grew up in or things their parents or grandparents told them and little tricks they were doing or recipes they were doing that have just completely died out now and we wouldn’t necessarily know anything about. It’s just so interesting.

It’s the minutiae, I guess. You know, if you are looking at the history of corn, like the corn laws, no one cares about the minutiae of what was going on in the kitchen, but that’s what I find really interesting because it helps you imagine what it was like for those people to be in that house, whether it was good or bad.

And if you can somehow recreate it, I think that’s closest you can get to being in some kind of time machine. Now there are cynical people who go, no, that’s not true, because you can’t control everything. But I think it definitely is true. Although, I’m as authentic as I can be, I don’t sit there, try to source the equipment for years. But if somebody does tell me some information, then I can integrate it in and be more authentic.

Sarah Kernan 25:50

I’m just really interested by this idea of, you have become this receptacle in a way, I guess, for other people’s historical food traditions. And I wonder if you’ve thought of doing anything with that beyond integrating certain things that are applicable to whatever you happen to be working on.

Neil Buttery 26:11

Yeah, I have. It’s one of those things where what I really would like to do is essentially write a book, certainly nothing like a memoir, but I’ve been sent such a rich amount of stuff or I’ve been told such a rich amount of stuff, that I feel like, you know, taking the of the best of what I’ve learned in the podcast or being sent by listeners or readers of the blogs to try and assimilate that together into something.

It is something I thought about. But it’s so big and sprawling. I’m not quite sure how I would tie it all together. It would be really nice to revisit things in maybe a book form where there’s more space. I restrict my blog entries. No more than a thousand words, which is three pages of handwritten. I write everything out longhand because I’m from the past. So it’s three pages of A4. That’s the amount of space I have to write a blog post. So it would be nice to go into things in a bit more depth. And a lot of the stuff I wrote ten years ago, I know so much more now. So it would be nice to bring back a kind of, maybe like a best of the blog or an elaborated version of some elements of the blog.

I suppose with one thing, I mean, I am working on book ideas at the moment and one of the things from doing the blogs, one thing I’ve really become interested in is the lost course of the savory, which used to happen after the main course, but before dessert, or sometimes instead of dessert. And it’s completely died out now. Although some of the foods we do still eat, but in a very different context. That particular strand is something that I think could become a book. And there’s lots of people who have sent information to me on savories. And it’s one of the most popular episodes that I’ve made for the podcast was the episode on savory, so it’s something that people are interested in. So I think taking separate strands might be the way to go.

Sarah Kernan 28:08

Maybe this would be a good place to kind of wrap things up a bit. Do you have any projects in the works that you would like to talk about?

Neil Buttery 28:18

Well I’m doing season nine of the podcast, so that’s exciting. A nice, good, varied package. I’m very pleased with the group of people that I’ve got to come and talk on it this year. I think it’s the most varied one I’ve got so far. We’re going very posh porcelain in one episode, to Bronze Age, Tudor cheese, really all over the place. Very eclectic. So it’s been really good fun putting that together. We’re between seasons for A is for Apple, but really…

Well, I’m working on a new project with the Museum of Royal Worcester. We’ve done a couple of projects together now, which we’ve completed. So, lots of things that are maybe going to happen. We’re planning some new projects.

Like say, I’ve got six book ideas at the moment I’m trying convince people are good ones. One is about wild fermentation, which of course is very trendy, live ferments. Over in Britain, certainly in England, there’s a lot of people saying, this is weird foreign food. We don’t like it. It turns out that we used to eat wild fermented foods all of the time. We’ve just forgotten that we did.

So that’s one of the books. That’s my main idea at the minute I’m sort of punting around different publishers. So hopefully that will happen. I’ve got a few ideas. Some of that just straightforward popular history books and some cookbooks. I’ve never actually written a cookbook. I’d love to write a cookbook.

Sarah Kernan 29:44

You should. I hope that book idea gets through.

Neil Buttery 29:47

Hopefully. Hopefully. Oh, and also, oh I forgot to say, I’m also involved in a food history festival, online food history festival, October 18th. It’s called Serve It Forth. We thought that was an appropriate name since end of it. Every single historical recipe ends with Serve It Forth. So we’re very excited about that. We’re still working out exactly who our guests are going to be for that, but I’ve been doing that with Alessandra Pino, Sam Bilton, who are my co-hosts on A is for Apple, but also Thomas Ntinas, who’s the host of the Delicious Legacy podcast. And we’re really excited about it. So keep an eye out for tickets and things. Of course, with it being online, of course, anybody in the world can come.

Sarah Kernan 30:26

Absolutely. We’ll definitely put a link in our show notes to that.

Neil Buttery 30:30

Great.

Sarah Kernan 30:31

Well, thank you so much, Neil, for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it.

Neil Buttery 30:35

Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.

Sarah Kernan 30:38

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.