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: Archaeology of Food with Crystal Dozier

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and anthropological archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is Chair for the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the city of Wichita. Crystal describes researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Follow the Archaeology of Food Laboratory on Instagram and Facebook.

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

Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory

Grape Wine Biomarkers on Pottery Sherds

Recreating Pumpkin Leather

Recreating 16th Century Wine

Making Mead

Riley Muncher (Alumnus, Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory)

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.

Today I’m speaking to Dr. Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and Anthropological Archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is the Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the City of Wichita. I am excited to speak to her today about her expertise in researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today.

Crystal Dozier 01:36

I’m delighted to be here.

Sarah Kernan 01:38

So, as I just mentioned, one of your areas of expertise is using archaeological approaches to studying food and foodways. Could you tell us a bit more about what those approaches are and what that can reveal about food and foodways centuries or even millennia ago?

Crystal Dozier 01:56

Of course. So, in your expertise of food history, you’re focused on the written word related to humans’ relationship with food. And archaeology is the companion science to history in this way, in that we’re telling a historical story, but we do not have always the written documentation to accompany it.

So, the archaeological record is a wealth of information that isn’t written down, but rather embodied in artifacts. So, our ability to tell the history of food in archaeology is going to the remnants of cooking practices themselves. To be explicit, this is looking at animal bones. This is the burned crust on the outside of bowls that are thousands of years old. This is looking at micro botanical remains that have been carbonized and preserved for thousands of years even. So, this is a companion to the written word in our understanding of food history by looking at what was actually practiced and what physically remains from those ancient techniques.

So, I like to think of the archaeology side of it as giving us this extra window into humans’ relationship in food that is actually far deeper and far wider than what the historical narrative can tell us. The historical narrative is, of course, relegated to those manuscripts that survive, written for people who could read them, which is a minority of humans across time and space.

So archaeology gives us these insights into all of these practices that we don’t have a written record for, or when we’re lucky enough to have a written record for, usually that’s biased or partial, and archaeology can widen this view of what was actually done in the past.

Sarah Kernan 04:04

I absolutely love the way that you phrase that, that archaeology and this history are companions in creating this narrative. And that’s an excellent segue into my next question. A lot of scholars who deal primarily with this written evidence have simply relied on the work of archaeologists to supplement or support their findings. But your research and publications really show that archaeology often reveals things that simply aren’t present in other evidence or even brings to light things when there isn’t any evidence at all in a written record. So could you talk about some more examples of your work that really highlight the value of archaeological methods in revealing previously hidden or unconsidered moments in a culture’s relationship with food?

Crystal Dozier 04:57

Yeah, I think there’s lots of different ways to attack this question. I usually, as an archaeologist, I usually actually start with the written word. So, we rely a lot on the historical narrative and ethnographies that are written. But sometimes you have to realize that those are partial or incomplete. And so I have a couple of examples I can think of, one from my work and one in archaeology more general.

To come from my work, I had done a study as part of my dissertation looking at a Native American community right before Spanish colonization in central Texas. And archaeologists called this the Toyah phase, somewhere around 1350 AD to just, you know, the colonial moment, 1600, 1650.

And what we know about this group of people is that they were non-agricultural, so they’re mobile hunters and gatherers. There’s lots of bison bones at the sites. There’s usually lots of stone tools, but one of the unique things that is found at these kind of sites is pottery.

And for non-agricultural groups that are mobile, it’s a huge question of why you would put in the time and the effort to make pottery you’re doing the same life ways that you’ve done for thousands of years, you’ve never needed pottery before. You’ve got to lug it around. It’s heavy. It’s fragile. So you have all these questions about why would you start developing a ceramic tradition? And this is a group that there is no direct written history for. We have archaeological evidence, but there was no observation by colonialists into this tradition by the time that we have a historical record in North America.

So my dissertation asked the question of why would you put so much effort into making pottery for this foraging group? And one of the things that I noticed about the kinds of sites that we see for this group of folks is that quite a number of them showed evidence of feasting, of throwing really large parties that were probably inter-ethnic.

Crystal Dozier 07:12

And the reason why I say this is that we find earth ovens, which are a form of cooking technology all over the world in which people put rocks into fire, and then use the heat in the rocks to cook other foods. Usually it’s, you dig a hole, you set a fire, you put the rocks in the hole, the rocks absorb the heat of the fire.

You let the fire burn down, but the rocks are still hot. Cover it with green material, put your food in there, cover it all tightly wrapped. You cover it back up with dirt, and it’s kind of like a crock pot. It maintains the heat and will cook it for a long time without direct fire, so it’s very safe. And looking at the earth ovens at these sites are ginormous.

They are, I have to use metric, it’s 10 meters by 10 meters. That’s 30 feet by 30 feet. This is, you know, you can lie down several people inside of this crock pot, which implies that you’re either cooking something very, very large, or you’re feeding a lot of people, or both. And so these sites that have pottery for this non-agricultural community also includes pottery from the surrounding regions.

So, they’re in central Texas, but they’re pulling ceramics from east Texas and from west Texas. And so, I looked at the residue inside the pottery at some of these sites as part of my dissertation, with the idea that they’re probably making something important in them. And I had a bunch of different hypotheses about what kind of things they could be cooking. And one of the things I chose to explore is whether or not they were making fermented alcoholic beverages, because that’s what people do.

Crystal Dozier 09:04

When you throw a big party, a common feature internationally throughout human history is that you provide a beverage to your guests. And so I decided to include the ability to look for some biomarkers associated with grape wine, tartaric and succinic acids.

And to my delight and surprise, we did find this evidence of tartaric and succinic acids in this pottery sherd that predates Spanish expedition into North America. None of the colonial powers in North America reported grape wine as an indigenous product. But North America has a huge variety of “wild grapes” that colonial narratives emphasized how bountiful and available they were, which is probably because they were in the leftover stands that were being cultivated by Indigenous people prior to colonization.

And so this research helps open up the door to say, hey, even though Europeans didn’t see this, and I do think part of this is because the European mythos around fermentation is so strong, particularly wine. So that the idea that you have Indigenous folks producing the same things and using the same technology was previously unconsidered. And I hope this research opens that door to say, hey, even though the Spanish, the French, didn’t see it, doesn’t mean that this wasn’t being practiced. Because human beings love a good drink.

Sarah Kernan 10:53

Absolutely.

Crystal Dozier 10:56

And there’s tons of it. So that’s one example from my research of things that hadn’t been considered before, that was a hidden foodways. And the reason why it’s hidden, I think, you know, may be really multilayered. But archaeology in general, I think, provides these alternative narratives to challenge both the historical understanding and really empower the way we think about humans’ relationship with food.

And this is by clarifying the origin of various foodstuffs. You know, where do these products come from? And also giving, I think, a lot of respect to the people actually doing the cooking, the chefs, and the women, and domestic labor that’s actually providing these meals for their families and their communities.

Sarah Kernan 11:45

I love that description. That’s such a great example that you have there. On a kind of related note, you’ve mentioned some elements of this as we’ve been talking so far. But could you talk more about how using a methodology like experimental archaeology might differ depending on the cultural context that you’re working in? For example, you’ve researched some very different topics and cultures. You have researched pumpkin mats made by Indigenous groups in the North American Great Plains. And you’ve worked on recreating 16th century French wine following a recipe in Charles Estienne’s L’agriculture et maison rustique. And these are really different places and times and types of supporting evidence, other evidence to draw upon to supplement your work and research and narrative. How do you think about tackling such different projects and what type of evidence you can draw on that might be available to support an experimental approach?

Crystal Dozier 12:50

Sure. So my work in experimental archaeology is mostly to understand how do we know from the archaeological record what people were cooking and eating. So in order to do that we need to actually make things we think people were eating and then see how it decomposes, see how it is formulated, and what components of it may persist in the archaeological record, you know, for thousands of years.

And for these kind of studies we have to start with what we know about these food products. So that can either come from the historical record, which is either through recipes, written down, which are fairly constrained, or it has to come from ethnographies, which are third-party observations of this foodstuff. If you’re very, very lucky, another resource that we can use is oral traditions of people who have continued those foodway practices. All of these sources come with the same kind of recognition that they are a product of a time and a place and therefore are not a full understanding of a particular practice.

For example, I don’t think everyone in the sixteenth century was making wine in this one particular recipe that we found. Or for the pumpkin leather mats, which is a form of fruit leather made with pumpkin, we were able to find two different records of ethnographies, of observations, of watching it being made, and they follow different techniques.

Because the goal of these studies is to figure out what is left in the archaeological record when the food is complete, that means we also need to take account what are the scientific processes that we know are happening in order to record it. These experiments do look and feel very scientific. We are measuring everything, everything from how much time it takes to how much water we put in, you know, to the actual looking at these things underneath the microscope, which is my main focus. Is, from this food, what is left on the crumbs of the piece of pottery that we’re looking for, the microbotanical crumbs, so to say.

Crystal Dozier 15:17

So, we have to be very exacting with our methodologies. But the process of it is remarkably similar, even though we are looking from very different traditions and time periods, in that you start with what do we know about this practice? What do we don’t know? What is likely to survive in the archaeological record? How can we trace that through this experiment? And very often we find also through the practice of making these past foodways, all sorts of tactical knowledge you would never know without physically trying to do it yourself.

You know, how would you know that this particular food gets very sticky at this stage, or that it makes a particular sound? And that sound is probably rather than, you know, what we’re doing, the temperature checks and the pH levels, maybe it was it was probably that sound or that texture that led ancient cooks to know, oh, this is done. So in that way, it is very scientific.

But I also really appreciate the very humanistic nature that recreation of these foods gives you is that, oh, this is messy and cooking is messy, and why did no one ever tell me that you can dry pumpkin and then rehydrate it to use all year round?

Sarah Kernan 16:38

You’ve worked on such a variety of really interesting projects. Do you have any favorites or is there anything you’re really excited to research soon?

Crystal Dozier 16:48

Yeah. I’ll tell you maybe the highlights of the experimental archaeology is when the food turns out really good. There’s also when the food does not turn out really good. So, my most “successful” experiment, in that it turned out delicious, is probably, I made mead, honey wine. And the goal of that experiment was to figure out if the pollen in the honey survived the fermentation process. Because pollen survives for a long period of time, we know that people often add honey to all sorts of fermented beverages. And so it was a very straightforward experiment of, does that pollen, does that remain through the fermentation? And that was probably my most delicious experiment to date.

The pumpkin mat also is a very delicious experiment. So, in that, which I kind of referenced, is dried pumpkin leather, like fruit leather, that is woven into a mat, like a, think like a table mat, but not that you would put stuff on, just for storage. And that is an incredible piece of technology. That we did the experiment three years ago and it’s still hanging in my lab. It is completely still edible. And every six months, we like take out a pair of scissors and cut off a piece and dunk it in hot water and be like, is it done? Do we need to take it down? Nope, this is still pumpkin-y.

Sarah Kernan 18:32

Wow.

Crystal Dozier 18:33

So that’s the really exciting, when you’re like, wow, this really works, and it’s delicious, and it continues. Every once in a while though, you realize how much we don’t know from ancient cooks and that they knew ways to make things delicious that were not written down and we do not have access to.

So recently, one of my graduate students completed an experiment looking at mesquite bean pods. So you probably know mesquite, the little bushy tree people use its wood a lot for smoking, but the beans themselves you can grind into flour. You can make all sorts of things with that. You can make bread, you can make cakes. We were particularly interested in making beer. In South America it’s very common, it’s called algarroba. And we wanted to recreate this knowing that in North America people were probably doing it as well. And I must say, missing a written record certainly missed something for us, because the experiment was successful in that we got really great data and being able to understand if or when people might have been making this in the past, based on starch residue. But it kind of tasted like dirt.

Sarah Kernan 19:50

Oh. I’m sorry that one didn’t work out.

Crystal Dozier 19:53

That one, I mean, it fermented, it was two and a half, almost 3 percent alcohol by volume. So, a light sessionable beer, but it was pretty acidic to modern tastes. So it’s one of those things of like, okay, we’ll be able to tell this, but we need more research into what ancient people were doing because they probably knew better than we do how to make this actually delicious.

Sarah Kernan 20:19

Wow. Well, I guess you might have to have another graduate student down the line work on that one again.

Crystal Dozier 20:23

Exactly.

Sarah Kernan 20:26

If we could turn a little bit toward teaching and public engagement. Food is such an incredible way to draw in people, get them interested in all kinds of topics and fields of study that maybe they normally wouldn’t be all that engaged with. And your institution, Wichita State University, has a really incredible resource, the Archaeology of Food Laboratory. Could you talk a bit about how the lab functions and how it works with and engages students of all levels and ages, and how the lab interacts with the public and non-academics?

Crystal Dozier 21:07

Sure. So the Archaeology of Food Lab is something that I established shortly after arriving at Wichita State as a way to not only formalize a lot of these research questions that I’ve had in the basis of my research, but also explicitly to be the avenue to support not only students, but the public at large. And so the way that the lab functions is really in two different components.

The first of which is that the lab actually serves as a contract archaeology research lab. In that I take research contracts from mostly private archaeological firms with very particular questions about the foodways that they’re researching. Most of these firms work in what’s called cultural resource management, which is a compliance-based field that ensures that when development is happening, that roads, airports, anything with federal funding isn’t destroying the archaeological record as part of that development. And as those firms ensure the safety of our historical record, they encounter things that they don’t know what to do with and that very few people have expertise in.

And so my lab actually accepts samples from all over North America. And we perform the residue analysis for different areas, looking for those residues of what was being cooked in the past. We’re one of the very few labs that is able to take these as contract samples. Otherwise, you have to usually have like a personal relationship with an academic, which is complicated with university systems.

Crystal Dozier 22:56

The benefit of doing this is not only that we get to know more about the archaeological record, but I employ students to work with me on these projects. So, students, we have undergraduates and Master’s students who work, are employed in the lab, who are paid to do this research. And this is a companion to the kind of work that they’re doing as part of their educational journey. Right. So they’re learning it in the classroom and do a lot of independent studies.

All of my Master’s students have an independent thesis or research project that may or may not, you know, intersect here. But this allows us to support their work better and aid our understanding of the history. In turn, this allows the lab to be stocked for those student projects. And so almost all of these experiments that I’ve spoken about have included students. So, the pumpkin man experiment was the work of an entire class, that we took it on as a class project. I mentioned Riley Muncher is the Master’s student who worked on the Mesquite bean pod beer. So, this affords the lab the ability to do these experiments on the academic side as well. And this in turn is something that we want to ensure is available to the public.

We do a fair amount of events with our more public facing parts of the university. This is everything from public lectures. I was invited down last year, down to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, who is the ancestral population to a lot of the archaeological work I’m doing here in Kansas now. And they asked me to speak about what are the foodways of the Wichita and the archaeological record before the modern moment. And so I think those are really important conversations to have about what are traditional food ways, what are the forgotten food products that have really complex interactions with health and well-being.

And so, this is something I do in the classroom, but also to the public, whether it’s school groups coming to visit, or working with our art museum on campus about how do artists interact with food and what do we know about the history of it. I like to support as much of this public facing as possible and do it through avenues like this podcast and open access publishing. We talk about how hard it is in the ivory tower to get our research out there. And so whenever it’s possible, I try to make sure that our research is available freely to the public, like the pumpkin leather mat article is open online for anyone to read anywhere all over the world.

Sarah Kernan 25:54

I love how all of this feeds into itself. And you’re really supporting, through this lab, all these different really important groups and constituencies, and it’s all serving this greater purpose of both researching and garnering interest from students and the public, as well as other academics. I think that’s just so important and really great that there’s this locus on your campus for that sort of activity.

I have a final question. Let’s say someone is listening to this podcast right now and they’re thinking, oh my goodness, I would absolutely love to use all these different archaeological methods to learn more about foods in the past, but I have no idea where to start. What do you recommend, whether they’re an undergraduate student who’s maybe looking for a major, or they’re an interpreter at a historic site, or a scholar at an institution who is looking to incorporate archaeology into their bag of research tricks? What would you recommend?

Crystal Dozier 27:04

Right. So, I’ll start this with a piece of advice I love to start when talking with the general public. And it’s that our relationship with food as human beings has so dramatically changed in the last 20 years, the last 50 years, the last 100 years, the last 1,000 years. So, one technique or avenue or trick that I really enjoy is when you are sitting down to a meal or if you’re in the grocery store, try to identify or look up, just real quickly, you can just Google it, where does that food come from? Where is its origins? And I think a lot of folks don’t realize the complex histories of so many of these food products.

You know, we think of tomatoes as an essential part of pasta sauce in Italian cuisine. But tomatoes come from Mesoamerica and were considered very questionable to European tastes in the early colonial period. And not only looking at where is it, where is the origin of this food, but also what did it look like prior to domestication? Over 90% of the food we eat today has been fully domesticated and managed under human horticultural and agricultural practices.

Again, a quick Google will show you what is the archaeological record of what did this food start as? And it’s absolutely mind boggling. Look up bananas. Wild. Humans did things to these foods that has absolutely changed the landscape of our globe. And I think if you start there, of what did this food actually look like and how have humans transformed it? And you know, you can then apply that if you’re working in a particular context.

What does this narrative actually look like? What would have meant to do the dishes in this society? How would you have cleaned them? Something as simple as that. It’s not going in the dishwasher. Are you using a brush? What is the brush made out of? This kind of exploration and imagination, I think, is really crucial to the archaeological process. You really have to push yourself into what are the boundaries of what we know about the food. And there’s always more to know.

Sarah Kernan 29:34

Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today and for talking a bit about the archaeology of food.

Crystal Dozier 29:41

Of course, anytime.

Sarah Kernan 29:44

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: Edible History with Victoria Flexner

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the historical dining collective, Edible History. She is the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023. Through these projects and her Substack newsletter, Victoria expertly communicates history through food. Follow Victoria Flexner on Substack 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

A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes

Edible History (Supper Club)

Edible History (Substack)

Museum of Food and Drink

Ken Albala

Lucy Schaeffer, photographer

Victoria Granof, food stylist

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.

Today I’m speaking to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the historical dining collective, Edible History. Along with Jay Reifel, she is the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023. You can also read her work in her Edible History Substack newsletter. And I’m so excited to speak to Victoria today about her extensive experience recreating historic recipes and communicating history through food. Victoria, thank you so much for joining me today.

Victoria Flexner 01:37

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

Sarah Kernan 01:40

Before you published A History of the World in 10 Dinners, you founded Edible History in 2014 as a way to share history through food and dining experiences. Could you talk briefly about the supper club events Edible History hosted for several years and how that eventually led to your book?

Victoria Flexner 02:00

Absolutely. I studied history as an undergrad and then also did obviously my postgrad in history as well. But I’d also worked in restaurants for many years. And so Edible History as the supper club was kind of a natural evolution of my work in those two spaces. And it began as sort of a small little indie supper club in Bushwick and Williamsburg around 2014 and kind of quietly grew into, you know, still kind of like a local supper club, but we had a nice loyal following of people. It was an interesting mix of foodies, people who are really interested in history. And yeah, we would host these dinners in different kind of pop-up spaces around Brooklyn.

Victoria Flexner 02:58

Each dinner was rooted in a specific time period. So, like Tudor England and all the dishes served that night would be from period cookbooks and manuscripts from Tudor England. And so then as each course would come out to diners, I would tell everyone about the dish itself, you know, where it came from, but then also use it as sort of like a window into kind of broader historical themes of the period. So the idea was always to use the food as just kind of a lens through which to approach the entire time period and kind of bring people in through the flavors and the smells and things, and then kind of get them hooked into the into the moment.

Sarah Kernan 03:44

Absolutely. How did that eventually lead to the creation of the cookbook? Was that a goal initially or just a product of the process over time?

Victoria Flexner 03:56

It was kind of a bit of both. Through a long series of events, as these things kind of often happen, someone came to a supper club who introduced me to someone who worked in publishing. And eventually I began working with my agent. And the idea for a book was sort of always there in the background, but the supper club was kind of operating full force at the time. We were doing a residency at the Museum of Food and Drink, MOFAD, when it was back in Williamsburg. And um and so it was one of those things that kind of just kept getting pushed down the road. It’s like, oh, when we have a bit more time, we’ll put some kind of a book proposal together. And then the pandemic hit and…

Sarah Kernan 04:42

You had time!

Victoria Flexner 04:45

It was a lot of time. Do things like write a book proposal, which is exactly what I did. It was acquired by Rizzoli and yeah. I guess. And then that became the book. So it was sort of a, I think Edible History, the supper club, really pivoted into sort of the written format during the pandemic, interestingly. That was like the pandemic pivot for Edible History.

Sarah Kernan 05:12

Does Edible History exist as a supper club anymore?

Victoria Flexner 05:15

It lives on in my Substack, which is kind of musings and individual histories of foods and beverages. And it lives on in the book. But I think the supper club, it existed in like a really unique time and space, also within kind of the food scene in New York. You know, it’s interesting post-pandemic. Everything is more expensive, which is so legitimate, but also it kind of changes the ways in which you can do a fun, affordable pop-up dinner. And I think that we have like a wonderful supper club that we can kind of like put our, you know hang the hat up on, or whatever the saying is. We did amazing events for almost a decade. And that feels like a really wonderful run for the supper club wing of the whole thing.

Sarah Kernan 06:15

Before I start asking you a lot of questions about the book, I do have one follow-up question about the supper club events, just because encountering historic recipes out in modern dining experiences is not very common. There’s only a handful of restaurants you can go to, for example, that serve historically inspired recipes or dishes on a regular basis. And so I’m wondering, what was the response that you got from diners who attended the event? Was it a little bit of shock and awe, or were they just more engaged in history after the experience? Did they think the food was just incredibly weird and off the wall? What did they think?

Victoria Flexner 07:02

It was a wonderful range of reactions, and it kind of depended on the diner, you know. If it was like someone who was at the tenth-century Baghdad dinner because they love reading about tenth-century Baghdad in their spare time, they’re probably there more for a bit of like the history chat, but some of my favorite diners were always like the friends and family members who kind of got dragged along by their foodie or history-loving loved ones and who would be kind of a bit shocked at first, maybe a little intimidated, maybe not super enjoying some of the flavors. But I think after, you know, maybe like a dish or two when they would understand that this isn’t going to be like a typical tasting menu that you would get at a restaurant and the conversation is kind of flowing about the period. You would, you would see them sort of almost start to like settle into the time period.

And it was really amazing. I mean, once when we did a Tudor England meal in Bushwick, this young guy came with like a friend of his and he was horrified when we brought out the cockentrice, which was one of Henry VIII’s favorite dishes, which is the front end of a pig, sewed to the back end of a partridge. And he was like kind of hiding behind his friend and, and like, and that’s great because you know what? He probably won’t forget the cockentrice like that.

Sarah Kernan 08:40

Exactly.

Victoria Flexner 08:41

Forever. And it also, I’m sure we’ll probably talk about this more, but one of the most magical things about recreating historical recipes is that you get to be in the same place, just for a moment, as someone who lived so long before you. And that shock and awe that, you know, that guy was having in reaction to the cockentrice is perhaps the same that someone else at Henry VIII’s court, centuries ago, also experienced when they saw the cockentrice being wheeled out of the kitchen. And that’s so cool to just witness and be a part of.

Sarah Kernan 09:23

For listeners who haven’t had a chance to read a History of the World in 10 Dinners yet, or even look at it, I just want to describe it for a moment. It is both a cookbook of historic recipes and an incredibly well-researched deep-dive into specific moments and places in global history. And it’s also a visually stunning book. The design and the layout are so thoughtful. The food styling and the photography are beautiful. They bring each chapter and dinner party to life, and it really makes you want to just start cooking the dishes that are in the book. It covers a very wide range of historical periods and places. And notably, many of the dinners and the recipes are from non-Western culinary traditions. So, to get started with talking about the book, how did you decide exactly what to include, the themes and the chapters, as well as even the specific recipes?

Victoria Flexner 10:25

We set out a large project for ourselves. I remember a few months after signing the book deal, I was visiting my godfather at his beach house and I was walking down the beach and I just started crying because I realized the magnitude of the project that I just sort of signed all this paperwork to do. Such an idiot, why did I decide to do this? Why not just like one place or one time period? It was tricky to kind of take the entire globe and then distill it down. It’s like, okay, we’re gonna, we’re doing ten time periods and places.

One of the rules that was sort of self-imposed, but I felt like was important was I didn’t want to include any recipes from any place that we didn’t like have recipes from. So, one could start in ancient Sumeria because there are cuneiform tablets that still exist to this day with recipes for bread and beer, but I felt like you kind of want a whole cookbook from a time period or a larger collection of recipes to work from that give a fuller image of what that culture and that place was like, because we are going to use these recipes as the windows into sort of doing a little kind of mini-history of each place. So, if we’re only going to cover places that, kind of, large culinary repertoire still exists from that that kind of cuts it down a large amount.

And the oldest cookbook that we know of in human history is a cookbook from ancient Rome that was compiled in the first century AD by a man named Apicius. And so this ancient Roman cookbook felt like a place to start and it’s, yes, perhaps a little problematic to start with ancient Rome, is like beginning of history. I hope that I did a good job of acknowledging in the text that just because we’re beginning with ancient Rome doesn’t mean that that is the start, quote unquote, of history. Because it often is in, kind of, more like textbook Western history, which is problematic as we sort of revisit the historical narrative writ large from a 2025 post-colonial perspective.

And then once we sort of had the start point, I knew that the end point was going to be New York City in the nineteenth century, because I did not want to include a time period that someone was still alive from. Because then you’re competing with memory and that, you’re never going to win.

Sarah Kernan 13:29

It’s challenging.

Victoria Flexner 13:30

Yeah. Like that’s not how my grandma made it. Or like I actually remember that, you know, I used to, my mom used to do it this way. Anyway, ending in the nineteenth century with New York and the birth of the restaurant, which felt like perhaps after the writing of the first cookbook in ancient Rome, the birth of the restaurant about two thousand years later is, in New York, is perhaps like another really pivotal moment in global food history. So that felt like a neat place to wrap it up. And then it was about trying to strike a nice balance between the Eurasian continent and the Americas, trying to be reflective of pre-Columbian American history, while also not working with a lot of written sources, and also trying to include some African history, again, not working with a lot of written sources.

There was quite a few cookbooks and manuscripts to choose from, from medieval Europe. There’s about 140 culinary manuscripts from medieval Europe that still exist either in libraries physically or kind of digitized versions. So that was easy. It was almost like an embarrassment of riches and one had to kind of cut down. Okay, we’ve already done, you know, France.

But Asia and the Middle East, also a fair amount of sources to work with. So that was just kind of juggling what recipes fit in with the other ones, you know? I chose Spain, Muslim-ruled Spain, Al-Andalus, because that felt like a nice way to touch on European history, but also Islamic history within Europe, which is not a subject people know a lot about.

For the African continent, it would have been amazing to do something from Timbuktu, from the empire of Mali. Unfortunately, all those sources were destroyed by Al-Qaeda in 2010s or so. So that knocked that out. And then it felt like we’d already done, you know, perhaps a good amount of, sort of, places near Egypt. So didn’t include Egypt. But yeah, it was just kind of an interesting, it was sort of like putting a patchwork together of different places.

But hopefully the, kind of, end result is, that as you move through the cookbook from ancient Rome through the Middle East back to Europe, and then kind of into the Americas, into Africa, back into Europe for a moment, and then end in New York, you feel like you’ve seen a lot of parts of the world in some of their most impactful moments and sort of follow the journey of culinary styles and ingredients. So you’re also following the kind of food itself around the world. And it’s only “a” history of the world, not “the” history of the world.

Sarah Kernan 16:30

Exactly.

Victoria Flexner 16:32

Hopefully protect ourselves a little.

Sarah Kernan 16:35

How many of these chapters, which are basically organized as dinner parties, essentially, if that’s fair to say, how many of these did you do as supper club events? I know that there’s at least a couple, like the Tudor England, which you had done at least some of the recipes from at events. Are a lot of these taken directly from your experiences with the events or was a lot of it brand new?

Victoria Flexner 17:05

Yeah, a lot of them are. Actually, I think Ethiopia and Al-Andalus might have been the only ones that were, and Versailles, weren’t done as supper clubs prior to the cookbook coming out. So, we had, I mean, we’d been doing the supper club for a number of years. So we had covered a good amount of, you know, space and time and geography. But which was also really helpful in in putting it together because we’d seen firsthand people’s reactions to different dishes and narratives. And, you know, you’re sort of evaluating like which stories are people really resonating with, but also simultaneously which dishes are speaking to people, which is so hard to kind of determine sometimes because even if it speaks to you, it might not really resonate with someone else. I mean, it’s so subjective in that sense.

Sarah Kernan 18:01

Yeah. Yeah. So when you’re putting together these recipes, how are you balancing what is said in the actual recipes, in the original cookbooks, the original texts, and balancing that with the modern kitchen setting, modern expectations of cookbook readers today? How do you accommodate all that? And how does that affect the final product that you’re putting out?

Victoria Flexner 18:31

Yeah. Well, the original recipes are pretty spartan. Often it’s just like, kind of, here are the ingredients and, you know, combine them and, you know, walk around a field and say fifteen Hail Marys and cook it until it’s done.

Sarah Kernan 18:51

And serve it forth.

Victoria Flexner 18:52

Exactly. Yeah. And serve it forth. So there is a fair amount of like kind of guesswork that you’re doing with measurements and cooking times and temperatures and things like that. I would say that recipes today are so much more detailed, which is fair enough because recipes for most of human history that were recorded weren’t recorded to be used by average people, you know, as a cookbook that you would look to when, you know, you want to make like a nice Friday night dinner for your friends or something.

These recipes were recorded by very elite professional chefs who were working for the nobility, the aristocracy, you know, the wealthiest individuals. And they were recorded more as kind of a record of what was occurring in that household, but also often as sort of like a manuscript to consult for kind of dietary guidance or medicinal guidance. In a time before our medicine was made in labs, what we ate was our medicine and how we, you know, heal ourselves or adjust our temperaments or humors.

And a cookbook that you might find in a noble house in Renaissance Italy wasn’t going to be used by the family to cook up a thirty-minute weeknight meal. It was there for the doctors to consult and also just kind of as a physical representation of the culture that was being exercised there. I mean, these are the same individuals that were having their portraits painted and who were commissioning churches and grand houses. You know, they wanted the way in which they experienced culture to be kind of codified and remembered.

Sarah Kernan 20:56

Could you talk a bit about what role you think food plays in connecting with and understanding history, since that is such a fundamental part of this book?

Victoria Flexner 21:09

Yeah. I think it’s only recently that food has, and I mean really recently, like the last decade or two, maybe that might be a stretch, maybe the last decade, that food has really been taken seriously as a medium to study history. I often compare it to kind of like what women’s studies or women’s history was in the 1970s and 80s, where it just wasn’t taken very seriously by traditional academia. I mean, even when I was doing my first master’s degree, I had to explain to my professors what food history was, which was kind of like mind blowing to me, but they hadn’t heard of other food historians, even though there were some who were out there practicing, like Ken Albala, who’s, you know, like a legend and a true OG in that sense.

But most history kind of comes to us either in the written format, or we look at a painting, or we go to an old historic site, and we’re kind of taking it in that way. But food is tasting the past, it’s deeply sensorial, but what makes it so critical to the study of the past is that it’s a way to access the lives of individuals who left nothing behind. Most humans who have lived on this planet left absolutely no trace of their life. And I think any of us would be really sad to think that you know once we pass, there’s nothing left of us.

And it’s not just individuals, it’s entire cultures and communities. And if we’re gonna be frank, this is, generally speaking, women and people of color. You know history is written by the victors and the victors have been white Christian Western men. So it is mainly their experiences that we have records of. But food gives us way to relate to people who weren’t literate, who didn’t write books or build buildings or make art that we still have today.

Victoria Flexner 23:17

And when we cook something that someone else cooks like five hundred years ago. We’re performing similar actions. We’re inhabiting a shared metaphysical space for a moment with this person. We’re smelling what they smelled. We’re tasting what they tasted. And maybe it sounds a bit woo-woo, and maybe that’s why the ivory tower is still a little bit on the fence about the entire subject, but it is a legitimate form of study. It’s anthropological in a lot of senses.

It gives us access into someone else’s life, not perhaps in the traditional sense of they were born on this date. This is you know how long they lived. These were the major events of their life. But you can share an understanding that’s very similar to the understanding you have when you go to a restaurant and you eat something that is mind-blowingly delicious. And you know, for a moment really are so grateful to the chef and the, and the, and the cooks who prepared it and the people who grew that food, you know, you’re connecting with someone else. It’s just connecting with others across space and time.

Sarah Kernan 24:24

One thing that I really like about the format of your book, when you look through it, the images and the layout, it is like a work of art. And that gets across in a very different way than if you’re just like reading these historic recipes on their own. When you’re seeing these images of the final products or the stages of cooking, you really get the sense that dining in the past and food of the past was a really beautiful sensorial experience in a way that you can’t really access through a lot of other historical sources. And I think that’s a real gift from this book. It’s a different way to appreciate these historical recipes and to consider dining in the past and a different way of thinking about that. So when I look through the book, I start thinking about how beautiful of an experience some of these dinners must have been hundreds of years ago in a way that I don’t necessarily get immediately when I’m just looking at the recipes and the historic cookbooks on their own. So I think that is a wonderful contribution that you and Jay have made through this cookbook as well.

Victoria Flexner 25:52

Thank you for saying that. Although I think that a lot of that credit has to be given to Lucy Schaeffer, who is the photographer for this book, and Victoria Granof, who is the food stylist. I mean, the two of them were, are, just legends, the absolute best. I mean, every day on set with them, you know, we sort of knew which dishes we were doing. And, you know, in your mind, you might think, oh, okay, well, it would look really cool if we did this.

And then they would just come up with something that was like a thousand times better than you could have ever imagined. They are two women who are supremely good at what they do and should get all the credit for really making this book so visually stunning. And Rizzoli also does. They know how to make a beautiful book. I have to say the cover of this book was Victoria Granof’s idea. She was like, I want to do a Roman floor mosaic. And so she had given me this like huge list of all these various things to buy before the photo shoot. So I spent like three mad days running around New York, like acquiring like half a red snapper and like an oyster shell that looked exactly like this and one bone marrow bone. And I was, it was before I’d met her and she’s a good friend now, so she’ll find this funny. But I was like, this woman is either completely insane or a genius.

The most random list: one peacock feather, four roses. And on the first day when we showed up, she had made this mosaic. They weren’t actual, kind of, like ceramic pieces. They were little pieces of paper that she had individually hand painted. And then she made this entire, kind of like, floor and then got all these random ingredients out and just sort of started, you know, kind of placing them around and her and Lucy worked together a lot. Lucy just sort of, you know, kind of instinctually knew where to go and how to photograph it. And you’re just standing there looking at it like, oh God, it’s like a lot of food scraps on like a piece of cardboard. This is weird. This isn’t what I thought. And you look at it on the screen and you’re like, that’s incredible. That’s absolutely incredible. It was the first shot we did of the whole shoot. And I knew immediately that it had to be the cover because, just, amazing.

Sarah Kernan 28:29

Yeah, I mean, it really does look like a Roman mosaic when you look at the cover. I mean, so much of it. For anyone who actually makes or attempts to make historic recipes, I think we all run into the same problem. The final product is often just a different shade of brown and it doesn’t look all that attractive yet somehow like everything in this book is so colorful and just beautiful to look at. I mean, there’s so many colors and textures and none of it looks boring or just all different shades of brown and is really exceptional. Kudos to the whole team that worked on this.

Victoria Flexner 29:14

Yes. Thank you. The team came together and yeah, and magic happened in the kitchen and the studio.

Sarah Kernan 29:21

Well, if I could switch a little bit to asking about more recent work. Your most recent food history writing is on your Substack, Edible History. What sorts of things do you write about in that space? And do you have any plans for what that will become or what you want to do in that specific writing space?

Victoria Flexner 29:42

Yeah. So the Substack looks at individual foods and beverages, and it’s covered a really broad range. Again, it’s kind of like taking one singular dish or ingredient like the pineapple or the tomato or Dr. Pepper or, you know, the New York City cup of coffee in that kind of classic Anthora blue and white cup. And then using that as, again, a way to kind of look at a kind of bigger moment of history or a bigger theme within history. And they’ve been really fun to put together.

It’s been fun to work in a way where I’m still kind of wearing my historian hat and doing a lot of research, but it’s also a way to reach, I think, an even broader audience. And it’s been really interesting, kind of this whole new audience that I’ve been able to engage with over Substack, which is also its own interesting kind of entity at this moment in time. If you’re anyone who’s writing in any way, I think Substack is just kind of an interesting place to be.

But it’s pop culture. It’s, you know, it’s now, but it’s also history. And so I’m really enjoying writing about food in a way that perhaps feels like a bit more immediate, but is still very much tied to the past. So, it’s been really wonderful. And hopefully somewhere in those Substacks, there might be a future book. I can’t say, but yeah, absolutely kind of continuing to work in that sort of style, I suppose.

Sarah Kernan 31:25

Wonderful. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate your time, Victoria.

Victoria Flexner 31:31

Oh, thank you for having me. It was really wonderful.

Sarah Kernan 31:35

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: Odeuropa with William Tullett

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to William Tullett, Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York and a Lead in the Horizon 2020 funded project Odeuropa. This European research project was designed to show that the sense of smell and scent, or olfactory, heritage is an important way to connect, promote, and protect Europe’s cultural heritage. This episode was recorded just before the project’s funding period concluded at the end of 2023. Follow William Tullett and Odeuropa on X (formerly Twitter) 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

Odeuropa

Odeuropa Website

Odeuropa Smell Explorer

Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage

Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit

Heritage Smell Library

Historical Scent Collection

Mentioned in the Show

Uncommon Senses Conference, Centre for Sensory Studies

American Historical Review, “Knowing by Sensing: How to Teach the History of Smell”

Osmothèque

Museum Ulm

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a new 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.

Today I’m speaking to Dr. William Tullett, Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York and a Lead in the Horizon 2020 funded project Odeuropa. This European research project was designed to show that the sense of smell and scent, or olfactory, heritage is an important way to connect, promote, and protect Europe’s cultural heritage.

Will, thank you so much for joining me today!

William Tullett 00:53

Thanks for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Sarah Kernan 00:55

Could you tell us a bit about Odeuropa? What’s the purpose of this project? Who is participating? Just some general information about it.

William Tullett 01:05

Yeah, so it’s a project that, well it’s still running, although it started in 2021 in the midst of Covid and will finish at the end of this year. Because of that it feels like it’s been running for a much longer time than it has, I think. But the main idea of the project is to use a kind of multidisciplinary mix of methods that includes not just history and art history and literary studies, but also computer science, so natural language processing and computer vision to work with both digitized text and images from the past, um, and also heritage science. So, kind of working with museums, um, and what we would call GLAMs, so galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, but also with chemistry, analytical chemistry, that allows us to examine the smells that objects from the past exude, um, and to try and preserve them for the future.

William Tullett 02:04

So it’s, ah it’s, an interdisciplinary project. It involves people across 6 countries, 7 different languages, multiple different universities, so it’s been quite a feat of organization. Um, and I’m luckily not the chief PI. So the PI is Inger Leemans in Amsterdam, who with her other Amsterdam colleagues including Marieke van Erp, have been the ones kind of really organizing and making sure that we all do what we’re told. So it’s been quite a big project and an exciting project to be part of and we’re now getting to the stage where we’re finally releasing a lot of the kind of results and final outputs of the project for people to kind of look at and play with. So there are tools. There are books. There are various websites and bits of digitized data for people to look at. So we’re now at the point we’re encouraging people to engage with all of that really.

Sarah Kernan 02:59

But before we get into all of those products that are coming out of Odeuropa, um, could you speak a little bit about how the project was initially developed and how the team came together. Because this, as you mentioned, it is a very large project. It’s a very impressive group of researchers who have come together.

William Tullett 03:16

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, so the project came together really, um, from the Amsterdam side, from Inger Leemans and Marieke van Erp and Arno Bosse, who are in the Dutch side of the project. And I think one of the things that they did that was really good was, and that you don’t see all the time now we’ve got Zoom for everything, is that they invited all of the people that they wanted to be involved in the project to Amsterdam, right. So we had multiple workshops together where we kind of talked about the kind of things that we’d like to do, the kind of outputs that we wanted to see from the project. And I think one of the big challenges with these big interdisciplinary projects of the sort that European Horizon 2020 funds, is that you want projects that give outputs that are state-of-the-art, not just for the historians on the project, but also for the people who are doing compute the computer science side of it, The heritage science side of it. So trying to make sure that all of the people involved are doing work that they find kind of useful and cutting edge and is going to advance knowledge in their own disciplines. And I think smell has, you know, was a useful thing to focus those various disciplines around, partly because it’s a sense and a stimuli that really presents a whole series of problems.

William Tullett 04:36

So, like linguistically smell is a problem, right? It’s difficult to describe smells. How do we find them? How do we categorize them? What does it mean to visualize smell in an image and how do we identify them in images? Can we archive smells? How do we archive and preserve them? So kind of all of these questions that I think resonated with all the different disciplines that were involved in the project made smell a kind of, to use the slang of grants people, a kind of wicked problem for us to kind of have work with and um, really the project, the call that we applied for, because obviously you know you can’t just come up with good ideas, there has to be a call out there that fits it, and the call that we aimed at was one that was about reconnecting digital resources with museums. And so essentially what we’re trying to do is use smell as a way to connect all of these digitized texts, databases, and image databases, and archival catalogs, and so on, with the kind of experience of heritage in heritage sites and museums and spaces by bringing smells back into those spaces, And so that’s really what the kind of project has been all about and sort of geared towards.

Sarah Kernan 05:51

As you alluded to, smell is a difficult topic to work with in many ways and it’s quite ephemeral and in so many ways and contexts, it’s different to so many people. Why should we be interested in studying and preserving and contextualizing smells and olfactory heritage and experiences, especially ones in the past? Why does that matter and how does Odeuropa fit into that?

William Tullett 06:22

So I think the reason that historicizing smell, preserving smell, contextualizing smells both in the past and present matters is because smell is a kind of fundamental part of our everyday experience. It’s a fundamental part of how not just humans engage with the world but also other animals more than human animals, as well. And if one of the goals of academic research in general is to understand the ways that we and other creatures experience the world then smell should therefore kind of be a fundamental part of that. But I think also there’s been a tendency ever since really the nineteenth century in museums, and it’s a tendency that luckily is now slowly being undone, to make museums and the experience of heritage all about the visual or at least the audio visual. And so if smell is really central and fundamental to our everyday experience and indeed was central and fundamental to people’s everyday experience in the past, then you know it makes sense to try and reintegrate that into museum spaces particularly actually in cases where you know the artifacts themselves or the paintings or other objects in museums and heritage sites have had particularly important olfactory or smell-related connections. It’s the classic case of, well we can have an incense burner in a glass case, but you know the whole point was that this thing was supposed to be used to burn incense and that had a smell and indeed had other kind of visual, tactile qualities to it.

William Tullett 07:56

So, I think it’s necessary for us to kind of recontextualize all of the things in museums that we have, but I think there’s kind of a much bigger broader reason why engaging with smell is really important. And that’s that many people today are often alienated from their sense of smell. And yet if we are to respond to the massive challenges that face the globe in the you know in the next five, ten years, we need to engage more with our environment and understand our environment better. And one way to do that is through smell. So by engaging people’s noses, by engaging not just academics and students with smell, but museums and libraries and the people that work in them and the audiences that use them, by engaging those constituencies with their nose, what we’re trying to do is also create a sense of olfactory awareness and encourage people to attend to the evidence of their noses more.

William Tullett 09:04

And a simple example of why that’s important is we’re all familiar with the idea of sell by dates and use by dates on packaging for food. Now if you’re in the seventeenth century and you went to buy food, you would go to a market and you would pick stuff up and feel it and touch it and you know put your knife into butter and take out the center of it so you could smell it. You know, all of this kind of very multisensory interaction. And now in the twentieth and twenty-first century, smell in supermarkets and other spaces that sell food, you know smells are still important but they’re fundamentally about trying to get people to spend their money. They’re about creating a desire for products rather than allowing people to assay quality of products. And so when there’s now been a move to try and get people away from using sell by dates and use by dates and instead just to kind of trust their own senses in order to be more sustainable by using food if it’s still fresh. Actually it’s been really interesting to see that many people are not able necessarily to smell out whether milk is fresh or not right, or whether it’s gone off or not because they’re just not used to using their noses. So that’s a kind of simple example I think of why encouraging people to be attentive to the evidence of their nose and getting people to engage with their nose is quite important from the point of view of sustainability and environmental awareness and you know, engaging our students, engaging museums and their audiences with smell is one way to create that more sustained olfactory awareness among people. So there’s a kind of wider social role I think that smell can play and history is one way to get that to people.

Sarah Kernan 10:48

That’s a really wonderful connection from the historical to how we can use that today in present day contexts. How does Odeuropa actually collect information, research that information about smells? What is the process of what Odeuropa is doing?

William Tullett 11:07

So, one of the things that Odeuropa is trying to do is to get smell out of lots and lots and lots of digitized archives. So, for anybody who’s listening to this podcast who is a historian, you know, or has worked with historical texts online, you’ll be aware that there are a load and those of great databases now full of historical source material. For example, Early English Books Online, or particularly relevant for this podcast, the Wellcome Library’s amazing collection of digitized recipe books. But we wanted to be able to do is kind of cut down the kind of needle in the haystack work of finding smell in those documents and to extract as many examples of smell occurring in digitized texts, historical texts, as possible. And so, we composed a massive dataset of historical text that includes text in English, German, Italian, Dutch, French, Slovenian, and some Latin. And then we trained models to be able to detect references to smell in those texts. And so we have kind of seed words like smell, or stink, or you know, kind of key olfactory terms. But then we also are looking for the different, what the natural language processing people would call frame elements. So, who’s doing the smelling, where is the smelling occurring, how are they describing what they’re smelling, all of that kind of data as well. What are the emotions that are connected to the example. And so, we trained, we trained models by annotating texts ourselves and then using those to train to train the models and let them loose on this historical text data, and then it’s gathered loads and loads and loads of references to smell.

William Tullett 12:57

I mean, you know, I think we’re now at the stage in the Smell Explorer, which is our kind of online database which anybody can go and look at, of smell excerpts, I think we’re now at the stage where there’s millions of references to smells from text data in there, including text from Gallica, the big online French digitized collections, the Deutsche Historic Archive, like loads of different text. So that’s the text part, then there’s the images part which is much more difficult because how do you decide what’s smelly in an image?

Sarah Kernan 13:29

Right? Exactly.

William Tullett 13:31

Yeah, that’s a problem, right? Like and it’s a problem that kind of, I think you could easily annoy a lot of art historians by answering badly, and so one of the things that we did early on in the project was to think about, well, what are the types of objects, or animals, or gestures, or spaces, which in different periods from the 1600s to the 1920s were thought to evoke smell? So there are really obvious things like gestures around, like holding the nose, or taking snuff, or smoking tobacco, for example, or throwing up, which is something that occurs in lots of allegories of smell, particularly Dutch ones, in the seventeenth century. And, but also we’re looking at animals, so like dogs, civet cats, you know, that were particularly associated with smell, and then also flowers as well. So, we did a whole kind of side project where we were training models to look and identify different flowers in still lives.

William Tullett 14:33

That’s been an interesting and tricky part of the project, but essentially it involves drawing boxes around objects and then training computers to then find more of those objects. That’s the very short form explanation. So, for example, we trained it to find gloves because early modern gloves were almost always perfumed. So, if we can find lots and lots of examples of gloves we can, kind of, that’s one olfactory object that we can find. Or we looked at chimneys and then we looked at chimneys with smoke and without smoke to think about the representation of smell and pollution, or different smoke coming from different objects. So if it’s coming from a chimney, it’s smoke, if it’s kind of a cloud of smoke that we’ve identified that’s coming from a teapot then it’s more of a kind of steam, right? So, thinking about different forms of vapor and how you identify them in images. So that’s the text and image stuff and then the other part of it, I guess, is the heritage side of it, which has involved some quite different methods.

William Tullett 15:30

And for the heritage science side of it, we’ve kind of had a mix of social science methods. So, for example, one of our case studies was the smell of heritage vehicles, particularly cars, and we ended up interviewing lots of car enthusiasts about like kind of do they value the smells of their cars and how would they describe them? We also, but then, we also used scientific methods. So, we used various forms of pump and other that that would basically pump air over a fiber and the fiber would extract the volatile organic compounds. So then once you’ve captured the volatile organic compounds, you take them to a lab, you put them in a gas chromatography mass spectrometry machine, which then allows you to essentially see which smells are, you know, which compounds are making up the smell of that particular car, right. So, it was a mix of kind of social science stuff and more kind of what people wrongly or rightly might call hard sciences like chemistry. So, it’s a truly interdisciplinary project and it’s partly thinking about, I think, the way in which smells and the impressions that they leave are not just textual but also actually materially about us today, which I think the kind of car example really nicely gives you a sense of.

Sarah Kernan 16:56

Absolutely.

William Tullett 16:57

So yeah, whole different mix of methods to extract smells. And hopefully we’ll keep to use, keep using that multidisciplinary mix into the future, because I think that’s kind of the future of smell studies and sensory studies.

Sarah Kernan 17:09

That’s really fascinating how many, how many different sides there are to this project and how many different disciplines are converging in one place. Um.

William Tullett 17:19

Yeah. I mean I think that’s always been a strength of sensory studies right? So, like, sensory studies you know is a field that really comes from anthropology and geography, but now has this kind of rich interdisciplinary mix of methods. And if you go to the Uncommon Senses conference which is the big kind of interdisciplinary sensory studies conference in Concordia in Montreal every two years, you’ll kind of see a whole rich array of people doing a whole different series of methodologies, from kind of more common historical literary, art historical types of thing, to people who are doing like research on senses and spider sex. And you know we had a whole panel where it was people getting to play with different types of tactile technologies like rumble chairs and tools for training dentists that involved scraping off virtual plaque and all this kind of stuff. So, I think there’s kind of a sense in which we are just drawing on a tradition within sensory studies that is very multidisciplinary in really interesting ways.

Sarah Kernan 18:21

Now that Odeuropa is coming to a close, could you talk a bit about some of its outputs, the products that have come of Odeuropa, and whether or not those have achieved Odeuropa’s main goals.

William Tullett 18:37

Well, of course we’ve achieved all of our main goals on Odeuropa, and I’m not going to suggest otherwise. I mean, I think, I think in some ways that we’ve achieved and um, exceeded in many respects what we set out to do and that’s partly because as soon as we started to talk about smell and the past when we announced the project in late November 2020, the amount of interest we got was absolutely incredible. And that’s led to lots of opportunities like the American Historical Review where we’ve done a series of articles with them that’s included the first ever published smell in a historical journal with its own DOI, right? So, you know we’ve been able to do this extra stuff that we never planned in the first place but has, I think, pushed the field forward in really interesting ways. But the main outputs that we kind of planned to do, which we’ve also managed to do in the time that we’ve had, um the Smell Explorer, which is as I’ve said before the kind of big data set online where people can browse all of the text data that we’ve gathered and image data that we’ve gathered. So that has millions of references on it and people can freely use that online and there’ll be a link in the show notes for people to look at that. We are hoping in the future we’ll be able to add more data to that. The problem is, of course, with anything like this is it costs time and money to process data to put more in, but there’s already another project going on called POEM in the Netherlands which is all about early modern English literature and poetry and smell, and we’re hoping to integrate more data from that project into the Explorer.

William Tullett 20:14

And then the other things we’ve done. We’ve got the Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage which I’ve kind of been the editor-in-chief of, which is an ever-expanding resource and we very much plan to keep adding entries to that. So if you want to write about a smell or a particular nose and way of smelling in the past or a particular kind of place or smellscape, then please do get in touch with me. Very happy to welcome more entries to that. But the encyclopedia also has alongside the entries what we call storylines, which are a way of representing smell not just in the form of a kind of linear text as you would get in a kind of article or a book, but in the form of kind of interactive hypertext stories. So we use the open source tool Twine, which some listeners may be familiar with, that basically allows you to create digital choose-your-own-adventure type stories as a way to create stories that kind of, you could use smell to leap between different places and times in the past, right. And kind of making real use of smell’s full potential there to crisscross across times and places. So there are lots of storylines for people to explore in the Encyclopedia as well. And then there’s the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit which is kind of really an attempt to give people the resources, particularly in museums and heritage sites, to integrate more smell into their practice. And so that contains lots of advice on kind of how to find stories that you can tell about or with smell in your collections, about how to kind of work to create smells and then diffuse them in a space, different diffusion methods that people might want to use for example, and also has information on kind of the risks to be aware of, right, because lots of conservators and other people are quite nervous about using smells in museum spaces. So that’s like a 200 and something page PDF that you can download online. But there’s also a series of resources connected to that that people can use, for example, to create smell walks around their own museums and heritage sites, or cards that they can use to kind of do storyboarding to think about smell in their collections and how they can tell stories with smell.

William Tullett 22:31

And then the final thing, I guess, that the final big kind of public-facing thing that we’ve produced which is at the moment accessible to fewer people because it’s not online. And one of the beauties of smell is that it frequently resists digitization in an ever more online and virtual world. And, but, the final example is something that I can show on camera but you won’t be able to see because you’re listening to this. But what I’ve produced is this magical box and it contains twelve different scents that we’ve worked on with perfumers during the project. Re-creations of different historical smellscapes or smells, some of which were kind of, very much imaginary, sort of, creative interpretations. So we’ve got the smell of hell in there which is based on looking at the way the smell of hell is described in seventeenth century sermons, and then working with a perfumer to interpret them. Some of them are kind of more based on looking at recipes. So, we’ve got pomander and perfumed gloves in there. Both kind of based around an interpretation of early modern recipes. So it’s a real range of different scents and the aim is to give those kits to museums and then to work with them on integrating them into some of their curating and education practices in attempt to get smell into more, into more people’s lives right? We kind of, and all of this, the Toolkit the Smell Kit, they’re all based on things that we did during the project as well. So we had a kind of smell tools that we arranged with smells at ah Ulm Museum in Germany, we did a whole workshop on malodors and kind of how to use, which was partly about you know how do we use bad smells in a heritage context. And of course we started during the pandemic so we kind of had to innovate and use some different methods to get smells to people and so some of that material has ended up in the Toolkit, as well. Different ways to distribute scents to people for events. So it’s all based on those three years of experience and research. So yeah, there’ll be links in there. There’ll be links in the show notes. Please do look at the Encyclopedia and the Smell Explorer and download the Toolkit. And if you do do look at them or use them then get in touch with us and let us know what you do with them.

Sarah Kernan 25:00

That’s fantastic! That, that box is very impressive. It really is a little magical box of smells that you were showing. Will that be available for anyone to try to get a hold of, or is that exclusively for museums?

William Tullett 25:15

So at the moment it’s exclusively for partners that we’re working with and the people who attended our kind of big end event which was in Amsterdam last week. But we’re also doing something else with the box and the smells, in that they’re going to be preserved in the Osmothèque. So for those who don’t know what the Osmothèque is, it’s essentially the world’s largest archive of perfumes. And they, Odeuropa and the Osmothèque have collaborated so that the Osmothèque can begin to host a heritage smell collection there, which would include our smells and hopefully in the future more smells with the scents themselves and the documentation that we’ve produced with them. The hope is that more places like the Osmothèque will begin to kind of preserve smells as well and that in the end we’ll encourage a culture where archived smells are publicly accessible to people on a wider basis in the way that say video or text or audio are. I think we’ve got a long way until we can we can get to that position. But that’s kind of like a much longer term goal for us.

Sarah Kernan 26:25

Great. Has anything surprised you or the team as you have been working on Odeuropa? Have you have you come across anything whether it’s a smell or a story or a description or any new conclusions that have just really knocked everyone’s socks off?

William Tullett 26:44

It’s always very difficult to answer, isn’t it, when you’re somebody who’s kind of like, knee deep in a subject area. Stuff that you will find fascinating and that knocks your socks off will probably be quite boring to lots of other people and seem like a kind of minor discovery. But, I think that the thing for me that has been really interesting and surprising. So, the first thing has been the public reaction to it which has been really welcoming and really engaged and really fascinated with what we’re doing in a way that I’m not sure I expected. And I think hopefully that will open up opportunities for more people to do this kind of work because it will encourage more researchers to go into the field. In terms of the actual research though, I think that one of the things that, I wouldn’t say it was surprising to me but which I think the project has really allowed us to do, is to tell a richer variety of stories about smell and its histories than were otherwise kind of there in the historiography before. So, you know, a lot of the work pre-Odeuropa had kind of focused on one of two things: perfume and its histories or sanitation and public health. And so it was either the fecal or the fragrant and that was kind of your choice.

William Tullett 28:15

And I think one of the things that has been really nice about Odeuropa is it’s given us the opportunity and the resources to explore a series of other stories, and for me that work has involved kind of opening up new questions about the history of animals and smell that I hadn’t really thought about before. You know, one of the things I found really interesting on going through our material was just the sheer amount of stuff about the care of animals and being sensitive to animal sensitivities around smell in not just in kind of sixteenth, seventeenth century sources but all the way through into the late nineteenth century. And I think there’s so much work to be done to be done there and that’s something I’m going to be working on in my next project. But also stories about war and conflicts, that was another kind of area that I thought was, came out a lot in the source material that we’d collected and the relationship between war and smell over time. But I think there’s a final thing that did surprise me is that the project has completely changed my attitude to my methodology.

Sarah Kernan 29:20

Really? How so?

29:22

So, basically when I started the project, I was very much of the mindset of a lot of other sensory historians like Mark Smith, which is that but we can never really reconstruct what it was like in the past and there’s no real point in using our noses. You know, it’s all about text. It’s all about language. There’s no point in actually engaging our own senses. And indeed, that’s kind of what I say in the introduction to my first book. And now thanks to this project and thanks to working with not just the computer scientists and the heritage chemists and scientists, but also working a lot more with creative practitioners and artists with perfumers and flavor and fragrance specialists, it’s kind of completely upturned that viewpoint and now I’ve ended up publishing a whole book that basically argues we should use our noses. You know, and that there’s a lot to be gained by smelling stuff and that maybe we should publish smells instead of publishing books. Maybe that would be a more exciting and interesting way to engage people with the past that’s still based in scholarly research. So I think actually the big surprise for me has been that working with all of these wonderful people and collaborating across disciplines and outside of academia, has completely changed how I see my field and how I see research. And I think there is something to be said for that more widely for historians, actually. A lot of academics and historians are some of the worst examples of this tend to assume that their understanding of the modern world is kind of just like how the modern world is, and so then they compare say, the early modern world, with that, right, and that’s kind of led into all kinds of weird assumptions about smell, including the idea that we live in a less smelly and more deodorized world today than we did in the past. Now you can say that if you’re an academic in an air-conditioned office that’s regularly cleaned by underpaid cleaners. It’s rather more difficult to say that we live in a deodorized world if you live next to one of the massive waste dumps that we have here in the UK, or if you live in the South of the United States next to a paper pulping plant, right. So, I think yeah, that’s the thing that’s really come out of the project for me is just working with a much more diverse range of people. You have a much more diverse range of sensory experiences and that has made me kind of question how I do my work and how I should do it in the future. It’s a very long answer, but I think, you know, it actually that was the thing that surprised me the most.

Sarah Kernan 32:02

Well, I think this is a perfect tie-in to a final question. Um, so say someone who’s listening to this podcast episode is thinking learning about historical smells sounds absolutely amazing. How do I do that? What do I do next? What do you recommend?

William Tullett 32:23

Yeah, I mean the first thing I’d say if you’re thinking about learning more about the history of smell and about historical smells and how to engage with the past through smell, congratulations. You’ve made the right decision, and you’ve listened to this podcast correctly. So well done. I think that the first thing I would say is to just pay attention to the smells around you, actually. So, one of the things that I try to do in the new book is I have olfactory figures which are just moments in the book when I say go and smell this thing that might be in your cupboard, right. Because lots of the smells that are around us every day have a much, much deeper history than perhaps we appreciate. And, I mean, one example of that and the kind of specificity of those histories is wintergreen. So, wintergreen is a kind of smell and flavor that is in lots of different products. In the 1960s and 70s they found out that people in the UK hated the smell of wintergreen. It was their one of their least favorite smells. In the US it was one of the most liked smells, most preferred smells. And the reason for that was because wintergreen was in loads of medical stuff in the UK, and in the US it was in root beer and candy, right. So, what I’m saying is if you kind of start at the tip of your nose and think about, well, why do I like this this particular smell right? Why is this smell important to me, you know, and use that as a kind of road into thinking about your relationship to the past through smell I think is the first thing I would suggest.

William Tullett 33:54

But then there’s so much great material that’s been published in the field and there are various ways that you can kind of get an introduction to it. We published a conversation piece in the American Historical Review which is free to access. And that was, that’s a really nice introduction to the field. But also, there’s a whole online bibliography that I’ve curated of over seven hundred entries, so if you want a kind of giant reading list to start and to pick out something that might interest you, look out for the Past Scent Bibliography which you can find on the Odeuropa website for information on how to do, to look at that. But finally, I mean one other thing you can do is do what lots of people I suspect on this podcast do, which is do things like recreate recipes right? I mean before we came on air, I was suggesting that, you know, one of the nice things about doing this with the Recipes Project is that I think lots of people who are interested in historical recipes are much more minded to be welcoming to ideas about reconstruction. And yeah, just find a historical recipe and try and remake it and think about, you know, what do the different materials that are going into that recipe smell like individually, what does the process smell like, what does the end result smell like, just doing some basic material engagement with actual stuff, I think is really important. Because I could sit here and recommend you loads of stuff to go and read, but I think it’s actually more important you engage your nose than engage your eyes as a kind of route into this.

Sarah Kernan 35:33

Everyone heard it here first, just go out and smell things. That’s all you need to do to get started.

William Tullett 35:39

Absolutely!

Sarah Kernan 35:40

Well, thank you so much! This is a great conversation. Thank you for joining me today to talk about Odeuropa.

William Tullett 35:48

No problem at all. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Kernan 35:50

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.

Critically Making Games from Historical Cookbooks

By Alessandra Zinicola Lopez

To make something edible is arguably the anticipated end-expectation of the design and use of any food recipe. Making is entwined with cookery, from the writing of its instruction, guided by the experimentation involved in developing a recipe, through the tactile creation process of the consumable result.

As scholars, we can approach the study of recipes from different perspectives. My educational background is in technical communication, but my doctoral work has been done through the University of Central Florida’s innovative digital humanities program, Texts and Technology.

Within this program I typically focus on historical domestic technical communication, the old receipts that instructed Americans for centuries on how to run households. But rather than solely approaching my research from methods historians or technical communicators might default to, I approach my work like a digital humanist, and have found critical making to be useful in exploring my studies.

In this article I aim to introduce the critical making research method to recipes research by showcasing a digital exercise I have completed using it. Through this, I hope to encourage other recipe scholars to experiment with this method.

In Ratto’s 2011 publication of Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life, the author writes about critical making merging concepts of critical thinking and pragmatic physical making together to create a process-focused way of deriving knowledge.

Ratto explains the method includes three stages: a literature review, prototyping, and reconfiguration, discussion, and reflection. The method is performed to bridge gaps between technology and society.

The critical making process can be interactive or collaborative and various digital tools can be used to perform it. In this exercise I used Twine, an open-source hypertext platform that allows for the formation of scholarship through online interactive non-linear narratives. I would describe it as a tool to create a digital choose-your-own-adventure.

Image Credit: Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/poeticalcookbook00moss/page/n8/mode/1up

I worked with Twine to explore a historical cookbook that interested me because of its creative use of poetry to instruct meal preparation. The book is Maria J. Moss’ A Poetical Cook-Book, a community cookbook originally published in 1864 during the American Civil War. An aim of the project was to generate public and scholarly interest in historical recipes through gamification. I thought that perhaps a younger, technologically savvy audience might have their interest in American culinary history piqued through a digitally interactive experience. I used the critical making research process to create a hypertext narrative game based on the cookbook.

The following is an abbreviated example of the show-your-work type of documentation done during the prototyping stage of critical making.

To begin, I consulted Twine’s discussion boards and searched for tutorial videos on using the platform. I wanted to create all the passages and arrange them in the way I felt would make sense to a user. While it was easy to select and place each recipe, it was harder to figure out how to lead up to them, transition between them, and end the journey.

In the next passages, I offered information about the project, and I allowed the recipes to be accessed in the order of what people typically consume during mealtimes, and additionally in any other way they want to access them (i.e., dessert for dinner). After I added all the recipes, I played with how they could link together. It was then that I realized the way to click through them could be a conversation between the user or attendee and the host.

Image Credit: Twine, https://twinery.org/

I eventually ordered the passages and links together as pictured above. I then started to fiddle with color. I used a tutorial to guide me through the tips on how to change the font within the stylesheet. While I was initially successful in finding fonts and colors for the game, I ran into some issues.

I tried to figure out why my colors displayed incorrectly. I had copied and pasted code from a forum discussion response that claimed to be a coding answer. Revisiting it, I realized there was code missing. Once I added it, the issue was solved. This type of refashioning constituted a reconfiguration portion of the project.

Image Credit: Twine, https://twinery.org/

I felt the exercise in gamifying a historical cookbook was successful and well received. Through the process of critical making, I found that it has provided a path to be more creative as a scholar by exemplifying the traditional ways of generating knowledge are not the only ways. Research can be designed in ways that allow for it to be presented in ways that may speak to more people, expanding its reach and impact. Turning historical rhyming recipes into a digital narrative game is just one way to garner more interest from scholars and the public in recipes, history, and literature.

Special thanks to Dr. Anastasia Salter for all the knowledge imparted within their course on Critical Making for Humanist Scholarship.

The published version of the game can be played at https://madeofallwork.itch.io/.