Category Archives: Article Round-Ups

A Post-Summer Solstice Round-Up of Blog Posts

This post does not fall within the strictest definition of “recipes”, but since it was just the summer solstice, the best time of year for magic and pagan celebrations, it seemed like an appropriate time and opportunity to offer a round-up of links to some of the more “magical” blog posts that may be of interest to readers of The Recipes Project.

The Societas Magica has recently revived its blog with a post by Damon Lycourinos on Ritual Magic and Conjured Bodies: A Philosophy and Methodology. He presents some thoughts on his current doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh – essentially his philosophical framework for his dissertation. Interesting stuff, indeed.

Other academics will appreciate Wouter Hanegraaff’s post on the problems with terminology in, Alt & Neumann on Hermetismus, which discusses how widely or how narrowly a term like “Hermetic” should be applied. In a thoughtful review of Peter-André Alt’s book, Imaginäres Geheimwissen: Untersuchungen zum Hermetismus in literarischen Texten der frühen Neuzeit, he also addresses that persistent problem among scholars of not reading secondary literature outside our native language – certainly something that should be discussed in this international, digital, age!

Praeludia Microcosmica is a very new blog started by Mike Zuber of the University of Amsterdam and his most recent post, Investigating the ‘Real Frankenstein Potential’ of Johann Conrad Dippel, Pt. 1, examines the real man behind the supposed inspiration for Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s a lively account of the man and his early life at the University of Gießen and whets the appetite for pt. 2.

The Heterodoxology blog alerts us to a new, open-access online journal on the history of Western esotericism. Even for readers uninterested in the subject matter, the growth of open-access peer-reviewed journals is an important subject in academia and it will be interesting to see how this journal fares.

Finally, the iCHSTM blog for the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine (at which I’ll be presenting in a few weeks) has been posting some excellent entries. They are all worth checking out, but I will just note a couple. Anita Guerrini’s The Ghastly Kitchen: Animals, Cooking, and the Birth of Experimental Science gives a brief overview of the history of experimentation in the kitchen from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries and its role in modern science. Seb Falk’s post, How to Cast a Medieval Horoscope, provides a very informative introduction to the medieval equatoria, a device to model the motion of the planets, mainly for educational purposes (and to help medieval astrologers correctly construct horoscopes).

Food History Panel Recordings from the Cookbook Conference

By Lisa Smith

In February, I attended the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference in New York. It was a fun conference, with a mix of academics and non-academics. A particular highlight, though, was realising that cookbook authors often bring samples of their food to panels! A delight in the case of cookies, though I’m sure the puppy water I discussed wouldn’t have gone down nearly so well.

The panels, for you recipe and cookbook afficionados, were all recorded and can be found at the conference home page. The panels below were the ones I found most interesting and, not surprisingly, primarily historical…

1. “Filling Our Hearts with Food and Gladness”: Christian Celebration and Food Traditions”

This insightful panel, which focused on medieval food and modern foods with religious origins, included Ken Albala (University of the Pacific), Anne Mendelson, Evelyn Birge Vitz (New York University) and Willam Woys Weaver.

2. “Wartime Cookbooks: Artifacts of Home Front Culture, Tools of Social Engineering, Narratives of Survival”

This was an exciting mix of junior and senior scholars, all of whom provided accounts of the complicated relationships between food, ideology, nationalism, and practice. The speakers included Kyri W. Claflin (Boston University), Barbara Rotger (Boston University), Diana Garvin (Cornell University, Ithaca NY), Ian Mosby (University of Guelph) and Amy Bentley (New York University).

3. “From Disgust to Delight: The Civilizing Influence of Recipes”

The main theme of the panel was how people in the West might be persuaded to incorporate insects into our diet. The panel began with the distribution of chocolate-covered insects, which I could not bring myself to eat despite the best will in the world. This thought-provoking panel raised more questions than it answered. e.g. is covering insects in chocolate really helpful in persuading people to eat insects as a staple food?

Tory Higgins was the final speaker and his argument ultimately failed to convince me. He focused on marketing and referred to successful government endeavours during World War Two–something that had been revealed as problematic during the “Wartime Cookbooks” panel. Speakers included Renee Marton (Institute of Culinary Education, New York), Tory Higgins (Columbia University),Kian Lam Kho, and Margaret Happel Perry.

I ended up speaking on two panels. The longer presentation was for “Personal Manuscript Cookbooks: What Do They Tell Us That Printed Cookbooks Do Not?”  Steve Schmidt provided an introduction, described his project The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey and gave an overview of what manuscript recipe books can tell us. Peter Rose’s talk, which begins at 23 minutes, discussed early modern Dutch recipes in New York.  Sandy Oliver (starts at 42 minutes) considered what she has learned from a number of manuscript recipe books. My own talk (1:02-1:19) was about why researchers should not overlook the medicinal recipes in collections.

In addition, I spoke for five minutes (from 25:20) during a “Digital Show and Tell”. I introduced the Textual Communities platform for teaching manuscript recipe transcription and the crowd-sourcing plans of Early Modern Recipes Online Collective. (See also my previous post for further details.) There are some other really interesting digital projects out there! One that caught my imagination was described by Jill Adams (Ph.D. student, CQ University Australia) about 20 minutes in: “The Cookbook in a Day Project“.

There were an intriguing selection of panels at the conference, allowing researchers and cookbook authors to think historically, culturally and practically about food. As an added bonus, the conference was also a great excuse to spend a few days in New York…

Historical Recipes: A Round-Up

The Recipes Project has an active Twitter account (@historecipes) and November has been very fruitful for interesting links. Maybe it has something to do with the nights drawing in, or the festive season rapidly approaching… The following links are the ones that proved most popular with our followers (at least judging by retweets).

The month started with John Gallagher at Earlymodernjohn reflecting on the history of soul cakes and live-tweeting his baking experience.

The Twitterverse was also all a-flutter with an exciting DIY history project at the University of Iowa Libraries: public transcription of the Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks Collection.

On Guy Fawkes Day, we learned how to make fireworks seventeenth-century style at the Whipple Library Books Blog and how to remove ear worms using milk and honey at Sloane Letters Blog. A few days later, Shakespeare’s England shared the secrets of setting a fancy table, napkin folding and turning a peacock into a porcupine. As you do.

There have also been some tantalizing historical recipes: gingerbread (Travels and Travails in Eighteenth-Century England), sippet pudding (Colonial Williamsburg), Louis XIV’s favourite braised chicken (Chateau de Versailles) and — for smelling, anyhow — Martha Lloyd’s milk of roses and pot-pourri (The Jane Austen’s House Museum Blog).

The last entry is a recent discovery on my end rather than one found via Twitter: Sarah Duff at Tangerine and Cinnamon discussing “Dude Food”. Duff neatly pulls together gender, professional kitchen culture, and the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking.

November’s been a good month for blog posts–and it’s not even over yet!