Category Archives: Recipes and Recipe Books

Folding and Pinning: Organization in Two Eighteenth-Century Swedish Recipe Collections

By Isabelle Fredborg


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What called for 4 egg yolks, 8 centiliters of cream, 80 grams of sugar and butter the size of a hen’s egg? With both the title and method missing, I assumed it to be some type of pastry, based on its surrounding recipes. Even after having studied some forty Swedish recipe collections from the eighteenth century, I was not used to this type of guesswork. I had seen both manuscript cookbooks carefully written as prestigious gifts as well as those assembled for personal use and filled with furious scribbles. But opening this archival folder, I was surprised by a thick bunch of sheets of various sizes and colors. Carefully picking up a small sheet, I was struck by not just its dark ink, but also the traces of how it had been folded and the clusters of small holes.

The two collections of the Esplunda archive (Riksarkivet Marieberg, Sweden) are attributed to the Swedish countesses Lovisa Ulrika Horn and her daughter-in-law Catharina Ulrika Heijkenskjöld, both of whom married into the Mörner family. They enjoyed a life close to the power of the Royal court, with a strong social network and considerable financial means. Both Horn’s and Heijkenskjöld’s collections survive as bunches of loose recipe sheets and a few sewn booklets – very different from the leather-bound volumes I had previously examined.

The collections show signs of having grown over time, through many hands and on whatever paper was available. Numerous hands had contributed to both collections, in penmanship styles ranging from the second half of the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Some recipes carried attribution from other countesses. The variety of paper sizes, colors and qualities suggested not just that recipes came from outside the household, but that they were sometimes written on whatever paper was at hand, including one sheet with a black border, revealing the paper’s past as a condolence letter. Most sheets showed clear signs of having been folded, sometimes to the point of tearing. The folded size is slightly larger than a modern business card.

Most small and mid-sized sheets were perforated with small holes. In the Horn collection, a few remaining pins suggested two reasons for the pin holes. One pin keeps two separate recipe sheets pinned together, binding a recipe for butter pretzels with brewing instructions. Another recipe, on clarifying tallow, shows how notes could be extended with an additional sheet when more space was needed for the instructions.

 
Fig. 1. Pins keeping two recipes together (left) and extending a recipe (right). Lovisa Ulrika Horn’s recipe collection, Esplunda vol I:117, Riksarkivet Marieberg. Photo credit: Isabelle Fredborg

 

Some papers had been sewn into booklets with needle and thread, often organised around a theme, such as compotes and puddings or flavoured spirits. In Heijkenskjöld’s collection, one such booklet stood out by mostly featuring lists of ingredients with measurements, sometimes with a title – Mandeltorta, “Almond torte”, Bakelse, “Pastry”, and Buding, “Pudding” – but no instructions.

A few pages featured small, folded notes pinned to them, revealing additional ingredient lists and measurements but no instructions, title or method. The unknown pastry from the beginning of this article was one of them. Based on the many holes, these notes had been pinned, removed, and re-pinned repeatedly, suggesting active use or perhaps a favorite recipe. Instead of providing clear instructions, this type of note functioned as a prompt for someone who had the necessary skill and experience to make the recipe and only needed to be reminded of the proportions. What was worth writing down was only what could not be remembered.

Fig. 2. Two recipe notes without title or method, pinned onto a booklet page with many holes. Catharina Ulrika Heijkenskjöld’s recipe collection, Esplunda vol I:191, Riksarkivet Marieberg. Photo credit: Isabelle Fredborg

 

In both collections, the pin functioned as a tool encouraging flexibility and mobility, a mobility hinted at by the folded size of the sheets. Small enough to fit into one of the pockets commonly used in eighteenth-century women’s dress, recipes could be transported between rooms, tucked away mid-task, or sent by post between friends and acquaintances. The pinning allowed its owner to organize groupings, with certain recipes clustered together for a season, a dinner, or a particular task, then detached and returned to the collection. The pin was the system’s adjustable element, making the collection physically editable in a way a bound book never could be. The folding and pinning suggested not a collection assembled for show or instruction, but one in constant, practical use by women who already knew what they were doing.


Isabelle Fredborg is a master’s student in ethnology at Umeå University, with a focus on eighteenth-century Swedish recipe manuscripts. She runs Project Henrika, which digitizes, transcribes, and publishes these manuscripts to make them accessible for research.

Side Dishes and Supplemented Reading: Sammelrezepte in West German Women’s Magazines

By Ellen Barth

The recipes from aunts, the paper, and friends,

that have been collected over years without end,

often lie in a box out of view,

lost to the clutter and daily rush, too.

But that should not happen, not anymore—

we’re hoping to make it less of a chore.

This little folder here is just the right book,

filled with good recipes ready to cook.

The above poem, loosely translated from the original German, appears in a recipe booklet by the food seasoning company Maggi, published sometime in the 1950s. The poem positions traditional handwritten recipe cards as disorganized, ephemeral, and—at least implicitly—old-fashioned. The booklet, on the other hand, is printed and conveniently punched with holes so that it could be included in a binder, perhaps one full of such branded, promotional recipes.

Around the same time that food companies like Maggi were nudging cooks to rely less on manuscript recipes handed down through generations and more on their printed output, women’s magazines in West Germany (1949-1990) were also turning the collection of magazine recipes into a marketing tool by encouraging readers to collect and bind printed recipes in new ways.    

A striking example of how women’s magazines tied recipes to the practice of collecting appears in Petra: Die moderne Frau, first published in 1964 and, at that time, one of only two monthly women’s magazines in West Germany. As well as giving advice on fashion, home decoration, and beauty products, cooking was a common element of Petra. However, in the early issues, few recipes were included in the magazine’s pages. Instead, during the 1960s, Petra readers received a separate recipe supplement with each issue. These supplements, numbered and with changing themes, could be collected and bound in a Petra binder—an advertisement for which can be found on the back cover of the June 1967 supplement.

Fig. 1. Image courtesy of the author.

Magazines have often inspired collecting behavior, being a lesser acknowledged branch on the book collecting tree. In Germany as well as other countries, magazines on various topics have sold branded binders that could hold multiple periodical issues together, a practice that dates back at least to the nineteenth century and the “strap file and binder” format. Examples of this from German magazines include Auto Motor und Sport, Funkschau, and the pornographic Frivol, all of which have sold branded Sammelmappe (collection binders) for collecting their issues, with affordances listed as keeping issues neatly together, attractiveness, and, in the case of Frivol, a neutral spine that did not reveal the contents.

Petra’s binders for collecting recipe supplements offered their readers a new twist on this old collector’s classic. Writing about the purpose of printed supplements, Yanick Rice Lamb states that these “were often intended to infuse spice […] and provide added value[.]” In German, this metaphor is especially apt, considering that the word for supplement (Beilage) is the same as the word for an edible side dish. As well as adding “spice” through additional content in the form of cooking advice, the supplements were used by Petra’s publishers to turn readers into collectors and offered an alternative way to engage with the magazine.

Fig. 2. Image courtesy of the author.

Into the 1970s, Petra’s recipe supplements disappeared but the collection of recipes nevertheless remained. Collectible Sammelrezepte were printed in the magazine’s pages with pictures of the dishes on one side and recipes on the other, often with four recipes on a single page. The recipes were meant to be cut out—helpfully marked with an icon of an open pair of scissors and dashed lines—and then gathered and bound in a Petra-branded binder. In this reader-to-collector strategy, Petra was not alone. In the 1970s and 80s, the magazine Brigitte also published Sammelrezepte and sold its own branded recipe binder—the Brigitte Rezeptbuch—with the added benefit of organizational dividers based on food type.

Vintage binders filled with cut-out magazine recipes are somewhat rare to find (they themselves are not yet viewed as valuable collector’s items), but surviving examples attest to how these collections incentivized regular magazine purchases, extending and deepening engagement in a kind of brand-oriented practice of reading, curating, and collecting. The examples from my own private collection—one purchased online and one found at a free little bookshelf—demonstrate media loyalty, with each only including recipes from their respective magazines. The organization of those recipes is, however, a more personal and creative matter. Although the Brigitte binder suggests a specific organizational structure through the inclusion of dividers, how the individual reader interprets—or perhaps ignores—those categories is up to them: for example, the collector who chose to put the recipe for pizza in the baked goods section next to sweet Quarkstollen, presumably because it is cooked in the oven.

Fig. 3. Image courtesy of the author.

Although this kind of collecting and organizing of recipes may have little in common with the rhetorical remix prominent in recipe notecards and scrapbooks, it nonetheless reflects an active engagement with and remixing of mass media. Through magazine supplements, printed recipes, and branded binders, West German women participated as readers, cooks, and collectors to create unique recipe books that blended mass culture with personal taste.


Ellen Barth works at the Chair of Book Studies, University of Münster. Her monograph Contradictory Cookbooks: Print, Protest, and Feminism in Women’s Community Cookbooks will be published by the University of Georgia Press in late 2026, and she has also published research on the topics of feminist craftivism, menstrual activism, and political cookbooks. Originally from the United States, she now resides in Germany.

Giving (and Receiving) with Recipe Cards

By Ozoz Sokoh

What does adopting new-to-you methods of recipe preservation look like, especially when you didn’t grow up with an abundance of recipe cards or cookbooks (beyond culinary textbooks)? How do you package shared recipes and memories for travel? Or as Amanda Elise Herbert and Annette Elise Herbert ask in “Golden State: Recipes and Memory,” “How do recipes make memories?” Recipe cards are one way.

In 2021, shortly before Jedidiah, my oldest child (and the first to leave home), went off to college in New York, I designed a personal recipe collection of eight cards, interspersed with seven photos of her siblings, her father, and me. Usability was top of mind for me – the cards had to withstand wear and tear in what I hoped would be frequent use. Though I didn’t have personal experiences with handwritten recipes on paper, I’d seen photos of many online with ink blotted by splashes of soups and stews. I decided to type up the recipes because they were long, I didn’t think I could fit each handwritten recipe on a singular card, and I didn’t have the strength to write all eight of them by hard, so I opted to go digital for this part, along with the design in Canva, then proceeded to my local print store where I had them printed in 5 X 7 inch dimensions, and then laminated. They went into a surprise gift box along with spices which she opened in her apartment-style dorm room (complete with a shared kitchen), on her first night at school in New York. She loved them.

Mother and Daughter, January 2020. Copyright Ozoz Sokoh

Recipe cards are time capsules, holding nostalgic space for recipes as heirlooms. In “Preserving Family Recipes,” archivist Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler says “They evoke wonderful memories and keep traditions alive,” like our frequent family taco nights with tomato salsa, a recipe in the collection. Jedidiah shared that she “made salsa, maybe twice or three times – in my first year, when I had one of my dinner parties and then I think after that I made it again. It tasted just like yours and that surprised me.” I was thrilled. This is what I’d hoped for, that she would create new memories, while honoring traditions, perhaps of taco nights with corn tortillas, pickled onions, guacamole, with the tomato salsa at the centre, like we did at home.

For Jedidiah’s collection, I used favorites from various sources which spanned a 30-year period, from my time at university in the UK in the late 1990s, to recipes gifted by friends when we lived in the Netherlands in the late 2000s, and ones inspired by our favorite TV show, Masterchef Australia. Some recipes reflected our cultural identity as Nigerians (Pepper SauceNigerian StewJollof Rice), others were family favorites (Banana BreadTomato Salsa, Zucchini with Lemon and Mint), and I also included a few I thought she’d love (Masala Chai, Tomato Salad). While most of the recipes were accessible to her via my Kitchen Butterfly food blog, I wanted to create something physical–a touchstone–, of home, as she laid down new roots in New York. 

The three cards Jedidiah used from the collection. Left to (top, then) R – Banana bread, Pepper Sauce, and Tomato Salsa. Copyright Ozoz Sokoh

Four years later in August 2025, on Jedidiah’s return home with cards, certificate, and a wealth of cooking practice, I sat down with her, curious about her experience with the cards particularly after examining them. What did she think of the cards when she first opened the box? “I was touched”. In response to my questions on whether she felt like she needed the recipes, she said she found them convenient: “They were handy, I didn’t have to search (for them online), and if I needed a recipe, I could just take them to the kitchen with me, and I didn’t need my phone, and I also liked that I didn’t have to prop them open like a cookbook. And they were protected because you laminated them.” Music to my ears. Of the lamination, she shared, “I hadn’t seen anything laminated in years, and it took me back to my (secondary) school days.”

Three cards looked well used, with spots and splatters–Pepper Sauce, Banana Bread, and Tomato Salsa–while the others were virtually untouched. “At some point,” Jedidiah explained, “I separated them in my drawer.” She’d put away those she didn’t use as much in the back of her drawer, reserving space in front for those she called on time and time again.

On Banana Bread: “I used it because baking is more precise.” When asked what I could have done differently, she shared that “It would have been nice to have space to make notes, like I don’t really like bananas so I use less in my banana bread, and I also reduce the sugar.” She would have liked to note those on the card so that she’d be reminded for future bakes. It reminded me of a comment in “Recipes, Index Cards and Paper Slips” where Elaine Leong writes “The index card provides note-takers with a flexible and extendable system”. And while my cards are similar to index cards, I’d not thought far enough to see them as adaptable. 

Banana Bread recipe card. Copyright Ozoz Sokoh

My conversation with Jedidiah about the cards made me reflect on the article, “When a Recipe Was a ‘Receipt’.” It rightly highlights instruction and record keeping as essential elements of both the modern recipe, and its predecessor, the receipt. There is reciprocity with recipes, in many ways. When I gifted them to Jedidiah, I didn’t think of a future in which I’d reflect on them, many years on, or get her perspective. In the end, these recipes travelled and returned home with their steward in one piece, albeit a touch tomato-stew stained.

Recipe cards can do and be many things. They can be practical references, useful in recreating dishes, drinks and more, relics with anthropological value, and expressions of love and legacy. I’m glad I explored this format–and thrilled I got to reflect on it here–of written heritage, making memories built on shared identity while creating new traditions, across geographies.


Ozoz Sokoh is an ex-exploration geologist, food and tourism studies educator, and author of Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria (2025), the definitive guide to Nigerian cuisine drawn from over a decade of unearthing and preserving Nigerian culinary tradition. She researches, and interrogates connected foodways across the world, highlighting similarities between popular and little-known cultures and cuisines.

Her ongoing project, “Coast to Coast: From West Africa to the World” traces the histories and edible trails of West Africa and its diaspora through ingredients and “commodities” and is documented on Feast Afrique. It includes an open-access digital library of 250+ Black culinary resources, from the 1800s to date, a hall of fame, data-driven work on the role of food media in marginalizing West African voices, and a series of short films available for screening.

She makes her home on Land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Ozoz has spoken at TEDx and at conferences hosted by the Culinary Institute of America. Her work has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, Gastro Obscura, CNN African Voices, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and more.

oz.kitchenbutterfly@gmail.com

A Digestive for the Voracious Reader:

Digital Humanities Approaches to a Recipe Book Corpus

By Elisa Tersigni


If you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably a voracious reader of recipe books. And, if you’re anything like me, you might even be partial to manuscripts. If so, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s holdings—which include the largest collection of early modern English manuscript recipe books in the world—is truly a feast for the mind. But one could spend years digging into this buffet of books, with its indecipherable early modern hands, challenging orthographies, and pages and pages of intriguing discoveries. How then might one quickly consume such a breadth of material? As one solution, I present to you a metaphor to go with this feast—a digestive, if you will. Digital humanities (DH) tools and methods can help an ambitious reader make sense of a lot of text at once—even when that reader has no programming skills—allowing them to detect patterns or isolate the points of interest.

Lucky for us, the Folger has anticipated the needs of the digital recipe book reader. As part of the three-year, Mellon-funded Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures project (2018–2021) and its legacy, the library has aimed to photograph, transcribe, and encode the entire collection. All its recipe manuscripts (with the exception of the most recent acquisitions) are photographed, and of these, 50 are also fully transcribed and encoded, with more in the queue. The encoding makes the recipe books available for study not only as manuscripts but also as digital objects, in the form of lightly edited PDFs (“reading copies,” made for ease of reading) and plain text files. It is the latter that we’ll use for our DH analysis.

To learn more about the transcribing and encoding processes, see the blog posts “Code Breakers: the Hidden Labour Behind the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Recipe Book Transcriptions” and “Code Makers: the Hidden Labour Behind the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Recipe Book Corpus” on the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective’s (EMROC’s) website.

Using the Recipe Book Corpus

There are many ways one might use or peruse the Folger’s corpus of recipe books, but here I’ll illustrate a couple of the easiest using Voyant, a free, browser-based software with many language and visualisation tools (Figure 1). All one must do is upload the plain text files, and Voyant will immediately present them with an interface displaying the results of the default tools.

Fig 1. Screenshot of Folger Recipe Corpus in Voyant Tools

From these default tools, one can dig deeper. Let’s use the “Contexts” tool (bottom right hand) as an example of what kind of analysis is possible. In the search bar, typing a word, such as “digestive” will search across all the uploaded documents for that spelling, listing all the instances and contexts of that term. If one then selects the term, the “Reader” tool (top middle) will display the document in which that spelling appears. Essentially, using these two tools together permits the reader to search across the entire corpus for key terms and immediately read the recipes in which those terms appear. (N.B.: these tools only search spellings, and not words, and so users should expand their search options by trialling different spellings or using wildcard searches for more comprehensive results.) For instance, searching “digestive” found three instances of that spelling across the entire corpus: two in manuscript E.a.5 and one in V.a.260. This search took seconds whereas reading all 50 books might have taken weeks.

Another neat tool is “Cirrus” (top left hand), which creates word clouds of commonly used spellings: the bigger the word, the more common the spelling. Hovering over a word will give the user the number of times that spelling appears in the corpus. To view a word cloud for a specific document, rather than the entire corpus, one can use the “scale” function (found just below the word cloud) and select the manuscript of interest. By comparing resultant word clouds, the user can gain an immediate sense of the focuses of each document. For instance, compare these word clouds from two different manuscripts in the corpus:

Fig. 2. Folger manuscript E.a.1

Fig. 3. Folger manuscript V.a.401

The word cloud in Figure 2 —featuring words like “god,” “grace,” and “lord,”—suggests that the manuscript is more likely a commonplace book or miscellany than a receipt book, whereas the word cloud in Figure 3 —featuring words like “butter,” “sugar,” and “salt”—suggests the manuscript is likely a cookery book. Reading word clouds is one way a reader can quickly identify documents that might be of greater interest.

 While Voyant is a surprisingly effective tool, it’s important to note its limitations and the quirks of uploading a corpus to a tool not strictly designed for it. For instance, if using Voyant’s default settings, the most frequent spellings that will appear in the corpus’s word cloud are “folio”, “recto”, “verso”, and “page,” not because these are common words appearing in the manuscripts, but because they are common artefacts (encoding tags) of the digital documents. Still, Voyant is flexible enough that creative problem solving can expand its possibilities. For example, to get around the issue of encoding tags cluttering the cloud, the user can modify the stop words list (i.e., the words that Voyant automatically filters out of its analyses and visualizations, which include function words like “the” and “a”) to include these tags so that the remnants of the digital artefacts do not appear.  

These examples are but tastes of what is possible with the Folger’s corpus. The simplicity and accessibility of the corpus and DH tools like Voyant make them ideal interdisciplinary teaching resources in addition to effective research tools. There is something for everyone, whether your focus is the big picture or the fine detail. Dig in!