Category Archives: Summer 2025

Around the Table Podcast: Teaching Manuscripts with Sara Charles

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

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

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Patricia Lovett, professional calligrapher

Christopher de Hamel, medieval manuscript expert

Oak gall ink

Theophilus, On divers arts

Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook

L. Cornelissen & Son

Sara Making Parchment

www.teachingmanuscripts.com

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

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

Sara Charles 01:59

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

Sarah Kernan 02:01

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

Sara Charles 02:26

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

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

Sarah Kernan 03:53

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

Sara Charles 04:10

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

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

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

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

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

Sara Charles 06:13

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 08:37

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

Sara Charles 09:09

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 10:25

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

Sara Charles 11:18

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 13:41

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

Sara Charles 14:20

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 15:28

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

Sara Charles 15:32

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

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

Sarah Kernan 16:55

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

Sara Charles 17:03

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

Sarah Kernan 17:13

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

Sara Charles 17:27

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 19:34

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

Sara Charles 19:45

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 21:08

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

Sara Charles 21:22

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

Sarah Kernan 21:41

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

Sara Charles 21:47

Thank you. It’s been very enjoyable.

Sarah Kernan 21:49

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

A Cure for Cardiacle: Making and Tasting a Medieval Remedy for Heart Ache

By Caleb Prus

Grief often feels as physical as it does emotional—like a weight on the chest, a flutter of the heart, or a tightening in the throat. The distinction between these physical and emotional symptoms is largely a product of modern medicine; in the premodern world, those boundaries were far blurrier. In The Canterbury Tales (c.1390), Chaucer’s Physician tells a story so tragic that the Host cries out, “I almost have caught a cardiacle”—a heart pain brought on by pity and sorrow—and begs for a drink of ale before he collapses from grief. But what exactly was a “cardiacle,” and how might a medieval ale have helped? As both a medical student and a scholar of medieval medicine, I set out to answer these questions, by recreating a centuries-old recipe—and tasting for myself how people in the Middle Ages tried to ease heartache.  

The Death of Fébus (d. 1391). Chronicles of Froissart, London, BL, Harley 4379 (c.1470-1475), f. 126. Public Domain.

The cardiacle feared by Chaucer’s Host was a broad diagnosis for heart-related distress. It referred to chest pain, palpitations, and fainting spells—what we might now call angina, arrhythmia, syncope, or even a heart attack. But for medieval people, living centuries before the discovery of circulation, the heart wasn’t a pump. It was the seat of feeling, emotion, and spirit. A sudden wave of grief, or an excess of melancholy (black bile) could literally make the heart sick. This is why the Host panics after the Physician’s Tale: he fears that sorrow itself might give him a cardiacle. And while this diagnosis is rooted in humoral theory, this link between emotion and cardiac dysfunction is supported by modern medicine. Today, we recognize conditions like Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, commonly known as “broken heart syndrome,” in which acute emotional stress can lead to temporary heart failure.

Given its literary and medical prominence, I was intrigued when I came across a remedy for cardiacle in a Middle English medical manuscript. The recipe was simple, direct, and surprisingly easy to recreate:

For the cardiacle

Take gallynggale, gyngeuer and licoris, with fynel; seth and make to poudre, and drynke with stale ale.

The remedy is, essentially, a spiced ale—something Chaucer would have readily recognized. In The Miller’s Tale, he writes that the barber-surgeon Absolon woos his beloved with “spiced ale,” and in the Tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer lists licorice, zedoary, cloves, and nutmeg as flavorings “to putte in ale / wheither it be moyste or stale.” This recipe for cardiacle is a variation on this familiar tradition, blending licorice, ginger, galangal, and fennel into a warming, aromatic drink.

Ingredients used to recreate the remedy for cardiacle.

The ingredients were surprisingly easy to source. The instruction to “seeth” the herbs likely referred not to boiling but to drying and dehydrating them, preparing them to be ground into powder with a mortar and pestle. At my local spice shop, I found dried fennel seeds, ginger pieces, and licorice root, all ready for grinding. For the galangal, which I bought fresh-frozen from an Asian grocery store, I dehydrated slices at 250°F for several hours until they were brittle enough to crush. 

Finding the right ale proved more challenging. Medieval ale was quite different from today’s beer: unhopped, malty, and slightly sweet, often brewed with a mix of herbs or bittering agents in a style now referred to as gruit. It was also regularly consumed while it was still fermenting or allowed to settle into “stale” ale, as the recipe directs. Without the means to brew my own gruit, I settled on Samual Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, a low-hop British ale with a mellow maltiness and smooth body—about as close to a medieval ale as I could get off the shelf.

On brew day, I laid out my ingredients and began grinding them by hand with a mortar and pestle. Following the proportions implied by the recipe, I used equal parts of each herb, about half a teaspoon per ingredient, mixed into one cup of gently warmed ale. The resulting drink smelled strongly of fennel and licorice. Its taste was intense: sweet, earthy, and medicinal, with a lingering licorice bitterness on the tongue. Hoping to make the potion more palatable, I reduced the quantities to just a pinch of each spice for the second batch. Even then, the licorice dominated, its sweetness overwhelming the other flavors. The drink was also course and gritty. Since the recipe offered no instruction to strain it, I left the powder in the cup, which resulted in heavy sediment that clung to the teeth. 

Warmed ale after the addition of ground spices.

In the end, the potion was challenging to drink—a sensory shock to a modern palate more accustomed to hoppy beers than to bitter, spiced tonics. Its flavor was unmistakably medicinal and sweet, dominated by the taste of fennel and licorice. Yet I suspect the experience would have been quite different for a medieval drinker. The unhopped, malty base of a traditional ale would likely have complemented the sharper notes of the spices. And while modern drinkers tend to associate black licorice with cough syrup or candy, that connotation may not have existed in the medieval period. To medieval tastes, this kind of spiced ale may have been not only palatable but genuinely comforting.  

As The Canterbury Tales continues, the pilgrims stop at an alehouse, allowing the Host to finally get the draught of ale he so desperately craves. The Physician and his potions are nowhere to be found in this scene—but perhaps that’s the point. The physical and emotional dimensions of cardiacle were deeply intertwined, and so too was its cure: a warming drink, shared among fellow travelers, to soothe the heart in both body and spirit. In the end, Chaucer’s Host wasn’t simply asking for ale; he was reaching for spice, for solace, and for the ritual comfort of drinking in good company.


Caleb Prus is a 4th-year MD candidate at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He holds a MSt in English (650-1550) from the University of Oxford and a BA in English Literature and Chemistry from the University of Rochester. His Master’s dissertation studied the use of Middle English bloodletting texts by John Tyryngham, a fifteenth-century Londoner. He has presented his research at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, the Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies, the American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Meeting, and the Corner Society for the History of Medicine.

 

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

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

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

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

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

Folger Early Modern Measurements

The Sifter

John Locke’s pancakes recipe tested by Marissa

Sage Pudding recipe tested by Marissa at Pottsgrove Manor

Penn State University Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections Library

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

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

Marissa Nicosia 02:17

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

Sarah Kernan 02:22

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

Marissa Nicosia 02:29

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 05:04

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

Marissa Nicosia 05:20

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 07:06

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

Marissa Nicosia 07:33

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 10:51

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

Marissa Nicosia 11:14

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

Sarah Kernan 11:31

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

Marissa Nicosia 11:52

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 14:31

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

Marissa Nicosia 14:40

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 16:34

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

Marissa Nicosia 16:48

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

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

Sarah Kernan 17:46

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

Marissa Nicosia 18:11

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 20:14

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

Marissa Nicosia 20:36

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 22:11

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

Marissa Nicosia 22:24

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 23:59

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

Marissa Nicosia 24:05

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 25:40

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

Marissa Nicosia 25:48

Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Kernan 25:51

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

 

 

Chocolate, Poems, and Virtual Kitchens: Reconstructing the Early Modern Experience

By Sara de Blas Hernández

Since starting my Ph.D. journey at UC Davis, I have collaborated with Prof. Daniela Gutiérrez-Flores to enhance medieval and early modern Spanish literature classes using multisensory pedagogical approaches. The goal is to help students connect with the literary production of the time, one that often feels culturally distant, through tangible activities and familiar settings. For example, we organised a workshop where students nixtamalized corn to make their own tortillas after reading excerpts from the Popol Vuh and Chronicles of the Indies, we explored Fray Luis de León’s “Oda a la vida retirada” (Ode to a Quiet Life) in the Arboretum, and performed skits in the style of Calderón de la Barca’s small dramatic piece Mojiganga de los guisados.

The Reconstruction Project

In Fall 2024, Prof. Gutiérrez-Flores taught Survey of Spanish Literature to 1700, a course that explores the multicultural formation of Spanish culture through early literary texts. In this course, I wanted to explore the contrast between a traditional classroom model (reading, lecture, discussion, worksheet) with a hands-on experiential approach. This time, that meant asking students to turn their kitchens into classroom spaces.

In the first of two linked lessons, students read and analyzed Décima y coplas al chocolate  by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. This playful poem compares the seductive power of women with that of chocolate, which the lyrical voice describes as a “dulce brebaje” or sweet potion (Hurtado de Mendoza, line 54),  and which is described as being intoxicating and overwhelming. This poem opened the door to explore chocolate’s journey from a suspect substance—viewed by early European colonizers as mysterious and dangerously invigorating—to a fashionable obsession, particularly among elite Spanish women, some of whom refused to stop drinking it even during mass, despite threats of receiving excommunication!

For the second lesson, we moved to the kitchen. We decided to have students cook from home, either solo or in small teams. I selected Juan de la Mata’s “Vizcochos de chocolate – Otra manera” from his 1747 Arte de repostería. At the beginning of the session, students were provided with the recipe —they had already been informed of the tools and ingredients they would need— and divided into Zoom breakout rooms to modernize the recipe by restructuring steps and estimating quantities and times needed. We all reconvened to discuss the surprises and challenges, and to evaluate potential solutions.

Then, we rolled up our sleeves and started baking. I hosted the session like a DIY cooking show: “Baking Early Modern with Sara.” I remember that we were collectively stumped by one detail: the recipe called for twice as much sugar as flour. When students asked why, I wasn’t sure. The mystery lingered until the next day, when I brought the cake to a screening of Like Water for Chocolate. There, a former student of mine majoring in Food Science offered a possible explanation: sugar was likely used as a preservative, especially in the absence of refrigeration. It was a lightbulb moment—and a great reminder of how learning often continues beyond the classroom.

Resulting chocolate cake. Image Credit: The Author

Once the cake was in the oven and with just a couple of minutes of class remaining,  I invited students to share their initial thoughts. To build community, I created a Canvas forum where students could share photos of their cakes and reflections on the experience. 

Screenshot of the students during the virtual workshop. Image Credit: The Author

Student’s Perceptions

To better assess the impact of the lesson, I asked students to complete a short survey. While some noted logistical challenges —like commuting home to use a kitchen—, most found the activity fun and unique. Others reported appreciating learning culinary skills and engaging with recipes in Spanish firsthand.  Several students noted how the physicality of “making” deepened their connection to the material: “I liked it and I think that it helped me think about these recipes in a more real way” and “It was very fun, especially because I could do something physical while still reflecting on the Spanish ways of the past.” One student shared being surprised at how much one could learn about a “mundane” activity such as cooking:  “I particularly enjoyed that, even though it is a cooking activity, there is a lot of history embedded in it, and we learned a lot.” 

Some reflected on the literary text itself: “While baking, I thought a lot about the verses of the poem, and I was able to imagine the lyrical voice when I was adding the cocoa powder to the mix.” Others offered powerful insights on food and colonialism: “It was a unique lesson like I had never experienced before. I realised that the foods that I have at home reflect a history of colonialism and peoples that I have inherited. Now I can see a more clear connection to the topics we covered in class than before. It is humbling… and delicious.” Finally,  several students highlighted the sense of community the lesson fostered. Whether cooking together in person or connecting via Zoom, they valued seeing their classmates in a new light and learning together in a shared, informal setting.

Implications of the Approach

Designing non-traditional lessons requires careful planning and flexibility, especially when logistical hurdles arise. But the results—deeper engagement, critical thinking, and stronger student bonds—make it worth the effort. This project reinforced what I have come to believe: hands-on, sensory-based learning, a form of “making”, can help students connect emotionally and intellectually with distant literary worlds. When students become “makers” through cooking, smelling, tasting, and collaborating, they not only grasp content more vividly, they also experience history and literature as something alive, embodied, and relevant to their lives. That is why these approaches deserve a place in the classroom, especially in academic settings where learning is still too often confined to the visual and textual materials alone.


Sara de Blas Hernández is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish Linguistics at UC Davis. Her research explores the intersection of language, food, and pedagogy. One strand of her dissertation focuses on how food and food-related practices can enrich second and foreign language learning. The other examines experiential approaches to teaching early modern Spanish literature, working closely with faculty in literary studies, to help students engage more deeply with historical texts and overcome linguistic barriers.


References

Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego. “Décima y coplas al chocolate”. Obras poéticas, edited by Rafael Benítez Claros, Gráficas Ultra, 1947.

Mata, Juan de la. Arte de repostería: en que se contiene todo género de hacer dulces secos, y en líquido … con una breve instrucción para conocer las frutas, y servirlas crudas, y diez mesas, con su explicación. Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, 1747.