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Archaeology, Around the Table, Embroidery, Making, Posts, Summer 2025

Around the Table Podcast: Early Medieval Embroidery with Alex Makin

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

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

Music

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

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

Mentioned in the Show

Shrine of St. Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral

Bayeux Tapestry

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

Alex’s Cuthbert Maniple Recreation Project Videos

Early Medieval Embroidery YouTube channel

Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard Project

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

EXARC 

The EXARC Journal

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

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

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

Sarah Kernan 01:01

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

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

Alex Makin 02:20

Oh, well, thank you for asking me.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

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

Alex Makin 02:41

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

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

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

Alex Makin 04:12

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 06:04

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

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

Alex Makin 06:43

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 10:30

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

Alex Makin 10:49

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

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

Sarah Kernan 12:01

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

Alex Makin 12:22

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 13:59

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

Alex Makin 14:14

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 16:01

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

Alex Makin 16:16

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

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

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

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

Alex Makin 19:05

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 20:41

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

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

Alex Makin 21:58

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 24:24

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

Alex Makin 25:00

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

Sarah Kernan 25:27

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

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

Alex Makin 26:20

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 28:12

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

Alex Makin 28:15

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Makin 31:23

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

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

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

Alex Makin 32:39

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

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

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

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

Alex Makin 33:57

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

Sarah Kernan 34:29

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

Alex Makin 34:45

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

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

Sarah Kernan 35:35

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

Alex Makin 35:53

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 38:01

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

Alex Makin 38:07

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

Sarah Kernan 38:10

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

19th Century History, Experimentation, Modern, Posts, Summer 2025

Reconstructing an Italian Perfume from the Nineteenth Century

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By Charlotte Gaudry

When we talk about historical reconstruction, “making” can be understood as the act of bringing the past back to life, recreating what once existed. This fits closely with the goals of the reconstruction I have in mind for my thesis project. It is not just about restoring objects or practices, but about exploring new ways of understanding and “making” history itself. It’s a process that can engage all our senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. In this sense, reconstruction becomes a multisensory experience, one that opens up new possibilities through the intersection of experimental history and sensory studies. This approach feels particularly relevant for studying 19th-century Italian perfumery, a field that remains relatively under explored.

That’s why, as a PhD student in contemporary Italian history, I believe this research is not only necessary but also valuable in offering a new way of connecting with the past. Reconstruction, in this context, becomes a kind of immaterial materialisation, a way to make something intangible, like a smell, feel real again.

To give a bit of background: Italian perfumery in the 19th century evolved alongside industrialisation, which brought a wave of new knowledge and techniques. In the course of my research, I’ve found that information about perfumery is scattered across a variety of sources, from press articles and cosmetic manuals to texts on chemistry, pharmacy, floriculture, medicine, and hygiene. Yet, despite all this documentation, the one thing we lack is the scent itself. We’re left with only written descriptions and material traces to guide us. That’s what makes this work both incredibly challenging, deeply fascinating, but also very complex. 

Given the lack of material evidence for such ephemeral and intangible artefacts, we must seek clues through available sources. The most obvious sources are recipe manuals. These documents detail raw materials—whether natural, vegetable, animal, or synthetic—specifying their origins, processing methods, and the evolution of associated techniques, whether local or imported. They also describe mixing and boiling methods. The authors may integrate olfactory descriptions, providing a valuable sensory dimension that serves as an important reference in the reconstruction process. 

Image credit: Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/manualedelprofum00ross/manualedelprofum00ross

Recipe manuals have become some of my favourite sources. They give a real sense of the skills, techniques, and even the mindset of the time. They also reflect the impact of industrialisation, especially how chemistry and machinery started to change the way perfumes were made. What I find most fascinating about the 19th century is how it captures this turning point: traditional craftsmanship blending with new scientific and mechanical approaches.

These manuals don’t just list ingredients; they reveal which materials were in fashion, whether they came from Italy or were imported from abroad. Reading through different recipes helps me imagine the range of scented products people used—liquid perfumes, scented powders, pomades—and the role they played in daily life.

The illustrations are especially helpful. They make even the most complex machines or processes feel more understandable, almost like you’re being guided through them by someone who was there. They’re drawn with care, showing precise proportions and technical details that tell us a lot about how the machines worked. The accompanying text is often surprisingly clear too, explaining how each part functioned and how everything fit together. We missed some flowers or perfume bottles’ illustrations. Nevertheless, our large corpus overcomes that. 

Together, these manuals and illustrations give us a way to piece together, and potentially recreate, the technical world of 19th-century perfumery. For me, they’re like stepping stones that connect us directly with a forgotten craft. Nineteenth-century Italian perfumery thus emerges as an ideal laboratory for analysing the intricate dynamics of hybridisation between tradition and modernity. 

However, we may wonder if these documents are sufficient to understand how to recreate a specific recipe. Upon reading, we notice that some information is missing, primarily relating to tacit knowledge. 

This type of knowledge is often deeply rooted in personal experience, context, practice, and insights. Unlike explicit knowledge, which can be easily articulated and shared, tacit knowledge is intuitive and often subconscious. We must therefore use experimental history to address this issue. 

One of the major challenges I have run into while researching 19th-century Italian perfumery is language. Not just translating from Italian to French, but translating entire ways of thinking about ingredients, tools, and measurements that don’t always match up with our modern understanding. Some of the recipe manuals I am working with were written before Italy was even a unified country. So, naturally, there is no standardised system, especially when it comes to weights and measures. Some manuals use kilograms, but others rely on terms like oncia (ounce), dramma, or libbra (pound). Furthermore, the value of a libbra changed from one region to another. So the pound used in Tuscany was not the same as the one in Naples. That means a big part of my work has been setting up a kind of decoding system, figuring out what each unit meant in that specific place and time, so I can accurately interpret the recipes. But it also shows how important it is to approach these sources carefully. A tiny mistake in translation or conversion could completely change the formula, and with it, the scent of the reconstructed perfume. It is above all about translating an entire sensory culture. One that was shaped by chemistry, trade, and the slow but steady march of industrialisation. That makes every detail, from a single dramma to the function of a distillation machine, worth paying attention to.

To overcome these issues, we must use different sources and disciplines. The historian, relying on various sources like manuals, treatises, objects, preserved residues, etc. to reconstruct the recipe with the greatest possible precision. I’m not doing this alone. The real magic happens when I work alongside perfumers. They take all the information I gather and turn it into something tangible, real experiments in the lab, trying to recreate scents that haven’t been smelled in over a century. And then there’s the chemist, who steps in to help us make sense of how raw materials might have changed over time, or why certain reactions happen, or don’t. Even though we each speak our own “language” history, chemistry, and perfumery—we are all working toward the same goal: to bring a forgotten fragrance back to life. That collaboration is thus essential.

In the end, this kind of reconstruction isn’t just about copying the past. It is about bringing it to life in a way that people today can experience. That is what makes it so powerful. By recreating these forgotten scents, we’re not only sharing complex historical knowledge. We are making it real, tangible, and relatable.

It is a new way of doing history. One that doesn’t just rely on dates and documents, but on our senses, our curiosity, and a mix of disciplines working together. Whether it is through the nose of a perfume, the feel of an old recipe book, or the hum of a recreated 19th-century machine, we’re building bridges between then and now. And for me, that’s where the real interest of this work lies.

Charlotte Gaudry is currently a PhD candidate in History at the University of Grenoble Alpes, where she is conducting research under the auspices of the “Olfaction” Chair within the LAHRHA laboratory. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the history of Italian perfumery in the 19th century, exploring the intersection of olfactory heritage, industry, and cultural identity. Beyond her academic work, she has participated in various cultural and educational projects. These include internships at the Osmothèque – the International Perfume Conservatory in Versailles – where she remains an active volunteer.



Posts, Summer 2025

A Handheld Cabinet of Curiosities: Kitchenalia, Social Media, and the Cultural History of Collecting

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By Esther Martin

People love Stuff. They’ve always loved Stuff. For hundreds of years, humanity has made a practice of collecting the Stuff they love. These collections carry alternative implications, showcased and flaunted to establish both the status and identity of the owner. The act of collecting is easy to dismiss as a type of overconsumption, but it is deeply tied to a person’s need to establish their sense of self, and to identify where they fit into the social spectrum. Collectors become taste-makers, establishing what is worth collecting and showcasing. In the age of the internet, taste-making is done through content-making.

Britannica defines the term “collect” as “to get (similar things) and bring them together as a hobby.”Russell Belk, a Distinguished Research Professor and the Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York University, defines collecting as “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences.” Collecting is more than the act of acquiring, but rather gathering items together with a specific and intended purpose.

Collecting became more defined during the Renaissance when the wealthy began establishing cabinets of curiosities in their homes. Dating back to the 1500s, early incarnations of cabinets of curiosities involved a full-size room containing a collection of artifacts and specimens acquired by a wealthy family or individual. Practically, the room was a way of storing an often exhaustive accumulation of artifacts and specimens, usually containing wonders of the natural world–such as animal skulls, “exotic” textiles, and preserved flora from all over the globe–making cabinets a kind of pre-modern museum, though highly personalized and private.

Göttweig Musaei Contignatio, between 1743-1745. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

However, the immediate intention of a cabinet of curiosities was to establish the elevated status of the owner and identify them as a person of intellect and good taste. A collection displayed in a cabinet of curiosities acted as a form of conspicuous consumption, informing visitors to the home of their host’s superiority. After all, not everyone could afford an entire room in their home dedicated to expensive objects, let alone the funds and means necessary to gather those objects.

Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale (1599), the earliest illustration of a natural history cabinet. Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

The construction of cabinets of curiosities continued to change over time as the delineation between classes diminished. The cabinets became just that – actual cabinets accessible to the less wealthy but growing middle-class. Still, a cabinet of curiosities in one’s home was an indication of good taste and a reasonably stocked bank account.

Today in the twenty-first century, cabinets of curiosity have now reached their next phase of evolution: social media. Visual-based social media platforms, chiefly Instagram and TikTok, serve as modern day cabinets of curiosities where anyone can become a content maker and set up their own virtual cabinet to share their real-life treasures. The images and videos establish their good taste, trend-awareness, and clued-in identity. The types of collections showcased have expanded from curiosities of the natural world to include all manner of interests including curiosities of the past, the grotesque, and the accoutrement of everyday life, past and present. For example, someone may fill their instagram grid with aesthetically pleasing photos of their collection of mid-century typewriters, hand-embroidered 20th century handkerchiefs, or artfully displayed primitive pickling jars. These pickling jars, stuffed with old wooden spoons and whisks that will never be used, fall under the category of kitchenalia.

Collecting kitchenalia (a catch-all term for kitchen objects) has become more prominent especially among women content creators on visual social media platforms. Accounts may highlight collections of a specific brand, such as @Vampyrex on Instagram, who collects and shares her extensive Pyrex collection; specific types of objects, like @nancysdailydish on Instagram, which features English transferware from the 19th and 20th centuries; and a general array of objects, like theinfluencedmillenial on TikTok, whose kitchen is full of thrifted items imbued with nostalgic stories. There is even a hashtag dedicated to collected and thrifted-style vintage kitchens–#grandmakitchen, honoring the aesthetic aspects of women and kitchens of our past.

A selection of the Instagram grid of @Vampyrex. Image Credit: Instagram.

The hashtag #grandmaskitchen evokes the nostalgia and emotional connection involved with  kitchenalia collecting. Content creators see themselves in their collections of kitchenalia and establish identities and expertise that are fabricated from trips to the thrift store. Since food, cooking, and the kitchen are evocative of personal history, content makers establish kitchenalia as an integral part of their personality and status. Kitchen objects, which may be considered traditionally mundane, gendered objects advertised primarily to women as part of their unseen labor as homemakers and providers, suddenly become elevated in value through their incorporation into content makers identities. By elevating kitchenalia to be worthy of collecting and redefining it as “of value,” the women showcasing their virtual cabinet of curiosities are also showcasing identities they’ve invented and advertise online.

Collections tell the story about the collector and what they value–pristine objects, name brands, and the status quo; or they have deep-held beliefs that they will one day make money off these objects and secure their future. Women content-makers and taste-makers who collect kitchenalia demonstrate that what is valuable is identities rooted in the appearance of a history and connection to the kitchen. Their Instagram and TikTok pages serve as a guide for future kitchenalia collectors to determine what material culture of the kitchen holds no value, and what items are worth the money and effort to acquire, enhancing their existing identity.

Esther Martin, MLA, is a food folklorist and writer who specializes in foodways, material culture, and online education. Her work has appeared in The Oxford Companion to Cheese, We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Regional Food, and An American Girl Anthology, with upcoming work in The Recipes Project. She has presented at The Museum of Food and Drink, the Association for Food and Society Conference, and the Rutgers Online Learning Conference. She holds an MLA In Gastronomy from Boston University. Find her at esthermartin.substack.com.

Around the Table, Culinary History, Food and Drink, Making, Posts, Summer 2025

Around the Table Podcast: British Food History with Neil Buttery

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

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

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

Music

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

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

Mentioned in the Show

The British Food History Podcast

A is for Apple Podcast

British Food: A History

Neil’s Amazon UK Author Page

Jane Grigson’s English Food

Neil Cooks Grigson Blog

Neil on Steak, Kidney, and Oyster Pudding

Neil on Eels

Museum of Royal Worcester

Delicious Legacy Podcast

Serve it Forth Festival

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:00

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

Sarah Kernan 00:17

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

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

Sarah Kernan 01:11

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

Neil Buttery 02:03

Thank you very much for asking me to come on.

Sarah Kernan 02:05

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

Neil Buttery 02:27

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

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

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

Neil Buttery 04:04

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 05:21

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

Neil Buttery 05:32

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 07:25

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

Neil Buttery 07:39

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 08:55

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

Neil Buttery 09:16

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

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

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

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

Neil Buttery 10:51

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

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

Sarah Kernan 11:56

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

Neil Buttery 12:07

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

Sarah Kernan 12:25

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

Neil Buttery 12:43

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 14:05

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

Neil Buttery 14:35

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 15:55

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

Neil Buttery 16:22

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 17:59

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

Neil Buttery 18:18

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

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

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

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

Neil Buttery 19:41

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 21:25

Oh my goodness.

Neil Buttery 21:26

It was awful. Yeah.

Sarah Kernan 21:27

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

Neil Buttery 21:39

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 24:01

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

Neil Buttery 24:26

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 25:50

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

Neil Buttery 26:11

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 28:08

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

Neil Buttery 28:18

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

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

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

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

Sarah Kernan 29:44

You should. I hope that book idea gets through.

Neil Buttery 29:47

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

Sarah Kernan 30:26

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

Neil Buttery 30:30

Great.

Sarah Kernan 30:31

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

Neil Buttery 30:35

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

Sarah Kernan 30:38

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