Category Archives: Teaching Resources

American Studies, Education, Modern, Posts, Summer 2024, Teaching Resources

Teaching with Community Cookbooks

Leave a comment

By Jolie Braun
Increasingly, cookbooks are finding a place in the classroom. In recent years, they have been used for teaching a variety of topics, including storytelling and language,[1] women’s lives,[2] and African American history.[3] In this piece, I will share my experience taking a book history approach in a session on community cookbooks. This method of studying the book as a physical object and cultural artifact can open up new avenues of discovery for students and spur different ways of thinking about authorship, publishing, and audience. In this context, community cookbooks are equal parts challenging and accessible, complex objects that offer students much to consider and discuss.

In Fall 2022, I taught a one-credit first year seminar, “More than Just Recipes: Exploring American Cookbooks,” based in the cookbook collection I steward as curator of modern literature and manuscripts at the Ohio State University Library’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library (RBML). I organized the course chronologically, beginning with Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), known as America’s first cookbook, and ending with a recent collection of no-recipe recipes, Danny Licht’s Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again (2021). Each class period focused on a different topic, such as cookbooks and global foodways or advertising cookbooks. The first part of a session was a combination of lecture and discussion. During the latter half, students worked directly with materials from RBML’s holdings.

Community cookbooks work well for hands-on analysis. Produced by small, amateur groups outside of traditional publishing channels, these books deviate from their mainstream counterparts in significant ways. This is evident inside and out: for example, they are often bound with inexpensive, comb binding, lack images of finished dishes, and frequently include duplicate recipes. The creators, resources, and motives involved in producing community cookbooks are vastly different from mainstream cookbooks and the tangible evidence of these differences can lead to a fruitful discussion about expectations and conventions of the genre. 

For our class session on community cookbooks, I selected several published in Ohio between the 1960s and the 1990s, including a mix of cookbooks printed by cookbook publishers—an option that became increasingly popular during the late twentieth century—as well as books that had been produced largely by the groups themselves.

A few Ohio community cookbooks used in this class session. Image credit: Jolie Braun

Working in pairs, students chose a book from the selection and used a handout I created with questions to guide their study. They began by recording bibliographic information about their book, a task that prompted them to locate these details and consider the context they provided. With community cookbooks, this seemingly simple task can present challenges: Who is the author? When and where was it published? During our class discussion, we talked about why such details may not have been considered necessary to include in self-published works created by a collective and intended for a local audience.

Students also wrote a physical description of their cookbook. How was it made, what materials were used, and what could that reveal? Some were bound together with metal rings or had covers made out of scrap cardstock, familiar materials used in unconventional ways that suggested both the limitations and resourcefulness of their creators. These descriptions were an opportunity to encourage students to think about how a book represents a series of choices and what decisions they might make if creating a book of their own.  

Lastly, students reviewed the contents of their book, chose an unfamiliar recipe to research, and reported their findings to the class. Their selections—such as applesauce meatloaf and sock it to me cake—were representative of home cooking, and led to a conversation about the nature of foods found in community cookbooks and what they could tell us about how people ate and the group that compiled the cookbook.

Community cookbooks can be eye-opening for students. My class was surprised and excited to encounter cookbooks that were not the work of chefs or cooks or writers, but of ordinary people.

[1] Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite, “Books That Cook: Teaching Food and Food Literature in the English Classroom,” College English, 70.4 (2008): 421-436.

[2] Kathryn G. Matheny, “No Mere Culinary Curiosities: Using Historical Cookbooks in the Library Classroom.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 21.2 (2020): 79-97. https://rbm.acrl.org/index.php/rbm/article/view/24707/32534

[3] Sakina M. Hughes, “Teaching African American History and Culture through Cookbooks and Etiquette Manuals,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, 42.2 (2017): 59-72.

Jolie Braun is the Curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she manages and develops the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include teaching and outreach in special collections, self-publishing, cookbooks, and zines. Her co-curated exhibit, Essential Ingredients: Cookbooks as History, runs from August 20, 2024 – January 5, 2025 in the Thompson Library gallery.

Early Modern, Family and Household, Posts, Students, Teaching Resources, Winter 2024

Olfactory Notes: Integrating Embodied Research in Art History

Leave a comment

By Madison Clyburn

In early modern Italy, perfumes were powerful substances whose therapeutic properties could generate pleasure and preserve or remedy one’s health if worn on or consumed by the body. In this post, I feature a typical Italian perfume recipe, “To make perfume for clothes,” from the Italian engraver and author Eustachio Celebrino’s (c. 1490-after 1535) printed vernacular pamphlet, Opera nova piacevole laqvale insegna di far varie compositioni odorifere per far bella ciaschuna donna…intitulata Venusta (Venice, 1550) intended for female consumers. Celebrino’s formulaic recipe books, typical of the genre, are printed records of socially important topics, like women’s health and adornment.

I made this recipe in Dr. Chriscinda Henry’s graduate seminar, Materiality and the Senses in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Art, at McGill University in the Winter of 2023. Celebrino’s recipe allowed us to work through experimental research methodologies in our final week dedicated to Embodied Knowing and Experimental Methods, which I co-led with fellow seminar member Mahdis Mohajeri. Making this perfume recipe raised questions about what it means for art historians living in one sensorium and studying others, like early modern Italy, where smelling amber rosary beads during prayer might bring one closer to God, chewing myrrh pastilles could prevent plague or wearing musk might help conceive a healthy child.

“To Make Perfume for Clothes”

The first step toward integrating embodied research in our art history seminar was to choose a recipe with accessible ingredients that was relatively quick to make. Celebrino’s perfumed sachet was just right since it simply asks one to take “fresh rose leaves & dry them in the shade & then take two carats [or vials] of musk, and make it into a powder, & two coins of fine cloves, and mix together, & then put it [all] in one or two little bags in the clothes.” 

Graduate student, Em Grisdale’s sachet keeps sweaters moth-free and smelling fresh one year later!

Before our seminar, I assembled a recipe kit with instructions and ingredients for each participant. I found cloves and dried roses from a local herbalist shop, while I substituted musk root for musk, whose extraction from the musk deer’s preputial gland is primarily illegal today. 

Next, I transcribed and translated the recipe, placing that information in a PowerPoint. This left more time in class to examine primary texts like Pliny’s The Natural History and Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Commentaries (1565) to understand the varied classical and early modern uses of musk, roses, and cloves. At the same time, selections from Sven Dupré et al. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment (2020) and Pamela Smith’s From Lived Experience to the Written Word (2022) grounded our entrance into an aromatic art history, offering insight into how hands-on historical recipe experiments can help make students more resourceful researchers and inform early modern health, hygiene, and beauty practices.

The final step consisted of interpreting the recipe through practice. Students opened their kits and began to crush, mix, and add the ingredients to a draw-string bag.

Some participants followed the recipe, and others adapted it; some used their hands, while others used a hammer or mortar and pestle to crush the musk root.

The recipe’s flexible ending tells one to put the sachet “in the clothes,” possibly in a chest, carried in a pocket, worn under a skirt or attached to a belt. Making the recipe together allowed us to pose questions, such as what types and materials of bags might be preferred, how much musk equals a carat or vial, and share reactions like musk stinks! 

Em Grisdale shows us how to wear Celebrino’s recipe on a belt loop.

Implications for Sensory Research in Art History

Embodied research welcomes questions about the sensuous relationships between the ephemeral body and its material culture. Things like perfumed sachets for clothes hinted at but not seen in visual media reveal how olfactory experiences in the early modern period are everywhere and nowhere. For example, middle- and upper-class women often had the luxury of owning multiple sets of clothes. When not worn, women stored their clothes in chests with sachets made from pure ingredients like musk or, for aspiring citizens, a counterfeit version made of spices and toasted breadcrumbs to preserve the fabrics’ quality and cleanliness. One can imagine only the finest ingredients perfuming Lambert Sustris’ Reclining Venus (c. 1548) in this wholesome atmosphere comprised of a downy mattress sprinkled with fragrant pink and white roses, sumptuous fabrics, and a woman playing a folding harpsichord, whose charming sounds vibrate through the clean air wafting through an open colonnade window.

Attributed to Lambert Sustris (c. 1515-20 -1584), Reclining Venus, c. 1548, oil on canvas, 116 x 186 cm, Venice or Padua, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3479. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

But of course, we cannot see the physical sachet made from Celebrino’s recipe that may lie nestled inside the elegant cassone (chest) in the background of Sustris’ painting. We cannot sniff notes of rose, musk, and clove possibly escaping the fibres of the pastel pink dress that a woman holds above the chest. Only by reconstructing these sachets can we begin to sense smell’s critical role in preserving hygienic bodies and homes as well as in observing or challenging socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in early modern Italy.

Detail of Sustris’ Reclining Venus showing a young woman leaning over an open-lidded cassone. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Embracing what we cannot see or smell through embodied research allows us to imagine how Celebrino’s recipe and Sustris’ painting document once fragrant interiors. An art historical approach to making recipes aims to recenter early modern sensuous practices and experiences in artworks so that teaching and academic scholarship can help us bridge two sensoria—that of our current moment and overlooked pasts.

Madison Clyburn is an Art History PhD candidate at McGill University. Her thesis focuses on the material culture of women’s wellness in late medieval and early modern Italy. Her research combines art and gender history, the history of medicine, material culture, and sensory studies to determine how perfumes were used to observe, challenge, and invert socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in the early modern period.
Posts, Spring 2023, Teaching Resources

The Rebirth of Embodiment: Hand-Compiling an Early Modern Recipe Book

Leave a comment

By Mackie Black

The early modern family participated in manuscript culture through the collection and trading of recipes among family, friends, and political connections. In this post, I describe how modern scholars can participate in a new manuscript culture through transcription. While digital transcriptions are valuable for accessibility, these projects hide thephysical experience that went into the creation of these texts. Though digital transcription does include physicality, with typing and coding and especially in an emotional sense with the frustration at a difficult word or phrase and the ultimate joy that comes with figuring it out, this is a different embodied experience than that of recreation through rewriting. Hand-writing recreation provides a more in-depth understanding of the messy physical processes of the past, those that leave the writer with ink-stained hands and the paper with scratched out mistakes, rather than the clean processes of the present. The cleanliness of today’s digital interaction with manuscripts removes not only the physical mess of writing with ink but also streamlines our encounters with these manuscripts to the point that their mistakes and quirks can be ignored in favor of analyzing the clean, edited text. My experience reconstructing the compilation of an early modern recipe book by hand-copying recipes using writing technology that closely approximates those of the time, became an act of recovering this messy embodiment. The physical act of transcription raises new questions that can allow us to more fully understand the processes behind the creation of these manuscripts. 

Photo of two sheets of paper with handwriting.
Attempts to copy recipes with a quill (left) and an ink-dipped pen (right).

My project adds to work by scholars including Marissa Nicosia at Cooking the Archives and Margaret Simon by stepping away from the kitchen and into the processes of recipe collection and copying. For this project, I created my own recipe book using manuscripts held by the Folger Shakespeare Library LUNA: Manuscript Transcriptions Collection and the Wellcome Collection as a final project for a graduate seminar. I skimmed through 8 manuscripts and selected 67 recipes that I could see myself making, focusing on those with vegetarian ingredients to fit my own diet, before hand-copying them in a notebook using either a quill or an ink dip pen. I also used cutting to remove unwanted ingredients and paste in recipes, mirroring this tool as it was used in recipe books, commonplace books, and in the literature of George Herbert and the Ferrar family in their Little Gidding Harmonies. 

Photo of open notebook with sections of handwriting and sections of cut-and-pasted excerpts from other notebooks.
Pages 88 and 89 of the completed recipe book showing two examples of cutting in order to remove non-vegetarian ingredients from recipes.

I experienced a difficult and messy process, one that left me with hand cramps and ink stains. Moving from the keyboard to the quill reconnected me to the methods of the past. While I was unable to fully leave the 21st Century behind thanks to my reliance on digitized manuscripts, I was able to experience the physical processes of writing down a recipe using an inkwell and quill. Digital transcription work is not messy, but this hand-copying was, engaging senses such as smell that get lost in the digital world. At the end of the day, there will be no ink stains left on the hands of the digital transcriber, no ink splotches to frantically clean off the manuscript or the table. It is this messy physical experience that I aimed to explore and through which new questions and avenues for further research arose.

Close-up photo of ink-stained fingers with laptop in the background.
My ink-stained hands.

Through this project, I experienced transcription in a new way that gave me an experiential understanding of the shapes of letters in various hands. As soon as I began copying and writing the letter “w”, for example, I understood it and grew better at recognizing it. It took the experience of hand-copying these recipes to understand that the unique shape of the “w” is a function of the difficulty of doing upstrokes with a quill or ink dip pen. This helped me better understand the rationale for certain writing conventions of the past as more than mere quirks but as features necessitated by technology. This process of realization, this rebirth of knowledge, occurred frequently during this project and improved my transcription abilities, as I had a better understanding of the embodied experience of writing with the technology available in the 17th Century than I had when I had been only transcribing digitally.

Photo of desktop with open recipe notebook, open laptop, ink pen and inkwell, and paper for blotting ink.
My desk as I copied out recipes. Shown are the book in progress, my laptop which I used to pull up the recipes I was copying from, my ink well, my glass dip pen, and my scratch paper used to restart the flow of ink on the pen if it dried out.

This experience also had me asking new questions. Unlike with digital transcription, when hand-writing, I was focused on the processes of copying. I asked myself, what types of editing were the authors using when they copied these recipes? Were they editing as they wrote by removing ingredients like I was? Were they adding ingredients that they thought would work better based on their own experience? Were they fixing mistakes such as removing repeated words and scratched out phrases like I was or were they at times introducing new mistakes? Does this editing count as unique knowledge creation?

A photo of a notebook with writing in black ink.
Pages 57 and 58 of the completed recipe book.

These new questions and this new experience allowed me to better understand why early modern writing looks the way it does. It opened a door for the recovery and rebirth of the physical knowledge hidden behind digital archives and digital transcription. Projects like this one that force modern scholars to rediscover this embodiment for themselves allow us to uncover this hidden knowledge, leading to a better understanding not only of the processes that resulted in the manuscripts we study but also of the people that created them. 

Early Modern, Posts, Series: Recipes at Play, Teaching Resources

Playful Learning with Food: Historical Recipe Assignments in the Classroom

Leave a comment

By Amy M. Froide

Recipes are powerful tools to teach about the past and the present. I like to experiment with assignments that mix a dash of fun with a quantity of learning in my courses on early modern British and European history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. These courses are upper-level surveys that do not require extensive background and content knowledge. Because not all students are history majors, I incorporate both multi-modal content and applied or experiential learning assignments. Students engage with historical sources and materials in different modalities; they will read scholarly articles along with a website, a blogpost, or a podcast on the same subject. And instead of assigning a paper, I structure assignments that require students to read, analyze, synthesize, and write, but the final product might be in a less textual format. Students respond well to this kind of hands-on and experiential teaching of history and the most successful examples have involved the history of food.

Utilizing some of the exceptional resources assembled by scholars and libraries, I have honed an assignment with the following constituent parts: 1) research and choose a historical recipe, 2) recreate the recipe,  3) present your results in class, and 4) write up a reflection on the experience and what food can teach us about history. Students consider various issues familiar to food historians, including the origins of foodstuffs and ingredients; histories of food production, labor, and gender; social status and class’s connection to foodstuffs; and food’s relationship to social settings, holidays, and religious events.

I ran this assignment for the third time in Spring 2022 in a course on Pre-Modern European Women’s History. I thought I had it down, but my 30 students staged a rebellion. Their act of charivari made a good assignment even better. Because I am a historian of Britain, I often do not assume my undergraduates can read non-English languages. In this course, I curated a set of digitally available recipes from early modern England. After perusing these recipes, however, my students balked. They did not feel attached to these recipes. They were distant and foreign. Diversity is a hallmark of my institution, and over a third of my students were Muslim with families from the Middle East and North Africa. A smaller percentage were Hispanic or from the Caribbean, many were African American, and several were Jewish. Given the breadth of backgrounds, I allowed these students to find a recipe that reflected their own past, with the caveat that it still had to be a documented early modern recipe.

The mandate for my students was to connect the past and the present through food.  Their background became the foundation for engaged historical learning. Thanks to this change on the last day of class we feasted on Sephardic Jewish recipes from late medieval Spain, agua fresca, and rosewater cakes. One student who is from the Philippines, chose to make adobo and taught about European colonialism in a new way by presenting native vs. Spanish adobe recipes. The main differences were the type of meat used–native Filipinos used goat, but Spanish Conquistadores introduced cattle–and the amount of vinegar to taste as Spanish tastebuds preferred a less tangy sauce (Figure 1).

Fig. 1 – “Potage de adobado de gallina” – a source typical of student online research from  Francisco Martínez Montiño, Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería, y conservería (Madrid: José Fernández de Buendía, 1662).

The part of the assignment that elicits the most discussion and concern is the recreation of the recipe and it often ends up being the most educational moment. I try to assuage their worry by reminding students that the ‘result’ does not have to be pretty or appetizing, it is the process I want them to think about. I must admit in the age of cooking shows, this is a hard habit for the students to break, but I repeatedly announce that results are not graded on taste or appearance. When students are in the act of recreation, they discover different perspectives and different questions to ask. How do I know what measurements to use? How can a modern stove top recreate a pot over a fire? What would pre-modern cooks have used as substitutions? And how long is it until something is ‘done’?

In my women’s history course, students recreated and presented food in ways I did not expect. One student chose to recreate a family pizzelle recipe (figure 2). She brought in heirloom pizzelle irons for her presentation and ran a taste test competition between northern European (made with butter) vs. southern European (made with olive oil) recipes. Spoiler alert: butter won. A few students chose to recreate medicinal rather than culinary recipes. A student compounded a salve used to treat Henry VIII’s leg sores. A key ingredient in the original recipe was turpentine. I had forbidden the use of toxic substances, which led to her regaling us with a comedy of errors tale of substitutions. The recipes that didn’t work out were some of the most fun. A student who produced a very dry and unappetizing seed cake was a good sport and allowed the class to laugh with and not at her. Her misfire introduced a lively discussion about the difficulties of recreating recipes without standard measures and suggested baking temperatures.

Fig. 2 – Student-made, historically-inspired pizzelles!

Between the research, recreation, presentation, and write up, I think this recipe assignment is more involved and productive than a standard paper. And yet, the successful work is ‘hidden’ in several ways. One, the multiple steps automatically break down the assignment into chunks. Two, because there are several elements of choice in the assignment students do not mind spending time on it. Three, because there are elements of play involved it doesn’t seem like ‘work’ or ‘study’ to them. I will admit, not every single student enjoys a recipe recreation assignment. A handful of shy students, or those who think cooking and food are insignificant to historical inquiry, are not won over. One option is to allow students to choose between this assignment and a traditional research paper. Overall, I have found that most students devote more time and thought to an experiential learning experience and enjoy the process much more.  Having fun while learning, mixing work and play, is a recipe for student engagement.

If you are interested in creating your own recipe recreation project, there is a bit of upfront work to creating the assignment. I suggest doing this part during a summer or winter break. If you trial the assignment, you might find you lose total control (like I did) or that you did not envision everything ahead of time, so you must be willing to do some improvisation. Making student reflection part of the assignment will help you figure out what worked and what did not. By your second or third iteration, your assignment will be much refined–much like any recipe!