By Tallulah Maait Pepperell

On Day 8 of the Recipes Project, we revisited some themes that had popped up on previous days of our virtual conversation. There were reconstructions, along with discussions of the ‘art’ of a good recipe. And, of course, we came back to the connections between recipes and family history, and the many forms of recipes that appear in our daily lives.

To start with the reconstructions, Maria Galanaki shared her video on constructing a meal that follows the Hippocratic Regimen.  Simon Walker continued his “Feeding under Fire” series with a video on Classic French Soldiers’ Food and a twitter thread on the subject.

There really was no end to the bready delights available yesterday (though specifically absent in Maria’s Hippocratic menu!).  We had @Pamphilia2‘s video on gingerbread recipes, Deborah Lawton writing on gingerbread in historical re-enactment, and Molly-Taylor Polesky’s interview with a master baker.

A lot of the activity of the day was focused around Twitter, with conversations surrounding family medicine recipes. We had chicken soup, hot toddies, mustard plasters, “The Remedy”, onion compresses, honey and salt water, honey-onion syrup, lemons, and Schmaltzwickel… All old family recipes, bringing together themes of family, memory, and personal links to recipes that has permeated this project.

Then I took over the Twitter feed for a few hours to indulge a personal project and explore the subject of fictional foods and recipes. A few suggestions of my own started us off on a journey through Studio Ghibli’s “Spirited Away” to Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” and then it took on a life of its own. Our wonderful contributors pitched in their own literary recipes, with a number from fairy tales and books from their childhood; we had an overflowing porridge pot, Little Red Riding hood’s picnic, the darker sides of Beatrix Potter, Narnian Turkish Delight, and the wonderful stories of Roald Dahl.

Participants came together around common themes, all  falling under the topic “recipes”.  We all have recipes that hold personal meanings, whether from tradition or memories associated with them. Recipes are just another way that family history is kept alive– like quilts, cookbooks, or photograph albums. This is also the case with the Winslow family in the bread posts today, and with the use of recipes as a wider historical teaching, such as the gingerbread reconstructions.

Similarly, the focus on fictional recipes explored the meanings food and recipes hold in both narrative and real life. Many of the recipes contributed dealt with fairy tales and children’s literature, showing how people can be shaped by what they encounter as a child. For me, the most vivid fictional recipe that sticks in my mind is the hideous roly-poly from Tom Kitten that Michael Rosen reminded me of during the discussion.

If there’s anything that the virtual conversation on ‘What is a Recipe?’ has shown us this last month, it’s that while they may not always be historical, recipes connect people in a multitude of ways.

A lovely summer day ahead–what awaits us on Day 8 of ‘What is a Recipe?’ Lots of videos! And also bread and gingerbread, and more!

Let’s kick off with a blog post that takes us on a trip to Wales… Lisa Tallis, from the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Cardiff, offers a blog post on their delicious collections, from brewing to farriery. She examines recipes from the perspective of Welsh-English bilingualism and cross-cultural travel between the two countries.

The Wellcome Library will be joining from around 11:30 on Twitter (@WellcomeLibrary) to consider: what is a medieval recipe? How did medieval people create and use recipes?

Siobhan Carlson’s eighteenth-century potato experiment, ‘Spuddenly Farming’, continues on Twitter and Instagram. She includes some videos of her experiment to show the differences between the cuttings. Spoiler: it’s very noticeable! It certainly seems like there just might be a recipe for growing better potatoes…

Molly-Taylor Polesky has a lovely ‘Interview with a Baker’ on YouTube. She visited a historical bakery in Berlin (Alte Bäckerei Pankow) and spoke to a master baker there, who tells us (among other things) that ‘Recipes are an art.’ Make sure to turn on the Close Captioning for English subtitles!

Over at her new blog, Cooking up the Archives, Deborah Lawton will be exploring ‘A Recipe is a Tasty History Lesson’. Indeed.  In this she looks at a gingerbread recipe and how it provides opportunities to discuss wide-ranging historical information. (She also has a taster from last week in which she ruminates on #recipesconf.)

Edith Snook and her team at the Early Modern Maritime Recipes project (Annabelle Babineau, Karim Baccouche, and Siobhan Carlson) will have a video on ‘Edward Winslow’s Receipt for Gingerbread Cakes’.  They will prepare a nineteenth-century recipe found in the account book of Loyalist and early Fredericton settler Edward Winslow. Along the way, they will think about  recipes and communities, how recipes bring things together—ingredients, tools, methods, flavours, tastes, people—and the tensions in these migrations across political, geographic, and cultural spaces.  (Link here.) You can also follow their discussion about the video on Twitter, with @BellePepper1, @Spuddenly_Farm, and @Pamphilia2.

Maria Galanaki shares video of ‘A Hippocratic Menu’ on YouTube (here). In this, she demonstrates the preparation of three recipes–a starter, a main course, and a dessert—using ingredients reported in the Hippocratic Regimen.

And from ancient Greece, we head to the trenches of the First World War with Simon Walker who will have a video on ‘Classic French Soldiers’ Food’ for his series Feeding Under Fire. (Link to the video here.) He will also be joining in to discuss his video on Twitter as @Dark_Nocterna.

If you haven’t yet tried it, I encourage you to try ‘Cooking with Anger‘. Get your list of emotional ingredients from the Protag-o-matic and write a VERY short story in the blog post comments. After all, as the German Master Baker says, ‘Recipes are art.’

Lots to keep us busy at #recipesconf today. Please do come join in the conversation in the comments below, on Twitter (@historecipes and #recipesconf), or at the individual projects. We’d love to hear from you!

By Amanda Herbert and Elaine Leong

Here at the Recipes Project virtual conversation Day 7, reconstruction has also emerged as a main theme.  What does “reconstruction” entail?  Is it following directions laid out by someone long-dead?  Or is it breaking down a past concept or culture according to our own systems, standards, and logics?  As our participants in Day 7 proved, reconstruction can mean many things.

Siobhan Carlson (@Spuddenly_Farm) continues to monitor her potatoes (see here and here). Working in parallel, Hillary Nunn (@HillaryNunn )  and Whitney Thompson (@klahom) explored eggs and the making of orange pudding. Prompting them to ask “What is an egg?” and “What is pudding?”. Elsewhere, Katherine Allen (@KAllen622 ) tried her hand at making lip salve and seed cake from an 18th century recipe book now in the Warwickshire Record Office. Katherine’s blog post highlights the difficulty and ease (via Amazon) of sourcing ingredients. Though we might be talking about potatoes, eggs or beeswax, one clear theme emerges from these #recipesconf about reconstruction – the difficulty in identifying precisely what our historical actors mean when they name an ingredient and in pinpointing their modern equivalents. Hillary and Whitney’s parallel experiment was particularly enlightening as the two versions of the pudding look somewhat different but still pretty appealing! 

#recipesconf aside, twitter has been filled with recipe reconstructions lately. The @makingknowing and @artechne projects have both taken advantage of the summer breaks to reconstruct recipes for all kinds of art processes from casting, soldering, melting to the production of colours like azurite. So, if you’re interested in reconstructing historical recipes, you’re in good company and there are plenty of resources out there!

Approaching “reconstruction” from a slightly different angle, Mark Sundaram (@alliterative) and Aven McMaster (@avensarah) reconstruct the history and etymology of the word “recipe” in their podcast, The Endless Knot.  If you’ve ever wondered how “recipe” was used in the ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern worlds — or even where we get the “Rx” symbol used for prescriptions, chemists, and drug stores! — then Mark and Aven’s exploration of words, history, and meaning offers some revealing insights.

The Instagram photo essay produced by Paveen Puneet and Priyanki S. Bishnoi explored “reconstruction” in the sense of breaking down and documenting the architecture, scaffolding, and framing of space and place.  Puneet and Bishnoi’s gorgeous images of cooking sites – both indoors and outdoors – in rural north India reveal that it is critical to explore the constructions which surround recipe activities.  You can find their essay, “A Pinch of This and a Handful of That: Food and Recipes in Kitchens of Rural North India” on Instagram @ppp_cookingchronicles

A more metaphorical reconstruction involves delving deep into one’s own family recipe collection to examine themes of cultural exchange of foodways, commercial functions of recipes, and memes, cliche, and memory. Will Burdette launched his new project, Food Moves, in which he’ll be exploring and reconstructing the family rolodex of recipes digitally! His video discussion is an intriguing counterpoint to Puneet and Bishnoi’s project. Where their interviewees dismissed the importance of written recipes as fuel for the fire, Burdette considers commercial recipes written on the side of boxes–as decoration, marketing… and family tradition. As @AvenSarah responded on Twitter:

Agreed! Makes me think of our famous, traditional ‘family’ recipe for shortbread–which is from the back of a cornstarch box! #recipesconf

— Aven (@AvenSarah) June 27, 2017

Finally, we “reconstructed” the archives of several libraries and special collections with a series of tweets from The College of Physicians in Philadelphia (@CPPHistMedLib), the Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives (@CUSpecialColls), the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections (@UofGlasgowASC) and the Thomas Fisher Library (@FisherLibrary).  All four institutions offered images and descriptions of images from their collections, focusing particularly on medical recipes, scientific recipes, and recipes revealing the cultures of composition and writing–specifically, of ink.

Of course, reconstruction has been a strong theme throughout the virtual conversation and indeed on our blog (and elsewhere–the researchers at The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, for example, have been doing replications for years now, see videos here). All this talk about reconstruction reminded us of our conversations on Day 1 of the virtual conversation (Storify here), where Thijs Hagendijk’s tweeted on how to make pearls from fish eyes and @rare_cooking‘s @Nicosia_Marissa discussed her work on Cooking the Archive, comparing the blog to a laboratory notebook open to public. We encourage you to start your own notebook on reconstructing historical recipes and share it with us on twitter, blogs, instagram and more.

It’s been a great day at #recipesconf. Please join us again on July 3 for Day 8 of “What is a recipe?”  The Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and  Medicine at the University of Minnesota (@umnbiomedlib) and the Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives  (@CUSpecialColls ) will continue to bring us gems in their collections. See you very soon!

By Rosie Redstone

Welcome to day 7 of our virtual conversation on ‘What is a Recipe?’

Today is a continuation of current projects and a few new ones:

• “What’s the Recipe for a Recipe? From ancient medicine to women’s mags”, Alliterative Video (Mark Sundaram and Aven McMaster). You can watch on YouTube here, visit their website here or follow them on Twitter @AllEndlessKnot, @Alliterative or @AvenSarah
• “A Pinch of This and a Handful of That: Food and Recipes in Kitchens of Rural North India”, Paveen Puneet and Priyanki S. Bishnoi. Visit Instagram @ppp_cookingchronicles
• “Transcribing Early Modern Recipes at Guelph: Experiments and Inquiries”, Hillary Nunn, Amy Tigner, and Guelph Team. Find the blog post here.
• William Burdette launches his Food Moves project, which looks at his family’s rolodex of recipes within a historical and digital context. Vimeo here and website here.
• “Reconstructing Recipes from an Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Recipe Book”, Katherine Allen. On Saturday, she was tweeting about the project here, Instagramming here and blogging here. And today’s contribution is a blog post here at The Recipes Project!
• “Spuddenly Farming: A reconstruction of Rev. Mr. Cochran’s Potato experiment, 1791”, Siobhan Carlson. Follow on Twitter here or Instagram here.
• The MMSH has revisited their initial post on what makes a good sound archive recipe — this time in French.
• College of Physicians Philadelphia sharing recipe related items from their collection, particularly medical and scientific recipes. Follow on Twitter here or their blog here.
• And yesterday on Twitter, Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives (@CUSpecialColls), University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections (@UofGlasgowASC) and Thomas Fisher Library (@FisherLibrary) were tweeting about ink recipes!

In case you missed it, Kierri Price’s Live-Cooking event is now available on YouTube. We are editing it down, if you’re hoping for a snippet instead — but this was a lot of fun to watch, with contributions even from a three-year old who was joining in. Let there be sprinkles!

As always, comments, contributions, stray thoughts, questions, and anything else you wish to put forward are always welcome! Join us on twitter using #recipesconf, or comment on any one of the projects above. We look forward to hearing from you!