Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Summer 2025

Making


Introduction

By Sarah Peters Kernan, Kelli Kimura, and Melissa Reynolds, Editors

Recipes are more than simple instructions—they invite us to enact their processes and physically engage with texts from the past. Whether termed “making,” “remaking,” “recreating,” or “reenacting,” this act of following historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way. These experiences can be challenging and frustrating, but also enlightening and fruitful. The Recipes Project has long featured contributors’ stories about making foods, cosmetics, dyes, and perfumes, and more from historical sources, often highlighting the rewards and surprises of these endeavors. Many have found particular success in classroom settings, guiding students through the creation of historic recipes and witnessing the meaningful insights that emerge. Furthermore, major academic projects like Making and Knowing and Refashioning the Renaissance have demonstrated that hands-on making is an invaluable tool for historical inquiry, teaching, and research. 

This month, we explore “Making” from a variety of angles: in six new episodes of our podcast, Around the Table, hosted by RP co-editor Sarah Peters Kernan, and in eight blog posts by authors who define “making” capaciously—from the historical reconstruction of perfume or medicine, to content-making online, to community-making through culinary practice, to making as a means of combatting the pernicious encroachment of generative AI within the classroom. 

Every Thursday through September 18, we’ll drop a new episode of Around the Table, featuring 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 is a way to bring a moment of history to life and invite awareness to an aspect of the past. Our guests embrace experimentation and a process of trial and error, reinforcing that no recipe is entirely complete, regardless if it is a household recipe for biscuits or an artisan’s notes on making an ink or wine. Recreating recipes also hints at a better understanding of the labor involved with daily activities, such as the physical effects on one’s hands after doing the same repetitive motions with a needle, quill, parchment, or mortar for hours every day. Or the preciousness of certain ingredients which were notoriously difficult or expensive to obtain or prepare. These practical realities of making attract and engage large audiences; all our guests teach and engage through a range of public-facing means, including social media, blogs, podcasts, non-academic books, and small businesses. They have all learned that making is a way to make abstract ideas come alive in a very real and material way.

Around the Table guests this season are experts in a range of crafts, including cooking, embroidery and textile work, and manuscript making. And in addition to practicing and promoting historic crafts, they are also writers and scholars of history, literature, and archaeology. Victoria Flexner, food writer and historian, talks about her experience hosting historic dinners through Edible History and writing A History of the World in 10 Dinners. Crystal Dozier describes how she explores historic food and foodways through experimental archaeology and running the Archaeology of Food Laboratory at Wichita State University. Food historian Neil Buttery discusses his passion for cooking and eating centuries of British foods in his blog, podcast, and recent books. Alexandra Makin, a textile archaeologist, talks about her recreations of early medieval embroidery, the impact on her research, and her popular YouTube channel documenting her work. Literature scholar Marissa Nicosia details the origin and growth of Cooking in the Archives, and the impact the project has had on her writing and teaching. And finally, book historian Sara Charles discusses her experiences making ink, quills, parchment, and more using medieval methods, why she shares it all on her website and social media, and her incorporation of making with textual research in her recent book, The Medieval Scriptorium.

In the eight posts that complement these episodes, published on Tuesdays, community activists, teachers, scholars, and physicians-in-training further explore making in all its variety. Like some of our podcast guests, a few of these authors view making epistemologically, as a means to reconstruct ephemeral experiences from the past, like sounds, smells, or tastes. In her post, Charlotte Gaudry describes her research into reconstructing recipes for nineteenth-century Italian perfumes as “immaterial materialization.” Caleb Prus similarly finds important insights into the emotional states—and taste preferences—of medieval Englishmen and -women by reconstructing a recipe to cure heartache, both physical and emotional. 

Again, like our podcast guests, some of our contributors bring making into the classroom where recipes and cookbooks become pedagogical tools which foster confidence, creativity, and interest. In their post, Bonnie Shishko and Shawn Bowers describe teaching their students to think of writing as akin to making a recipe for their favorite food: to achieve a great end product, you need to focus on the often-messy process. Sara de Blas Hernández writes about using eighteenth-century recipes for chocolate in her classroom, using hands-on reconstruction to expand her students’ appreciation for Spanish literature. But many of our posts this month push us to think of making beyond the act of physical reconstruction. As it turns out, recipes are crucial for making all sorts of things: community, tradition, or even content for social media. Anna Marie Smith and Thomas Cook write about their joint venture to recreate the traditions, smells, and tastes of their childhoods in Italian-American families through their new venture, Fatto a Mano. Claire Bunschoten and Ben Lee describe Korean American chef Edward Lee’s preparation of bibimbap as an act of identity formation. In Esther Martin’s post, the lines between making and collecting become blurred in the lives of social media influencers, whose curated collections of kitchenalia are central to how they make and remake their identities online. And finally, community activist and scholar Ángel Tuninetti describes his work with the Centro de Estudios Heñói, a small NGO in Asuncion, Paraguary, whose mission is to collect and publish traditional peasant and indigenous recipes, kept alive and transmitted from generation to generation. In a country whose traditional foodways are threatened by the dominance of industrial agriculture, the act of making is also an act of resisting cultural erasure.

We hope you’ll enjoy this issue on making food, making culture, making identity, making history, making expertise, making content, making manuscripts, making medicine, and making community.

Banner Image: Paraguayan women making Chipa Manduvi. Credit: Centro de Estudios Heñói Team.


around the table

Edible History with Victoria Flexner

In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the historical dining collective, Edible History. She is the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023. Through these projects and her Substack newsletter, Victoria expertly communicates history through food. Follow Victoria Flexner on Substack and Instagram for updates.

Archaeology of Food with Crystal Dozier

In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and anthropological archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is Chair for the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the city of Wichita. Crystal describes researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Follow the Archaeology of Food Laboratory on Instagram and Facebook.

British Food History with Neil Buttery

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.

Early Medieval Embroidery with Alex Makin

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.

Cooking in the Archives with Marissa Nicosia

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

Medieval Manuscripts with Sara Charles

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


posts In This Issue

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

By Caleb Prus

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

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

Continue Reading…

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

By Sara de Blas Hernández

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

Students in the nixtamalization workshop. Image credit: Sara de Blas Hernández.

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

Continue reading…

Reconstructing an Italian Perfume from the Nineteenth Century

By Charlotte Gaudry

A perfume manual. Image credit: Archive.org.

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.

Continue reading…

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

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.

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

Continue reading…

Mixing Rice, Making Self: Chef Edward Lee’s Theory of Bibimbap

By R. Claire Bunschoten & Ben D. Lee

On the Netflix show Culinary Class Wars, Korean American chef Edward Lee makes food to make identity. In the semi-final round of the South Korean cooking competition show, chefs are tasked to create a dish communicating their life story. Signature dishes abound: elaborately crafted songshu guiyu and painstakingly refined pasta vongole speak of hard won skill. Lee, however, offers a twist on a Korean classic when he prepares for the judges a “modern-style” bibimbap to communicate his Korean American identity in the form of a deep fried ball of rice reminiscent of arancini, encased in a layer of Ahi tuna, and topped with caviar. The result of his efforts are mixed.

A bowl of bibimbap. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.

Bibimbap, which literally translates to mixed rice, is a humble yet prominent mainstay of Korean cuisine dating back at least to the sixteenth century. Comprised of a bowl of warm white rice topped with an artful arrangement of vegetables (namul), some beef, and often an egg yolk, all is then mixed together by the diner with a condiment of gochujang (fermented red pepper paste) or soy sauce to one’s own taste before eating. Scholars of Korean foodways such as Hae-kyung Chung note that bibimbap has “a distinctive flavor that combines ingredients to create new flavors while allowing those ingredients to stay true to their core.” In this way, bibimbap is a dish of transformation; although bibimbap’s ingredients are discrete at the start, the mixing at the heart of its name (bibim from the verb bibida, “to mix”) produces a unified dish.

Continue reading…

Retracing Our Roots

By Anna Marie Smith and Tom Cook, Fatto a Mano Project

A lump of gnocchi dough. Image Credit: ©AZZAMARIE Studio ‘Ball of Dough’

Into the depths of Italian culinary history, there remains a search for the most exotic pasta shape; a culinary journey into transitory perfection and ephemeral uniqueness. Then, lies the humble gnocchi. A lump. A dumpling shaped and formed by ​old hands crooked and weathered or tiny fingers touching raw dough for the first time. The singular gnocco stands alone as Italy’s poor mass of unhinged flour.

Like the sculptor before us, gnocchi lies as a mass unbothered and unetched by shape and form. A gnocchi di patate, gnudi, or ricotta gnocchi sits below the base level of chef and restaurateur alike. Simple and manufactured as a starchy potato bomb, gnocchi have become a gastronomic black eye. To make them is above the Michelin guide, to buy them is embarrassing, to serve them​ pre-packaged…well, to some Italians, is sacrilege.

Continue reading…

“Recetario Soberano”: Defending Sovereignty One Recipe at a Time

By Ángel Tuninetti and the Centro de Estudios Heñói Team

Paraguay is a poster case for the damage that industrial agriculture can cause on food security and food sovereignty. The landlocked South American country was almost self-sufficient in food production until the 1990s, mainly thanks to the diversified crops and animal production of the fincas campesinas [small peasant farms]. 

Image Credit: Centro de Estudios Heñoi.

Then, in 1996, GMO soybeans were introduced, and with them, an industrial agricultural model aimed at the production of commodities, followed later by other GMO crops, such as corn, rice, and wheat.  Now the country depends on the import of vegetables and fruits, since 95% of the cultivated lands are dedicated to genetically modified crops for export. This production involves the use of 60 million liters of pesticides per year (10 liters per inhabitant), and is defended by mercenaries, the police, the army and the judicial apparatus. This is a war for the future of Paraguayan people and their right to food sovereignty.

Continue reading…

Recipes as Pedagogical Resistance: Teaching Food Writing in an AI Era

By Bonnie Shishko and Shawn Bowers 

An image from a student-created cookbook. By permission of the student at Queens University of Charlotte.

As college professors with three combined decades of First-Year Writing experience, we’re observing two unsettling trends: first, that traditional undergraduate students are increasingly unlikely to tackle academic writing without relying on AI-tools, and second, that they are increasingly likely to hold rigid beliefs about writing—what it is, what it can do, and what it should sound and look like. As a result, we’re noting a third phenomenon: in the face of machine-generated content, students don’t trust their own voices.  

And why should they? As products of an educational system that standardizes and quantifies learning, it makes sense that many students view writing as an output—one to be assessed through binary lenses of good/bad, right/wrong.  

 Continue reading…


Tales from the archive

  • Introducing ARTECHNE – Technique in the Arts, 1500-1950

    By Sven Dupré and Marieke Hendriksen What is ‘technique’ in the visual and decorative arts? And how is ‘technique’ transmitted? Those are the central questions of ARTECHNE, a five-year project supported by the European Research Council, and led by Sven Dupré, that started at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam in September 2015. ARTECHNE…

    Read more…

  • Reflections on Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century Recipes

    By Katherine Allen For the ‘What is a Recipe?’ Virtual Conversation on Saturday, 24th June, I reconstructed two eighteenth-century recipes from Mary Wise’s recipe book: a lip salve remedy and a pound cake. You can find out how these experiments unfolded over at my blog, and you can also check out Twitter @KAllen622 for the…

    Read more…

  • HEAT! A Recipes Project Thematic Series

    As humans, we want to control heat. We want to create heat, temper or even extinguish it, depending on context and purpose. We have a very limited temperature range at which we are comfortable (some microbes and bacteria can survive temperatures as low as -20C and as high as 130C), so we spend an incredible…

    Read more…

  • From the Hearth to the Gas Stove: A Study in Apricot Marmalade

    By Marissa Nicosia The early modern hearth and the modern gas stove are rather different technologies for controlling heat. Again and again in my recipe recreation work for Cooking in the Archives, I encounter complex instructions for managing cooking temperatures on a hearth and try to translate those instructions to my own equipment. To what temperature…

    Read more…


Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine