Tag Archives: 19th Century History

Reconstructing an Italian Perfume from the Nineteenth Century

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. 

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.



The Imagined, Implied, and Authentic Audiences of an American Settlement House Cookbook

By Kimberly S. Baker, PhD
In early 20th-century Milwaukee, a Midwestern American industrial city, social reformer Lizzie Kander and her fellow aid workers published a community cookbook (of sorts). Kander and colleagues ran “The Settlement,” a settlement house that supported and acclimated immigrant Jewish families to urban American living, offering social services, arts and culture opportunities, and classes including English and civics (Fritz). The Settlement Cookbook began as the instructional text for its cooking class for young women and girls. The settlement house movement generally held that adopting American ways of living included adopting American culinary habits (Ziegelman, 160); thus, settlement-style cooking classes introduced immigrants to mainstream American food.

The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).

This cookbook and its historical and cultural context, audiences, and communicative goals introduce a “community” where imagined, implied, and authentic audiences converge. 

Settlement house initiatives can be understood as contact zones, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” (Pratt, 1991). In these contact zones, people with social power and economic means strive to influence the lives of less-privileged people, and lower-status settlement house patrons receive services provided by higher-status workers, who themselves benefit, emotionally, culturally, and socially, from giving aid.

The uneven relationships present in settlement houses relies on forms of authoritative power which are also fundamental to advice literature, including household manuals, where higher-status authors instruct and make recommendations to their supposedly lower-status readers (Dorfman, 4). If authors write to advise an implied audience of their own peers, intending that authentic (lower-status) readers were “listening in” for guidance necessary to rise socially, group boundaries become more visible. Such advice is believed to be valuable because “correct” behavior indicates who belongs.

These were dynamics which Kander herself understood very well. Settlement “stood for domestic science;” she argued in The Settlement’s 1899 president’s report, and cooking class trained girls to “do battle with the industrialized world,” and, “equip [them] to become economical and efficient homemakers and intelligent Mothers.”(Annual Report, 1899). Precision and formality reflect the institutional authority of classroom texts and the then-emerging home-economics discipline with its scientific jargon. Cookbook instructions outline techniques, as well as specify cooking tools, brand-name ingredients, and prepared foods.

Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

However, the Settlement’s authentic students were likely more experienced cooks than the start-with-the-basics instructions suggest. While Kander and her circle belonged to Reformed Jewish synagogues, the Settlement’s immigrant patrons followed more conservative religious practice, and kept Kosher (Fritz). The students’ kitchen skills were homegrown, as young Jewish girls learned religious food guidelines and traditional food preparation through helping their mothers (Ziegelman, 95-7). This oral tradition familiar to the immigrant students contrasts with the settlement house’s formal, institutional approach. Kander’s president’s report acknowledges these divergent norms, explaining that the cooking class was “obliged to conduct the lessons on the ‘Kosher’ plan—as the children adhered strictly to the orthodox rules of cooking,” (1899).

Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

That cultural accommodation soon faded; Kander’s notes (1898) for the initial classroom cookbook address Kosher practices, including defining Kosher cooking, dishes for milk and meat meals, meat preparation, and washing (with soda, not soap, which contained “mixed materials”). In the 1903 printed edition, nods to Kosher practices are minimal; non-compliant recipes such as for shellfish, and meat with dairy, feature among its pages. This cookbook content aligned with the non-Kosher eating habits of the local, middle-class, German, Reformed-Jewish community, rather than the settlement house students.

Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

In reflecting the broader local community, the cookbook not only gains potential readers, but also legitimacy by association with them. Community authority (and approval) offers students a permission structure to discard strict, traditional norms and adopt American cuisine.

That affluent, German-Jewish community was also a key cookbook audience, supporting The Settlement and funding the cookbook itself: Kander initially sought to publish the recipes for classroom efficiency, so students could spend class time cooking, not copying. The Settlement’s all-male directors denied this funding request as extravagant, so the women and their publisher instead sold advertisements in the cookbook, many to businesses owned by Kander’s social peers. Students bought copies for a reduced fee; a local department store sold surplus cookbooks to the public. The initial 1901 print run sold out within the year, and proceeds from subsequent editions, edited by Kander herself, funded The Settlement through its first nine years (Fritz). 

The cookbook’s advertising sections showcased luxury goods and services that reinforced the sophisticated, middle-class living invoked by the recipes. While the lifestyle advertised was likely unattainable for the immigrant student audience, the women whose families owned the businesses that purchased ads were more realistic customers. The ads may also have reinforced the ad buyers’ altruism by publicizing who else bought ads and supported the cause.

The cookbook may appear a rhetorical flop, delivering strict, novice-level instruction to knowledgeable students, proscribing a cuisine that challenges students’ religious norms, and advertising an unattainable lifestyle. Instructors with social status and wealth advised newcomers that being American meant following these guidelines. Yet, despite apparent shortcomings of audience analysis, the cookbook remained popular, locally, and nationally, for decades, blending tradition with American tastes and the changing times.

REFERENCES:

Dorfman, Cindy. “The Garden of Eating: The Carnal Kitchen in Contemporary American Culture.” Feminist Issues 12.1 (1992): 21-38.

Fritz, Angela. “Lizzie Black Kander & Culinary Reform in Milwaukee 1880-1920.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History (2004): 36-49. 

Kander, Mrs. Simon. and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld. The Settlement Cookbook.  Milwaukee: The Settlement. 1903. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books. 2010.

— Annual Report: Milwaukee Jewish Mission. June 6, 1899. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 2 Folder 11) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

—-Notebook. “Cooking Lesson Book.” 1898. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 1 Folder 10) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33-40.

Ziegelman, J. 97 Orchard: An edible history of five immigrant families in one New York tenement. Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. 2010.


Dr. Kimberly Baker is an instructor in the Humanities, Social Science and Communication department at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, in Milwaukee, WI, where she teaches courses in professional and technical communication. Her research interests include The Settlement Cookbook, and its author, social reformer Lizzie Black Kander, as well as workplace communication and the experience of user-experience (UX) professionals in organizations. She is at work on a co-authored book about everyday rhetoric for undergraduate STEM students.