Tag Archives: Early Modern

The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method

By Serin Quinn

The earliest known recipe referencing tomatoes was published in Naples in 1692. This is not simply the earliest European recipe to include the ingredient, but the first written tomato recipe world-wide. The history of the tomato – a foodstuff indigenous to the Americas – is dominated by European sources: our recipes, botanical descriptions and illustrations all stem from either European or post-conquest authors.

How, then, can we use such European recipes to understand the cultural influence of Indigenous American cultures? This blog explores how following taste offers us a means to recreate the unrecorded past and to bring to the fore hidden histories.

I am not the first to note this issue: following Marcy Norton’s 2008 work Sacred Gifts, scholars have begun to reconsider the role of American foods in European cuisines. Nonetheless, studies to date have focused on foods that have distinct paraphernalia (chocolate cups or tobacco pipes) or that have necessary treatments, such as the nixtamalization of maize or de-toxification of cassava. The pre-Columbian history of the tomato is harder to grasp, but its study shows us that even the most ordinary of American foods had a fundamental influence on the food cultures of Europe.

[Xi]tomamolli: Mesoamerican tomato sauces

To reconstruct pre-Columbian tomato-usage (in Nahuatl xitomatl), we must consider the form and taste of food and relationship between ingredients.

The post-conquest primary sources we do have – ethnographies such as the so-called Florentine Codex and government reports such as the Relaciones Geográficas – provide us with two key pieces of information. These sources do not give us a fixed recipe of the type we would find in contemporaneous recipe European books, but there are notable consistencies in their reports that speak to common, repeated practice. Critically, these sources repeatedly tell us that tomatoes were consumed as a sauce or stew and that they were consistently paired with chili peppers: as the Relaciones report from Texcoco (1582) stated, ‘They have tomatoes and tomatillos, which serve as a spice with chilli, from which they make sauces and appetizers to eat’.

Ethnographic work suggests tomatoes and chilis were first charred to remove the skin and then pounded together using a stone molcaxitl (‘sauce bowl’) and a texolotl grinding stone. This sauce-paste was then used to flavour dishes such as tamales and stews of beans, turkey eggs or meat (deer/dog/turkey/fish/newt). As the authors of the Florentine Codex observed: ‘Where [it is] tasty, [it has] chili, salt, tomatoes, gourd seeds: shredded, crumbled, juiced’. This is the quintessential Mesoamerican tomato recipe, as recreated from common practice.

In the centuries following the conquest, tomatoes continued to be eaten in this way by the populations of New Spain. As one chronicler wrote in 1698, tomato-dishes were the ‘be-all, end-all of the stews of the Indies’.

Salsa de tomates: tomatoes in Iberia

Across the Atlantic, in the Spanish-controlled Mediterranean, we see a clear continuation of both these forms of cooking and of the tomato-chili nexus.

The earliest recipe, from Spanish Naples, is for a tomato sauce ‘in the Spanish style’, and sauces and stews/soups also form the bulk of recipes in Spanish and Portuguese. The author of a manuscript Portuguese cookbook (c. 1715) wrote: ‘Tomatoes in all foods, that is, in meat, in stews, or in roast sauces, add a particular flavor to everything’.

Almost all recipes from this period are directions to use tomatoes as a sauce or as the base for stews/casseroles (with one or two recipes directing tomatoes to be pickled or used in salads). If we deconstruct these recipes to their base elements, a consistent method appears that can be expressed as follows:

Take ripe tomatoes; roast them; remove their skins; mince or crush them until fine; mix with chili, oil and vinegar and [onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, oregano, or thyme], serve with [fish, chicken, eggs, beans, or rice].

Some aspects of the flavour profile varied between recipe in the choice of herbs, spices and alliums, but the addition of chili, as well as oil and vinegar, was almost always to be found. The association between the two foods was so strong that they were customarily depicted together in paintings.

Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.
Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.

 

Love apple sauce: tomatoes in Britain

The transfer of tomato-tastes to Spanish colonisers and subsequently to their homeland in Iberia is perhaps not surprising. Yet through tomato recipes we can see that the spread of Mesoamerican tomato-chili sauces travelled further, into the early modern British diet.

English recipes for tomatoes – then called love-apples – fall into two categories: pickles and sauces/soups. Recipes for these sauces use the methods seen above: rather than ‘roasted’ they are ‘baked’ and their skins removed by pulping through a sieve rather than peeling, but the result is the same. Importantly, alongside ‘Old World’ ingredients such as onion and ginger, almost all these recipes contained chilis. We see this across both print and manuscript recipes, and usually in the form of ‘capsicum’ or chili vinegar, as in the recipe below.

These sauces came to Britain not through direct colonial contact with Mesoamerica, as in Iberia. Rather, the authors of eighteenth-century encyclopaedias and gardening manuals attested to a different origin of influence: Jewish refugees, specifically Sephardi Jews fleeing the Spanish/Portuguese inquisitions of the 1720s. As one horticulturalist noted, ‘it is agreeable in Soups. Those who are us’d to eat with the Portuguese Jews know the Value of it’. As Iberian consumers once adopted a taste for the tomato from Mesoamericans, so they later brought it with them to their new home.

In both Iberia and Britain, therefore, we see how the tastes of a minority group can have a powerful and lasting impact on the diets and desires of the majority, and how knowledge is spread through a series of incorporations and re-introductions.  

‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.
‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.

The enduring relationship between tomatoes and the chilis illuminates a path of cultural influence from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to eighteenth-century Britain. While we lack detailed guides on how tomatoes were prepared prior to the conquest, understanding preparation methods and flavours profiles allows us to trace the movement of culinary knowledge over time and space and to reestablish the role of Indigenous American tastes in shaping European cuisine.
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Serin Quinn is an early modern historian, specialising in food, horticulture and global connectivity. Her PhD at the University of Warwick was on the introduction of the tomato to early modern England and was funded by Midlands4Cities. Her article on the early English reception of sweet potatoes recently won the Food & History Best Article Award 2025. As of October 2026, she has a research fellowship with the Society for Renaissance Studies, working on a new project on aphrodisiac-foods in pre-modern Europe.

 

Around the Table Podcast: Cooking in the Archives with Marissa Nicosia

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

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.

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

Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

Folger Early Modern Measurements

The Sifter

John Locke’s pancakes recipe tested by Marissa

Sage Pudding recipe tested by Marissa at Pottsgrove Manor

Penn State University Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections Library

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

I am so excited to welcome Marissa Nicosia to Around the Table. Marissa is 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. In addition to a voluminous body of journal articles, book chapters, and essays, Marissa has also co-edited two collected volumes and in 2023 published her monograph, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660. Today, though, we’ll be speaking about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website launched in 2014, Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen. In it, Marissa curates, transcribes, and updates recipes from early modern English recipe books, including historical information alongside detailed step-by-step instructions and photos of the updated recipes. I’m thrilled to speak with Marissa today about her wide-ranging experiences cooking and writing about early modern recipes. Marissa, thank you so much for joining me today.

Marissa Nicosia 02:17

Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I love talking about this work with other people.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

Can you share how Cooking in the Archives started and how it has evolved or changed over time?

Marissa Nicosia 02:29

So, Cooking in the Archives started with paleography, the practice of studying historical handwriting. I was a PhD student in English literature, and I was learning to read secretary hand, and also round hand and italic hand, the kind of dominant forms of sixteenth-, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century handwriting. And one thing that we read a lot to practice learning these letter forms that looped below the line in strange ways or had interesting abbreviations, we learned by transcribing, copying out each letter of recipes.

And recipes were great because you get excited about seeing sage or chicken, or you’d have, like, interesting verbs like mingle. And there were also numbers in there. So, they were really good for learning how to read handwriting that you would encounter doing archival research as a literary scholar, as a literary historian.

And me and my initial collaborator on the Cooking in the Archives project, Alyssa Connell, we kept saying, oh, this sounds tasty. Oh, maybe we could try to make this. So, we applied for an internal grant at the University of Pennsylvania where we were studying for interdisciplinary innovation. And we said we would like to innovate by actually cooking these historical recipes instead of just reading them to practice our handwriting skills and all of that.

So, we were awarded this grant, which was excellent because we needed a way to pay our rent in the summer of 2014. And we dove in. And at this point, my research had been in book history and manuscript studies and in thinking about Renaissance temporality and history. So, I felt like this recipe recreation was a different kind of time travel, but I wasn’t quite sure what. And, while I knew a lot about early modern manuscripts, I didn’t know that much about food studies, food history, or culinary manuscripts in particular, because that hadn’t been like one of my major fields of my research at that time.

So, we started feeling our way through what it was like to read and research and prepare these recipes, Alyssa and I initially. And now I’ve continued that practice by reading and learning so much for people in the broader community, of historical reenactment, of food studies, of chefs who practice, scholars who practice, about how to take historical recipes and make them today in all sorts of different ways.

Sarah Kernan 05:04

That’s a great segue into the next topic I’d love to talk about. How do you approach that process of identifying what recipes you actually want to prepare and then researching and cooking and updating them? What all goes into that for you?

Marissa Nicosia 05:20

The process always begins with me reading something and saying, ooh, that’s interesting. It might be that I want to taste it, or I’ve been reading a menu, or a household account book where a dish gets mentioned and now I’m like, oh, there are this is a recipe for smelts. It’s not just that that household was buying smelts.

So, there’s always something that piques my interest. And I’ve to date never done a project where I’ve cooked through an entire recipe book. I’ve always just kind of been more of a gadfly about it. I go with what is interesting to me. And that’s part of what’s enabled the project to last for eleven years and for me to not get bored with it or burn out on it. So, I start with something that’s interesting, either because I want to taste it or I want to know about it.

And at this point, eleven years into this work, I find that if there’s a recipe I’m curious about, I have to cook it. Even if I’m not going to be publishing a recipe for it in, say, the journal article I’m writing, I feel like I need to know about it through cooking. I need to use my embodied method, my practice as research method, to fully understand what it’s saying. Because I found that like I don’t exactly understand what the difference between peeling or not peeling the mushrooms are until I’ve tried it. Or, using sugar instead of honey. Or, white wine instead of red wine. All these kinds of variations that I’ve seen in recipes. I know what they mean a little bit more through the process of trying it. And I wanted to speak a little bit to updating as well. But I wonder if that gets into the question of historical accuracy too.

Sarah Kernan 07:06

Absolutely. Obviously, like anyone who tries preparing historic recipes of any kind, there are real challenges with translating that to the modern day. So how do you balance historical accuracy with the practicalities of modern kitchen and dining settings? I mean, it’s a very different environment than what was available the early modern period. So how do you handle that?

Marissa Nicosia 07:33

I begin from a position that what I make will not be authentic, but it will be in a open dialogue with that original recipe. So, if the recipe calls for flour, butter, sugar, and cloves, like a recipe for cakes that I’ve made before and that I’ve been writing about recently. The strains of wheat and the strains of sugar that are cultivated now are not the same as the sixteenth-century ones. The cloves have gone through different production processes. The climate is different. The milling and the processing is different. The butter is from a different breed of cow that’s also like fed in a different environment.

And, I’m also constantly dealing with the fact that I am based in Philadelphia and North America and my specific climate and foodways. And the recipes I’m talking about are English recipes most of the time. So, there’s also that removal. So very simple ingredients like butter, flour, sugar, and cloves raise all of these ways we already can’t get back to what they would have been like in 1616, or thereabouts. But we can still get something that is the modern equivalent of that thing.

And then I’m baking them in my oven. I’m baking these cakes in my oven. And that is quite different than the bread oven that’s described in the recipe. So, this particular recipe describes drawing your brown bread out of your bread oven, which could have been a kind of beehive bread oven, or it could have been one of the pocket bread ovens on the side of a hearth, but it would be some more enclosed baking space. So, the recipe has a lot of information about how to watch the cakes so they don’t over bake using that kind of radiating heat technology. And that’s something that they’re telling the cook to use instinct, but also use observational skills to do it.

And there, it’s a little different than me setting my oven to 350 in a timer. But, like as a historical recipe recreator, I’m using my like I’m like, is it getting too brown? Are they setting? Like, has the, am I seeing the signs that I was supposed to look for in the bread oven?

So that’s one way that these forms of attention translate across early modern cookery practices and my recipe recreation practices. So, in many ways, I see myself as a person in a long line of recipe users who is adapting what I’m doing to the current realities of my situation in a way that’s trying to honor the many people who prepared, compiled, circulated, and preserved these materials to bring them to us today.

And it’s important to me that most of what I put on Cooking in the Archives can be prepared with ingredients from your local grocery store, plus rose water. Because I can’t eliminate rose water and be truthful to the foodways. But a lot of the other things I want you to be able to buy at your big box supermarket, because I think people have a right to be able to access this kind of material, that it shouldn’t just be for people who can buy specialty products or have immediate access to specialty products.

Sarah Kernan 10:51

Yeah, making these recipes more accessible to a broader audience, in addition to translating them for a modern audience, but making them accessible for anyone to be able to cook. Yeah, I think that’s really important and kind of helps you understand the historical moment a bit more and have a grasp on that, no matter your ability to go to all these specialty markets or order food online.

Marissa Nicosia 11:14

Yeah, I mean, maybe I could try roast swan, but that would be very difficult for me to arrange. So, it would be very difficult for most of the Cooking in the Archives readers to arrange, although perhaps maybe someone will write in and say, I have a line on roasting swan, give me a recipe.

Sarah Kernan 11:31

How do you go about researching and filling in some other aspects of recipes, some of the trickier parts? There’s always missing pieces and recipes. How do you figure out the things that are left unsaid, like the ingredients, quantities, or the timing? What are ways that you fill in those gaps?

Marissa Nicosia 11:52

Yeah, there’s variation or implied knowledge in amounts, in methods, in temperature, and in timing. So sometimes there’s something like a reference for using a porringer or something like that. And then I consult resources like the Folger’s amazing, like weight and measurement resources, to figure out like, well, maybe a porringer is about three, I think it’s about three quarters of a cup.

But porringers also vary wildly. So, a person’s porringer in their house might not be what a porringer is in another house. Or a posnet, like a little three-legged cooking pot that you would use to make a posset or something like that. So, for some of these, there’s a material culture of cookery implements that we can turn to for some information. And there are certain resources I now know to go to for that.

There’s also, spice prices sometimes become really important. So, I found some resources for deciphering spice price rates. There’s occasionally putting the spices on top of a coin, as well. So, it’s sometimes unclear if it’s the price or the coin that’s being called for in those situations. Those are a little tricky.

If I have a sense from when I’ve prepared the dish, if I’m like, oh, that actually is like a meringue, or that actually is like shortbread. Then I turn to modern recipes that tell me what’s a good temperature for a meringue to go into my oven, what’s good temperature for shortbread to go into my oven. And I look at the timings on those modern recipes. And I set a lot of timers. I set so many timers when I’m recipe testing. If I have something going on the stove, I always have a stopwatch going.

But it’s interesting how there are certain descriptions for preserves that you can kind of approximate to candy height or other kinds of things you might see on a modern candy thermometer. There are descriptors like a gentle fire or a soft fire. And there you’re putting your pot just over like a kind of low flame. And learning what that method vocabulary is like is interesting. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Oxford English Dictionary, not just looking up ingredient nouns, but also looking up some of the verbs, to think about what is this? Is there a sense here in this word that I’m not totally getting?

I’m trying to remember the name of this particular resource. Oh, The Sifter. The Sifter also is a place where I sometimes look up cooking implements and that sometimes has volumes on it as well. It’s a great resource.

Sarah Kernan 14:31

Could you talk about any surprising or interesting recipes you have found while working on Cooking in the Archives?

Marissa Nicosia 14:40

One of the most fun recipe recreations that I’ve done started with a social media post that a bunch of people sent me. So, a scholar who works in political philosophy, was doing research in the John Locke Papers at the Bodleian. And he posted to social media a recipe for John Locke’s pancakes from the Locke Papers.

And a bunch of people sent this to me. I was very excited to see it. And I prepared this recipe and they’re really luscious, crepe-like British pancakes with a lot of cream in them, and also orange blossom water, and butter, and half a nutmeg grated into the batter.

So they are extremely expensive pancakes because nutmegs were very expensive during Locke’s lifetime. And I did the recipe recreation. And after that, I had the opportunity to go to the Bodleian and look. And it looks like he’s actually working through a couple of different recipes, one of which he received from a social connection to develop this kind of peak recipe. And the recipe that I shared with half a nutmeg is his, like, edited, best version. So, it’s just such an interesting way to come at the life of this very important historical thinker who’s had a lot of impact in the modern world, to see that he also was interested in this negotiation of developing the best recipe in the kitchen for this kind of dish.

And there’s something funny about it being up pancake, right? It’s not like a roast beef. It’s not a celebration piece, but maybe it is a, it maybe it was a celebration piece being served at a special occasion, but it doesn’t have the grandeur of certain other historical recipes. It’s a pancake, but oh boy, is it delicious.

Sarah Kernan 16:34

Yeah, I’m really intrigued now. I saw those posts and I saw you working on that recipe a while back, but I haven’t recreated those. And the fact that it has half a nutmeg in it really piques my interest. That is probably a pretty intense flavor.

Marissa Nicosia 16:48

It’s also one of the few recipes I can say that I’ve actually cooked using slightly more historical materials. So, Anne Mumenthaler invited me to Pottsgrove Manor, and we prepared that recipe on a flat surface over a brazier of coals, which is likely how that kind of pancake would have been cooked because you can do more detailed work over a brazier of coals than you can with other kitchen heat setups. It was one that we got, I got to try using a more historical technology than I normally have because everything I do is for the modern kitchen.

So was fun to see this recipe that I’d updated for the modern kitchen taken back into a historical kitchen and used. And the people who came to that event at Pottsgrove Manor really enjoyed these pancakes cooked in that way. We were surrounded by wood smoke, so that changed the sort of ambiance of eating, which was nice. It was very delicious. I can’t say if they were more delicious in my kitchen or in that kitchen, but both were delicious.

Sarah Kernan 17:46

Well, I think we’ve kind of hinted at this in a couple of my questions and your responses. Could you talk a little bit about what role you think food and recipes, this historic food and recipes, plays in understanding or at least connecting to moments in the past, the history, cultures of a specific time and place. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Marissa Nicosia 18:11

People really care about food. Because it’s something that they have to deal with every day. It’s something which they already have a history with through their family, whether their family is a like robust food traditions family or not. Food isn’t so important, but they’ll have a memory, whether it’s like a highly advertised snack or a traditional family recipe that links them to time and place.

So, I love showing people recipes from a more distant history because there’s an immediate connection with like, yes, I also eat food every day. I also have to think about these things. I also have some sense of food traditions, right? Whether that is like a favorite mass-produced drink or a family dish.

I think with something like jumbles, or these kinds of historical cookies, or the historical hot chocolate that I’ve made from later seventeenth-century manuscripts, people are like, oh, that’s like a thing that I have consumed, but this is a very different version of it. And it makes sometimes the historical lessons go down a little bit more easily or people leave with something that they immediately want to go tell someone else.

I’ve had students in class where I’ve made historical hot chocolate, have all sorts of different connections to other hot chocolates that they’ve had in their lives and tell me, oh, I need to go tell X family member, X friend, that I had this recreation of a seventeenth-century hot chocolate in class.

So, it really gets people excited. And I think it’s an amazing touchstone for showing people why the study of the past is important and what purchase the past might have on what we do now, and how we think about food now and how we think about history today.

Sarah Kernan 20:14

Well, you just mentioned preparing some of this food for your classes, or students preparing it. Do you do that very regularly? Do you incorporate historical cooking and recipes into many of your classes? How do you put the process of making into your own teaching and your own research outside of the Cooking in the Archives project?

Marissa Nicosia 20:36

It’s grown and grown and grown. So, it started out with, I end up talking about food more when I’m teaching a Shakespeare play, or a Margaret Cavendish poem, or something like that. And then it became, well, why don’t I have my students transcribe a little bit in class? Or we’ll read something from a manuscript in the round so they can see the handwriting.

And then I’m like, well, I can get this little grant and I can buy goose quills and then we can write out the recipe together. And then, oh, I have this other little pot of funding that’s connected to some undergrads who I have now transcribing. I’ll buy a hot plate. I’ve made historical hot chocolate in the classroom a lot in literature classes. And I taught a Shakespeare in the Kitchen class about my book in progress where we made strawberry preserves on a hot plate in the classroom. That was a little more involved.

And I’m now teaching, most semesters, classes where students are transcribing from mostly eighteenth-century, later seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century, recipe manuscripts that are held in Penn State Libraries, Eberly Family Special Collections. That collection has grown over the ten years that I’ve been a faculty member at Penn State through long-term collaborations with special collections, with curators, with the people who work in the digital library, digital collections side of special collections.

So, at this point, I’m teaching out of my food history work and out of my Cooking in the Archives work every semester. But in the beginning, I wasn’t. I had to learn a lot more to be ready to teach like that.

Sarah Kernan 22:11

Do these practices go more into your research and writing as well as your teaching?  Do you find that all this has become very interconnected on that side of your professional life as well?

Marissa Nicosia 22:24

It really has. So, I think I said earlier that I don’t want to write about a recipe unless I’ve tested it, even if I’m not actually like publishing the recipe test as part of the article. Like if I write an article where I’ve tested a recipe, I’ll test the recipe and I’ll put that up on Cooking in the Archives when the article gets published to say, hey, I wrote this thing over here that maybe you want to read, maybe you don’t. But here’s the recipe recreation for anyone who wants it.

And all of this work over the last decade or so has led to me writing a book called Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’ve been cooking the historical recipes for Cooking in the Archives, I’ve been writing these other pieces., and I’ve also been teaching Shakespeare pretty much every semester over that period of time. So, I have written a book that has ten recipes in it. And in the chapters, I use those recipe recreations to show that Shakespeare’s food metaphors are not just fun linguistic work, that they’re connected to this larger culinary culture and that preparing the recipes in the kitchen has a lot to teach us about these food references in Shakespeare’s poems and plays.

So that’s the project that I’m finishing right now. I never would have written a book like this if I hadn’t started Cooking in the Archives in 2014. And I’m really excited for this book to be material that I get to teach in the classroom because each chapter is written with the idea that I’d want to give it to undergraduates when I was teaching them the play.

Sarah Kernan 23:59

Do you want to tell us exactly when the Shakespeare book is coming out? Anything you want to plug?

Marissa Nicosia 24:05

I believe Shakespeare in the Kitchen will be coming out in 2026, but I will update you all with a fresh link and at a true date once I, once I’m clear with the press about exactly when that’s happening.

I’m also writing a number of different articles and book chapters that think about the seasons, and the way that seasons change, and how different literary works and different recipe works reference the changing of the seasons. So that’s something I’m very interested in, and it kind of links all my work about temporality into my work about recipes.

And I’d also note that Cooking in the Archives has been a little quieter over the last couple of years, in part because a lot of my recipe testing efforts have gone towards my Shakespeare in the Kitchen project But I have a lot of other ideas about food references in Shakespeare that I did not have a chance to deal with in Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’m thinking about continuing a sort of complete works of Shakespeare in the Kitchen on Cooking in the Archives in the coming years, where I’ll get to share some of the recipes that that didn’t make it into the book and that were exciting to me in a shorter format than what I’m doing in my book chapters. So, there’ll be more material adjacent to that huge exploration I’ve done in Shakespeare in the Kitchen coming to Cooking in the Archives soon.

Sarah Kernan 25:40

Wonderful. Well, I can’t wait to see that, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be very excited to see that as well. Marissa, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Marissa Nicosia 25:48

Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Kernan 25:51

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.

 

 

“To a Lady of any delicacy”: A visual exploration of the sway of English dining etiquette on early American identity

By Jennifer Wells

Gilbert Stuart, Abigail Adams (c. 1810-1815), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1784, Abigail Adams sailed for London to join her husband as the wife of the first Ambassador of the United States to Britain. In her diary, she confessed, “With the best accommodations [the voyage] will be dreadfull, to a Lady of any delicacy.” She bemoaned the ship’s drab lodgings and noted that her silver porringer was the only cup or bowl in sight. She also complained in a letter that the ship’s Black cook had “no more knowledge of cookery than a savage; nor any kind of order in the distribution of his dishes, but hickeltapickelta [higgledy piggledy].” She criticized his supposed missteps on course order, grumbling, “on they come with a leg of pork all Brisly, a Quarter of an hour after a pudding, or perhaps a pair of roast fowls first of all, and then will follow one by one a peice of Beaf and when dinner is nearly compleated a plate of potatoes.”

Paul Revere, Porringer (c. 1760). Image Credit: The Met, New York. 

Adams’s frustrations reveal the fledgling nation’s distinctions in race and class and indicate the significance of mealtime rituals to elite and aspiring Americans. Her anecdote makes clear that dinner was not the place for experimental expositions or risk-taking jaunts but a choreographed performance, with every detail scrutinized. For Americans like Adams, sophistication materialized through the precise ordering of ingredients and synchronized flow of dishes. 

In the nascent shine of independence, print culture celebrating American distinctness flourished. Americans juxtaposed their supposed virtue with the corruption and follies of Europe, but their claims of superiority belied deep insecurities. Because much of Europe, particularly England, regarded the fledgling nation as a provincial backwater, white Americans searched for ways to establish themselves as cultural equals in the eyes of their former kinsmen. Their desire for validation manifested in part through the emulation of English standards of etiquette that appeared in early American cookbooks.

Front piece and Title Page to Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (London: Printed by L. Wangford, c. 1777). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 
The Art of Cookery constantly lambasted so-called French extravagance while including French recipes in her Cookbook. Note, for example, Chapter III: “How expensive a French Cook’s Sauce is.” 

Colonists in British North America had long consumed English cookbooks, devouring rhetoric extolling the virtues of honest English fare when compared to French lavishness. Their popularity on both sides of the Atlantic tells of long-simmering obsessions with self-image and station within shifting social hierarchies. Manners, clothing, household furnishings, and table settings became markers of rank during the early modern period, and markets emerged for printed works to help readers traverse the fluctuating landscape. Cookbooks arose to aid housewives and housekeepers in their quest to project posh. 

Directions for a Grand Table, 1st Course and 2nd Course to Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (Manchester: Printed by J. Harrop, 1769), Google Books. 

Social climbers throughout the British Empire believed that the correct execution of politeness distinguished the well-bred from the low-born, materializing in countless small ways, especially at the dinner table. Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) enjoyed enormous success with its print life spanning nearly five decades, including an edition of  The Experienced English Housekeeper printed in Philadelphia in 1818. Raffald promised “Economy with Neatness and Elegance.” Her index provided “Directions for a Grand Table” and sketched out course arrangements to “make a pretty appearance” and “be entertaining to the Company.” She also noted what serving dishes to use and when, such as “Sweetmeats and Fruits dished up in China Dishes, or Fruit Baskets,” and added tips for garnishing. By heeding Raffald’s advice, the upwardly mobile strived to gain entry into privileged spheres.

Roberts’s index included extensive directions for meal service, see pages 42 to 64. Index to Robert Roberts, The House Servants Directory (1827), (Boston: Munroe and Frances, 1827), MSU Libraries. Image Credit: MSU Libraries, East Lansing. 
Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party (c. 1821), MFA Boston. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

After Independence, Americans sought approval by mastering preset codes of civility. While images rarely appeared in American cookbooks before the late-1830s, an emphasis remained on table settings as representations of prestige in and of society. Maria Rundell’s American Domestic Cookery (1823) (a revised version of an English cookbook for an American audience by the same author titled New System of Domestic Cookery (1807)) stated that an elegant table “gives respectability to her who presides.” Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-wife (1824) affirmed, “a dinner justly calculated for the company, and consisting for the greater part of small articles, correctly prepared, and neatly served up” creates a “pleasing appearance” for all in attendance. Robert Roberts’s The House Servants Directory (1827), one of the earliest books written by a Black American in the United States, had explicit instructions on “Regulations for the dinner table,” “Dinner on the table,” “The first course removed,” “Second course removed,” and “Placing on the desert.” And Eliza Leslie’s The House Book (1844) dedicated nearly fifty pages to “The Dining-Room:—Table Furniture, Waiting on Table, Carving, &c.” Henry Sargent’s The Dinner Party (1821) illustrates that sweet spot Americans craved—quiet luxury through tasteful display.

Half a Calf’s Head to Frances Harriet Green, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia, William Marshall & Co., 1837). Image Credit: HathiTrust. 

 Frances Harriet Green’s The Housekeeper’s Book (1837) was one of the first American cookbooks to include multiple illustrations. Her images focused on presentation and performance, notably the skills required for carving and serving meats. With seats at either end of the table, hosts and hostesses were expected to perform the task in front of a crowd. When dishes like calf’s head were placed before them, all eyes met theirs in eager anticipation. The show could turn into a debacle if done without finesse. As Eliza Leslie’s The Cook’s Own Book, and Housekeeper’s Register (1840) remarked, “nothing can be more disagreeable to one of a sensitive disposition, than to behold a person, at the head of a well-furnished board, hacking the finest joints, and giving them the appearance of having been gnawed by dogs.” American cookbooks aimed to spare such humiliation by incorporating images with step-by-step instructions. 

Turkey for Roasting,” to Frances Harriet Green, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia, William Marshall & Co., 1837). Image Credit: HathiTrust.

Green also provided readers with the “most approved” method for presenting roasted turkey through a tale of caution. Green recounted that she was once invited to a dinner where the unappetizing bird was “brought to the table with the head on as well as the feet.” She tsked, “such trussing is exceedingly ugly and altogether unworthy of a good cook.” Her disapproving tone indicates the implications of not following her suggestions—an accusation of lousy cooking and inept hosting that verged on buffoonery.

Green’s text followed precedents set by English cookbooks as authoritative sources that set culinary standards and assuaged nervous readers. Her comments also reveal how following precise procedures led to assumptions about status. While adhering to polite culture opened opportunities for self-elevation for some, it simultaneously barred others who did not conform to its exacting standards. 

America’s newcomer status meant that many of its inhabitants wanted to prove their worth to themselves and the wider world. Cookbooks and other prescriptive English texts had set guidelines for taste long before the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord. During the early national period, Americans continued to purchase English cookbooks and began to author ones of their own based on the English model. While Abigail Adams might have wanted to adopt a stars-and-stripes attitude toward the early republic’s distinctness from England, the proof was in the pudding—the mother country’s parameters of decorum largely dictated America’s cultural norms of the time.


Jennifer Wells is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Texas A&M University specializing in British colonial North America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her research explores the social ambiguities of the urban South following the Revolution, a transformative period when questions of national identity and belonging swirled. Her dissertation studies the petition of Christopher McPherson, a free man of color who attempted to repeal an ordinance prohibiting Black Americans from owning or riding as passengers in carriages in Richmond, Virginia. Using the petition as a lens into the early national period, she investigates veteran affairs, the influence and limits of polite culture on class and race, educational reforms, apocalyptic prophets, and the history of early American psychiatric institutions. You can read a recent article she wrote about Christopher McPherson here.

Reference List:

Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure: In Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: University Press, 2005. 

Bickham, Troy. “Defining Good Food: Cookery Book Illustrations in Britain.” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 31 (2008): 473-489. 

Bickham, Troy. Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London, Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2020. 

Breen, T.H. “Baubles of Britian’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 119 (1988) 73-104. 

Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain. Prospect Books: Totnes, 2003. 

Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 

Yokota, Kariann. Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. Oxford: Oxford University, 2011.

 

Around the Table Podcast: Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800 with Deborah Krohn

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to Deborah Krohn, Associate Professor and Chair of Academic Programs at Bard Graduate Center, about the recent exhibition Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800 at Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Staging the Table explores early modern dining practices through illustrated manuals featuring instruction and carving and napkin folding. The books are considered alongside early modern material artifacts such as table linens and carving knives, as well as modern napkin folds based on period designs. Follow Deborah Krohn and Bard Graduate Center on Instagram to learn more about current and future projects.

Music

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

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

Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800

Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800 Exhibition Website

Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800 Digital Exhibition

Instruments of Dining: A Research Symposium

Settings and Sounds: An Exploration of Early Modern Dining with Food Historian Ivan Day and Music Ensemble Sonnambula

Studio Visit: The Gentle Art of Napkin Folding: A Demonstration by Joan Sallas

Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800 Catalogue

Mentioned in the Show

Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens

Ivan Day

Molly Taylor-Poleskey

Sonnambula

Napkin, Netherlands or Germany, ca. 1600, with later inscriptions and labels. Linen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. Moore, 1923, 23.80.74a.

Frontispiece, from Neu Verbessertes Trenchir-Büchlein . . . (Breslau: Caspar Müller, 1660). Engraving. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a new 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.

Today I’m speaking to Deborah Krohn, Associate Professor and Chair of Academic Programs at Bard Graduate Center about the exhibition she has curated, Staging the Table in Europe 1500-1800. The exhibition at Bard Graduate Center Gallery explores dining practices through illustrated manuals featuring instruction and carving and napkin folding. The books are displayed alongside early modern material artifacts such as table linens and carving knives, as well as modern napkin folds based on period designs. Deborah, thank you so much for joining me today.

Deborah Krohn 1:02

My pleasure.

Sarah Kernan 1:03

So, Staging the Table has so many different components, including physical and online exhibitions, a catalogue, a symposium, performances, lectures, workshops. The project also pairs texts with imagery and material objects, including modern reproductions and interpretations of really exquisite napkin folding. This comprehensiveness is so helpful for conceptualizing the early modern table. Could you talk about how you developed the idea for Staging the Table and how it came to encompass so much.

Deborah Krohn 01:39

Sure. So, like so many of our projects it came really out of a very long-term interest in culinary history, as well as the history of books and print culture and early modern Europe. And I had been teaching classes for a number of years where I was using recipe books as primary sources to try to understand cultural history. You know, the culture of the table, food production, food distribution, images, images of food and still life painting, in more prescriptive texts like herbals and, you know, botanical treatises, anything that had to do with anything that was potentially edible, and recipes of all kinds, cosmetic recipes as well as culinary recipes. So, really that whole sort of very, very broad group of ideas and material things and images. And I had written a previous book about a 1570 cookbook, Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera. And that was, that really sort of got me into book history in a major way because I kind of, as an art historian, trained as an art historian, I realized after being really, sort of, gripped by the incredible illustrations in this recipe book that in order to actually understand what they were doing there I had to read the book. And then, you know, it sounds pretty obvious, but for art historians I dare say it is not always obvious to read the book. And then once I’d read the book I realized, well, you know, why it is what kind of editions are there, and how many times was it published, so it sort of was like, almost like following a breadcrumb trail to get, to use a food metaphor, to get to the whole. And after I’d written that book, I realized that there was a lot of other stuff that was similar:  carving manuals that were, by the end of the sixteenth century, very specific; books that were didn’t have any of the other kind of stuff that was in these larger recipe compendia and that were much more focused. And I just started kind of collecting references and exploring those and realized that there was a lot of, a lot of copies of these just in the New York area. Because part of the exhibition at Bard Graduate Center is part of a program that we call the Focus Project, where faculty (it’s mainly faculty and postdoc-curated exhibitions that are done as part of a curricular enterprise within the teaching structure) and we’re not really supposed to borrow stuff from far away places. You know, we’re really supposed to keep it as local as possible. So, I realized that there was this kind of treasure trove of these carving manuals really at five or six libraries in the tri-state area around New York, and that it would be really potentially very, very good to develop it into an exhibition so that’s a kind of long-winded answer to your question.

Sarah Kernan 04:50

No, It’s great. Um, so by the time this episode is released, the in-person exhibition will have ended at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, but the catalogue and all the digital components like the online exhibition and the YouTube videos are all still going to be available. Before we actually turn to those lasting components, I just have a few questions about the physical in-person exhibition.

Deborah Krohn 05:17

Sure.

Sarah Kernan 05:18

So, Staging the Table showed how dining at elite early modern tables was really a multi-sensory experience and every part of the meal from the food to the napkin folding, the room and table decorations, even the small details like the carving knives, that those could really represent or highlight a family, or a specific event, or a theme, and every aspect of the meal could be highly manipulated to a really dramatic degree. This exhibit really hits home that the table encompassed so much more than just the food that was on the table and there’s really a wealth of extant material culture to examine. Could you, could you talk about this for a moment, reflect on this for a moment?

Deborah Krohn 06:07

Sure, probably more than a moment. Um, yeah. So, the table was a really important space because in the early modern period there wasn’t that much else to do besides work, sleep, and eat. And, so, a lot, I think, a lot of social life came, came down to what happened around the table, whether it was in, a very illustrious banquet in an aristocratic or princely home or castle or even in a modest home in, in a town, or you know, perhaps even in the countryside, that meals were central to people’s lives, and so, understanding how important that was, I, I realized that it was, it would be really interesting to pull together as much information as, as I could about that event. And one, one parallel that became really evident to me when I was preparing the exhibition was thinking about the table as a kind of, of a Wunderkammer, a chamber of wonders. You know there’s been a lot of attention amongst art historians and historians of material culture to look at this phenomenon in the early modern period of these collectors cabinets where all kinds of objects were, were thrown together for private consumption and, and enjoyment, but that these were really the nucleus of the modern museum. And it struck me that the table was also a place for display, and contemplation, and kind of a socializing around a group of objects in the same way that the Kunst- and Wunderkammer was.

Deborah Krohn 07:59

But the table was in motion. It was, it was set up and put away. Tables were not permanent pieces of furniture. They were trestles. And they could be taken down. They wouldn’t, there wasn’t a dining room for a lot of this period, right. Not a set place in the home where dining took place. It was, could, you know, usually in the biggest room there was when it was a banquet and then it would became something else afterwards or the next day, so you know there, these were not kind of permanent spaces. But they were nevertheless very important, so I wanted to get a sense of what these spaces looked like. A lot of people think about and talk about the culture of food and dining and a lot of the objects as ephemeral, as things that sort of come and go, they, they, they, they’re not around. They’re not lasting. And I find this word somewhat problematic because they are a lot of the objects themselves were ephemeral but then there’s ways to kind of access the experiences that people had through texts, through images, through prints, through objects, that you know, and through recipes and all of that.

Deborah Krohn 09:02

So, so really I was trying to presuppose that the table is a kind of space for all of these activities and and it’s it’s also, doesn’t come out so much, I mean in an exhibition you have limited space to explain all your ideas, right? You have these labels, and labels are amongst the most frustrating things for somebody to write because you know they have to be really short and there’s so much that you want to kind of cram in, an object does speak a thousand words and for a label you often only have 150, and how you can possibly do that. So my labels are a little long. Um, but that’s actually what’s on the website. The labels are there. They’ve been slightly edited to be sort of in conjunction with the online exhibition but that information has been preserved on the website. So, yeah, I mean that’s sort of the idea of bringing together the um, especially the knives, some of the cut the carving knives and the linens is to just give people a sense of like the look and feel of this in a material sense and, you know, the one thing that you can’t have in an exhibition in a museum is food. So how to get around that, you know that’s another topic we could potentially talk about that, you know, in in another part of this, but that because it’s a huge subject, but I don’t know, does that answer your question?

Sarah Kernan 10:27

Yeah, yeah, I was able to visit the exhibition a few weeks ago, and…

Deborah Krohn 10:33

Oh great. You should have gotten in touch with me!

Sarah Kernan 10:38

I was really struck by just seeing some of these objects in person, especially the table linens, seeing the napkins. That’s not something you usually see on exhibit in too many museums. So, being able to see those and then see the the modern reproductions or interpretations of these Renaissance and early modern napkin folds was so fantastic, and seeing how they repeated a lot of these same ideas and themes like sugar sculptures, that I think might be a lot more familiar through people who look at these recipes and see recipes for how to mold things out of sugar paste.

Deborah Krohn 11:20

Right.

Sarah Kernan 11:22

But actually seeing these sculptures in essence out of linen repeating that same idea and having the same visual impact was really stunning.

Deborah Krohn 11:31

Right. Well, we were really fortunate to be able to have some reconstruction folded linen centerpieces made by Joan Sallas who lives in Barcelona and whom we flew over for the first week of the exhibition so he could bring some of his amazing creations, and he really has recreated these based on very, the very limited information in the treatises. You know, they explain how to make the basic folds but they don’t explain, you know, the step-by-step of how to take these basic folds and make a crab, or, you know, a double-headed eagle, or a turkey, or some of these fantastic objects that he, that he has created so, you know that’s, that’s a part of it too understanding the kind of ingenuity and the craftsmanship that went into it and all of what people sometimes refer to as tacit knowledge, right? You know, you have these books and there’s information in them. But what does the information actually tell you, how far does it take you, what other types of pedagogical support would be needed to create these, these objects and that’s something that, that’s very hard to kind of communicate that in an exhibition. But that was a big part of the research process for me was trying to think about how you might make these things and what kind of training and how that training was, was communicated. I guess you saw some of the wonderful frontispieces from the carving manuals where there were pictures of these, these men who were in it, caught in the act of teaching and sort of depicting that pedagogical moment is something I found super interesting and something you don’t often see in other types of imagery and visual material from the period. You know, to had it, teaching is not something that’s easy to represent visually.

Sarah Kernan 13:27

Yeah, yeah.

Deborah Krohn 13:29

So that was something that I, I mean there, you could, there is a whole history of it and that would be a whole other interesting topic, like you know Bolognese fourteenth-century legal scholars, you know, tombs with pictures of, you know, people standing at a cathedra teaching there, that they exist. But it’s a very specific kind of iconography. So, you know that was just like one of the many things that interested me about these books.

Sarah Kernan 13:56

How did you actually decide on what items to include in the exhibition? Was there really, was there anything you really wanted to include but couldn’t?

Deborah Krohn 14:07

I mean, yeah. If you, if I could have made a wishlist of everything I wanted from every museum in the whole world, yes, there would a lot been lots of things I would have borrowed from that, you know, the Kunstkammer in Vienna and, you know, the V&A, and any other number of European museums that have fantastic examples of this. So yes, but I did I think I did manage through the generosity of the Metropolitan Museum and the Cooper Hewitt which both of those have great collections of cutlery that’s completely understudied and it’s usually not out in the galleries, it’s hidden away in the storerooms. So I was able to find examples of, of objects that that were illustrative of this culture and which helped me to tell the story in ways. So yes, I think that everybody, every curator, would say that there are things that got away, but given the limited kind of construct of this exhibition, I was very pleased to have the loans that I, I got and to be able to kind of make them carry that the sort of messages and the meanings that that I wanted to convey, so, you know, that’s important that you, you have ideas and then you have to find objects that, that you can use to kind of illustrate those ideas. I think the process is different than if you set out to do an exhibition of, you know, impressionist painting for example, where there that the objects speak for themselves. There’s, there’s the early, middle, and late style. There’s all kinds of thematic ways you can organize a show like that, but it’s basically a paintings by an artist, whereas here, you know, an exhibition that involves all these different kinds of things I think involves really figuring out what the narrative is and what the basic ideas are that you want to communicate and then finding ways to do that through the objects that are available to you.

Sarah Kernan 16:09

Could you tell us a bit about the team of people who helped you put together Staging the Table?

Deborah Krohn 16:15

Sure. Well first, first I should mention the, the two designers, the designer of the book Jocelyn Lau and the exhibition designer Ian Sullivan, because they really helped me to kind of make my visualization that I had in my mind come to fruition, that was really important. I had very specific ideas of how I wanted this material to be displayed and both of them were incredibly good listeners, but, and creative, and so they kind of work with me and wait. It was a really good team I think that was part of it. But then beyond that, you know, we have the whole installation team and the students who over a period of three or four years, actually was drawn out because of covid. The exhibition was originally supposed to take place in 2021 and was delayed for two years and honestly, that was a kind of godsend because it would have been a totally different exhibition if I had mounted it in 2021. So, as a result of that, multiple generations of students got to work on it in the context of the of the two-year MA program that we have and they contributed through their research both directly and indirectly to parts of the exhibition. One really specific way that they contributed was through an amazing website based on a deck of playing cards published in seventeenth-century London that we were not able to borrow from the Beinecke Library, but we used a digitized copy of those decks of cards, and they created this fantastic website that brings food, and that was the brief was find recipes that the carving animals and fruits on the on these cards could have, how they would have been made, and so they they use the cards as a kind of way of getting into the whole period in terms of food. So, so that’s one very specific way in which other people contributed to the exhibition and then, you know, then of course there’s the usual: the editors, and, you know, the people that work with you to make sure that your labels make sense and are are clearly expressed and don’t have too many convoluted sentences and and all of that. So I guess you don’t mean really that, you mean more sort of intellectual collaboration.

Sarah Kernan 18:45

Well, those are all people I, I was thinking of, you also, there were also people who popped up in the exhibition itself, like Ivan Day…

Deborah Krohn 18:56

Ivan Day. Absolutely, right.

Sarah Kernan 18:58

…with his recorded, audio recordings of reflections about different appropriate food history commentary, and then Sallas’s napkin folding and his workshop and involvement in that. So.

Deborah Krohn 19:13

Yeah, I mean those people, both of those people I was, I was obviously aware of their work, and Ivan and I have known each other for maybe ten or fifteen years and I’ve, I’ve been to various conferences, and over the years have really come to understand the incredibly unique way that his knowledge and experience can be activated for an audience and the ways that that kind of practical understanding of things is so key to, to bringing the period alive and and bringing the objects alive. So I was really thrilled that he agreed to come to New York and and see the show and and comment on it and bring his reproduction set of knives with him and some other objects that he used for some of the programs that are, I think you’ll have links to those on on the podcast. But, but, yeah, I mean he his knowledge contributed both in direct ways and and in indirect ways as well in terms of my own kind of study and research and and coming to understand this in the way that I I did to put together the exhibition. So we we we stand on the shoulders of all of these people as we do our research.

Sarah Kernan 20:30

Absolutely. Well speaking of all these other people who do this research, could you speak a little bit about the symposium that was associated with the exhibition, I believe it was called Instruments of Dining, and also the other events like Settings and Sounds and how they complimented and added to the exhibition? And for our listeners, all these programs are going to be linked in our in our podcast notes.

Deborah Krohn 20:53

Yeah.

Deborah Krohn 21:59

Great. So, I wanted to do something for symposium that would kind of be accessible to a, to a larger audience than than simply the four or five people that might be interested in early modern recipe books. I mean, I know that there are a lot of people and that they’re probably all listening to this and thinking well like, why not just do programs that are geared to us? But part of it is the the person who’s the head of our public programs and research program, his name is Andrew Kircher, really was very encouraging in terms of trying to open it up to a, to an audience, which I really appreciate. This is something that a lot of places in thinking about public humanities and other ways of engaging a broader public with with kind of research projects, right? So that’s kind of the bigger background. So the symposium, I invited a scholar who I’d met at various conferences, Molly Taylor-Poleskey, who who works on dining at the German courts in the seventeenth century and she gave an archivally-based paper that was very interesting and really spot-on in terms of the courts and the the types of things that would be happening based on these archival sources that she’s researched and then I I had some, the music side of it.

Deborah Krohn 22:24

Well then Ivan, of course, because for the evening program, that was the Settings and Sounds, and the symposium, did different lectures where he was talking about ways that objects and he he made this wonderful sugar sculpture tazza that he demonstrated its use and shows showed us some cutlery from the period, so he did a lot of really great, very hands on things. And then the music, that came about because one of the carving manuals and folding manuals that became kind of the protagonist of the exhibition was something compiled, translated from the Italian in the 1640s by a German Baroque literary figure named Georg Philipp Harsdörffer. And Harsdörffer, I’d never heard of him before I was engaged in this project, but he’s actually an incredibly important person for other publications and and activities and among which he wrote the first libretto for the first German opera that was produced in the early 1640s and so I started digging around and finding all kinds of fascinating stuff and and in almost all the images of dining and banqueting from the period you see musicians and and a number of the images in the show and some of the prints, and I wanted to try to imagine what that what it would sound like to be at a meal and to have the the kind of music that would be played at a banquet at the table.

Deborah Krohn 23:54

And Andrew Kircher has a lot of contact in the performance world and was able to create a relationship between a wonderful early music group called Sonnambula, and specifically the person who is the the sort of director of Sonnambula, Elizabeth Weinfield, and together we kind of crafted a program where they actually went back and found the score for some of the music that was connected to one of the events that’s pictured in one of Harsdorfer’s books is the banquet to celebrate the Peace of Westphalia, which is the end of the Thirty Years’ War that took place in Nuremberg in 1649, and so we went back and found some of the music and she was able to, you know, play a snippet of it live for the event. And that was something that was really significant for me was to put together the the kind of soundscape as well as the tablescape for these events and and that was the idea of it and there were some other music um Telemann and some other more well-known kind of table music Tafelmusik that that she found to play for this. So, you know, a kind of involving people in what the the term Gesamtkunstwerk, you know, sort of “total work of art” is something that often is used in conjunction with German opera from the nineteenth century, but it it was really the case that these banquets from the seventeenth century were were total works of art with the with the food, the the visual stimulation, music, and and then sort of poetry and recitation and emblematic literary inscriptions that apparently would appear on so a lot of the sculptures made out of food or made out of sugar or linen. So there were all these elements and dimensions that I that I you know couldn’t really even in an exhibition communicate to say nothing of in, you know, a monograph, so that was really what I I tried to use those programs to do is to bring in all this other content and to kind of, you know, obviously one could quibble endlessly about authenticity and you know that’s another, that’s a whole other conversation, but I think in terms of just getting a broader sense of it with a, with the proviso that it’s not completely authentic and it’s impossible to to go to a situation where you have complete authenticity and any kind of reconstruction or recreation, but it at least provides a sense of what that experience would have been like.

Sarah Kernan 26:33

If we could switch gears now to the catalogue.

Deborah Krohn 26:37

Sure.

Sarah Kernan 26:38

I absolutely love this catalogue, actually. I don’t normally say that about catalogues. They’re usually really large and unwieldy and not exactly the most easy books to use. But this is really so manageable to to hold and to flip through. It’s such a beautiful book. It’s so evocative of the text of the period from the exhibition. It uses both red and black font throughout, like it’s so often the case with these early print books. There are decorative elements, they’re really evocative of the woodcuts found in books at the time, the different sorts of typefaces that you often see. So I really just love the visual aspects of the book as well. But it’s also such a valuable scholarly resource as well, and I was wondering if you had actually visualized this exhibition as a book or a monograph before an exhibition because this catalogue actually reads so fluidly, more like a monograph than an exhibition.

Deborah Krohn 27:49

Well first of all, thank you. It’s it’s wonderful to hear that because those are all things that I was very, very engaged with sort of making happen and and this. And to answer the question, I mean, you know, it is a monograph. A lot of catalogues are multiple authors and part of the the, this focus project idea, is that it’s a way for faculty members to deploy their research in a way which is more public-facing, so in a sense it I did think of it as a monograph, but I but I wanted it to be written for a broader audience. When I first started thinking about this, it was sort of amorphous. Once I got into it, I realized how significant visually it would be for an exhibition.

Sarah Kernan 28:40

So, the exhibition is now digitized and it’s freely available online. Could you tell us a bit about the process of digitizing a physical or in-person exhibition and some of the challenges associated with that, as well as some of the benefits you see?

Deborah Krohn 28:57

Sure, I mean the benefits are pretty clear, because an exhibition is around for a limited number of months and then it disappears. So having some permanent record of it is really important and it’s really nice because it’s it’s actually it’s so sad to think about the end of an exhibition. You know you work so hard on these and then and then they inevitably come to an end. So it’s really great that it exists in the digital form. So in order to create that, we have two wonderful, sort of digital people at BGC, Jesse Merandy and Julie Fuller, and I worked really closely with them to figure out how to, you know, organize it into some form, choose the order that the objects would occur in, but the process was pretty straightforward. I I just we we used the the images that, we had digitized images because of because of the book and the book illustrations, uploaded them, and uploaded the label material, and Jocelyn Lau who had designed the book created the design for the website, so that it was kind of a seamless transfer of all the graphic details that you mentioned, that were so important in in the sort of look and feel of the exhibition. So, in this case, the the online version does capture a lot of those aspects that you mentioned that the mixed typefaces the color scheme and all kinds of, kind of the quirks of early letter press printing which was what we you know we really wanted to communicate that. So I’m glad that came through.

Sarah Kernan 30:34

Well, final question. Did you have a favorite book or object from Staging the Table?

Deborah Krohn 30:42

Hard question. Who’s your favorite child. Um, let’s see. I, a favorite single object. Gosh. I mean…

Sarah Kernan 30:55

Or a couple, if you can’t really choose.

Deborah Krohn 30:57

Yeah, I mean, you know. One of the napkins that we borrowed from the Met that was, it’s it’s a napkin that was from seventeenth-century Haarlem or Belgium, sort of that area, that has a wonderful kind of label that’s sewn onto it with a series of names of different family members over several generations. And it’s it’s an American family, that’s how it got to the Met, and it was it’s actually in the American Wing at the Met, it was donated by an American family along with a lot of other objects. But the fact that this napkin had such an important status in the family that it became this kind of locus of of these different memories and the the kind of set of names on it. I I found that just so moving to see how something that many people would consider a kind of humble object, a napkin, became really the bearer of memory and transmitting family, you know, the family history, so that that object to me was just like a really important thing. Because you know these napkins, people had hundreds of them in the early modern period, literally hundreds, because they um they were used constantly. And they were really, you know, necessary to to this the rituals of dining and they do survive but people don’t really use them anymore.

Deborah Krohn 32:30

They’re too much work. I think when you start asking questions and talking about this, so many people when I was doing tours of the exhibition would say, oh yeah, I have all this big box of of of linens from my grandmother, but I never use them because they’re so hard to wash and, you know, and iron, and so but these are really these sort of humble material objects. And and so that’s something that’s that was one of my favorite objects. And then I’ll have to say some of some of the books that just the illustrations. There’s there’s one illustration of a carver and he’s standing in what looks to me very much like a Kunstkammer, and I think it’s kind of riffing on this the the theme of the Kunstkammer, you know that, I found that actually at the very end of my research process and we didn’t have time to even borrow the book, so I have a reproduction of it. And and one thing I’ll just say this really quickly. In the exhibition we also have a lot of reproductions because when you’re doing a book exhibition one of the challenges is you can only open a book to one page, but what I chose to do is to attach all of those reproductions with nails to the wall so it looked sort of like the workshop and so that the visitor. wasn’t deluded into thinking these were actual objects. I wanted it to be really clear what was a reproduction and what was, you know, an actual object. So this this image of the carver in his workshop that looks like a Kunstkammer, to me made that exact connection. And instead of having precious objects like jewels, and cameos, and ancient sculpture that you’d see in a in a Kunstkammer illustration, they’re carcasses of animals and and carved fruits. So, and I think it was actually humorous. I mean, whoever made that had a sense of humor about the sort of visual tradition that was being quoted, and that, so that to me was, it’s a favorite object because it seemed to kind of embody some of you know some of my ideas about the exhibition.

Sarah Kernan 34:25

Wonderful! Well Deborah, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about Staging the Table.

Deborah Krohn 34:32

It’s been a really wonderful opportunity for me to reflect as the exhibition is coming to a close and to think about some of the themes. And I really appreciate your interest. Great to meet you.

Sarah Kernan 34:43

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.