Welcome back to the Recipes Project’s annual Teaching Series, where we explore the ways that educators from both “inside” and “outside” of the academy use recipes to help people learn about the past. This series has proven to be enormously popular: during our Teaching Series last year, the Recipes Project received almost 38,000 visits (representing about 15,000 “unique visitors”) which demonstrates not only the global impact of the series, but how enduring and useful these posts can be, as scholars and educators from around the world come back over and over again to learn more about bringing recipes into their own museums, classrooms, seminars, and lecture halls. This year, the series puts particular emphasis upon the work done by people who use recipes as tools to involve, inform, and engage members of the general public.
Our Teaching Series opens with a post by Ian Mosby, whose course at the University of Guelph – with a unit on Canadian food during the Second World War – was profiled by ActiveHistory.ca, a website that connects the work of historians with the wider public. We’ll also hear from Molly Taylor-Poleskey, who will share how her efforts to share medieval blancmange with non-traditional students took her to grocers, spice-mongers, and butchers all around Somerville MA. During the second week of the series, we’ll learn how a university educator, Dr. Jennifer Munroe, brought recipe transcription and translation into her curriculum; this will be followed by a post written by three of her students, Nadia Clifton, Kailan Sindelar, and Breanne Weber, who were so inspired by their recipe assignments that they founded their own student-run Early Modern Paleography Society. The third week of the series will be devoted to alcohol: we’ll hear from Angela McShane and James Brown at the Intoxicants Project: Angela and James will describe their “Jolly Good Ale and Old” events, where they invite members of the general public to share information about brewing, music, and history over pints at local pubs; then Gabe Klehr encourages us to think more deeply about teaching “drunkenness” in his post about introducing his students to the drinking behaviors of early Americans . We’ll round out the series with a post by Rob Davies from the Museum of English Rural Life, who will contribute a post on a soap-making event co-sponsored with the Elizabeth Fry Charity and the University of Reading’s Special Collections, and will draw to a close with Carrie Helms Tippen of Chatham University, who speaks eloquently about food-writing, food-reading, food-teaching, and the future of the culinary literary imagination.
This year’s Teaching Series posts are as rich and varied as are recipes themselves, and we hope that educators of all kinds – from primary school teachers to museum professionals – can use them as they design their curricula, outreach efforts, public programming, and syllabi.
