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Around the Table

Around the Table: Digital Resources

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations cancelled conferences and events in staggering numbers. As it became clear that events would have to move online in order to continue, our organizations and institutions did so with gusto. While the Recipes Project community may not have had the chance to socialize in person at these events, we are left with a treasure trove of recordings. This is a roundup of free recipes-related recordings from Fall 2020-Fall 2021 conferences, webinars, workshops, and symposia.

The Food and the Book: 1300-1800 Conference (October 2020) hosted by the Newberry Library and Folger Institute is available online. The Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies also has a series of collection presentation videos related to food history.

The Folger Institute’s Critical Race Conversations hosted Jennifer Park and Gitanjali Shahani for the conversation “We Are What You Eat” (15 October 2020).

The Huntington Library’s conference, Ecologies of Paper in the Early Modern World (November 2020), is available on the library’s YouTube channel.

The British Society for the History of Pharmacy’s YouTube channel has videos of the BSHP March 2021 Conference sessions, as well as other 2021 lectures.

A recording of Revealing Recipes: Top Tips from Early Modern Women (4 March 2021), hosted by the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, Royal College of Physicians, and the Wellcome Collection, is available here.

The Food Cultures research theme at the University of Warwick hosted several 2021 events. Recordings are available for their “Food and Drink Cultures through the Ages” webinar (23 March 2021) and a “Food, Religion and Writing” panel debate (11 June 2021).

Bruce Moran’s keynote address of the Science History Institute’s “The Applied Arts of Alchemy” symposium (May 2021) is available here. The Science History Institute YouTube channel also has a wide variety of lecture recordings, demonstration videos, and “Distilled,” a series of collection presentation videos.

The IEHCA – University of Tours (L’Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation) hosted the 6th International Conference on Food History and Food Studies (May-June 2021). Recordings of sessions are available through the conference program by clicking on the “Detailed Schedule” link.

Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages: Corpus, Analysis, Visualisation (CoReMA) recently hosted a symposium on The Culinary Recipe from the XIIth to the XVIIth Centuries: Europe, Islam, Far East (May 2021). Recordings and detailed abstracts of each presentation are available on the symposium website. CoReMA’s other video offerings, such as cooking demonstrations and lectures are available on their site.

Several presentations from the Institute of Historical Research Food History Seminar are available on the seminar YouTube channel.

Intoxicating Spaces: The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600-1850 hosted a seminar series, “What’s Your Poison?” Recordings are available for Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. Intoxicating Spaces also hosted the conference, Intoxicating Spaces: Global and Comparative Perspectives (July 2021). Session videos are linked on the conference website.

If you’d like to feature a project, scholar, or institution on Around the Table, please email Sarah Kernan.

Around the Table

Around the Table: Digital Resources

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

Since the COVID-19 pandemic restricted physical access to resources for teaching and research this spring, educational, research, and cultural institutions have been busy digitizing their collections and creating digital content to assist their patrons. This is a roundup of some recently digitized recipes-related materials and newly created digital content (like videos, exhibitions, and source guides), compiled with the assistance of the Recipes Project community on social media. Thank you to all who contributed! This list is incomplete, as hearty as it is. Also, some digital items have been around for several years, but have recently received an update or reorganization due to increased web traffic during the pandemic.

Crowdsourced Digital Resources

The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) is hosting its annual Transcribathon in coordination with the Wellcome Library and the Royal College of Physicians on 4 March. This is a great opportunity to delve into some digitized early modern English recipe books and transcribe the text to benefit researchers and students alike! For details and updates, visit the EMROC website.

The Sifter, an online database of culinary writing, especially cookbooks and recipes, is now publicly available after years of development. Free for all users, it is a tool in finding, identifying, and comparing historical culinary texts. It currently includes over 5,000 works in multiple languages. Registered users can also populate The Sifter with texts and information, in addition to using the database for research.

Videos

The William Andrews Clark Jr. Memorial Library launched a web series titled “Bad Taste, where we explore what it truly means to be disgusted.” Each episode documents the process of recreating and tasting a historical recipe which seems “disgusting” to modern palates. Episode 1 is about an eighteenth-century recipe for toast water.

The Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library launched a series of brief collection presentation videos in coordination with the recent conference Food and the Book: 1300 to 1800. Each of the five videos highlights a food-related early modern resource in the Newberry’s collections.

English Heritage’s History at Home presents an array of digital content, especially videos, related to English Heritage sites and programming. The site contains videos on Georgian makeup application, Victorian cooking, and grand historic feasts. The site is also family-friendly, with content like coloring pages for children, and tours of historic sites.

Refashioning the Renaissance’s website contains an engaging archive of the project’s activities and experiments involving historic textiles, dyes, fabric cleaning, and fragrances. Many of the documented experiments include brief video summaries, which can be very helpful in digital classroom settings. The project also has blog posts and a podcast to introduce new audiences to these topics.

Digital Collections and Exhibitions

Transcriptions of over eighty manuscript recipe books at the Folger Shakespeare Library are available for full text search in the Folger Manuscript Transcriptions collection. The collection is added to on a regular basis.

The Library of Congress has long hosted a collection of digitized Community Cookbooks; it has been consistently updated since its originally posting in 2009. Here you can find links to nineteenth- and twentieth-century community cookbooks from the United States. In addition to searching for specific items, you can also sort the collection by place or date.

The National Library of Medicine has gathered links to their digital projects, exhibitions, and collections onto a single page. Here you can find links to their digital collections (which include many digitized manuscript recipe books) and exhibitions ranging from the consumption of intoxicants as medical prescriptions and Food and Enslavement in Early America.

Lifting the Lid: 400 Years of Food and Drink in Scotland is an online exhibition at the National Library of Scotland in 2015. It explored 400 years of Scottish food history, telling the story of Scotland’s relationship with food and drink. Here you can find digitized recipes for turtle soup and curry powder, as well as the library’s Burnfoot family recipe books, which include the same recipes by different people over four generations.

An Image from the Newberry Library’s Digital Collection for the Classroom on Foods of the Columbian Exchange. Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590). Used with permission through a Creative Commons Public Domain license.

The Newberry Library’s Digital Collections for the Classroom contains a wide range of digitized primary source collections for teaching based on collection items at the Newberry. While many collections only mention recipes-related materials in passing, some collections are more explicitly connected, like those on the Discovery of Chocolate, Foods of the Columbian Exchange, and the Medieval Spice Trade.

The New York Academy of Medicine has just posted a new digital collection, Recipes and Remedies: Manuscript Cookbooks. This digital collection boasts eleven fully digitized manuscript recipe books of the NYAM’s physical collection of approximately forty.

The Mexican Cookbook Collection at UTSA Libraries includes a breathtaking array of texts, many available online. Now the collection is even more accessible to public audiences through their recent outreach effort, Cooking in the Time of Coronavirus. Visit the link to find booklets of updated recipes, published in Spanish and English, picked from the collection’s many options.

Digitized Materials

First introduced to the Recipes Project in this 2019 blog post by Rachel Rich and Lisa Smith, the English royal household’s menus for each day when they were in residence at Kew Palace between 1788 and 1801 is now digitized and available on Adam Crymble’s website.

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has been busily digitizing since the pandemic began and have kept readers updated about their progress through blog posts. Their most recent includes mention of several items of interest to the Recipes Project community, including fragments of medical encyclopedias, alchemical texts, and instruction on the “treatment of eye sores.”

Digital Collection Guides and Compilations of Resources

McMaster University History of Medicine has compiled a list of digital exhibits based at institutions in North America and Europe. This list is organized into an array of medical history topics, ranging from Canadian cookbooks, significant works of the Renaissance, and Ancient and Classical medicine.

The British Library has just published a collection guide for Food History: Archives and Manuscripts. The guide highlights several physical and digital items at the British Library related to food history; however, the guide is limited to the library’s holdings from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries.

Several institutional libraries have created and updated online resources lists for teaching food history. Examples include lists at the Culinary Institute of American, Marshall University, and Virginia Tech.

Thank you to everyone who contributed a digital resource to include in this post! If you’d like to feature a project, scholar, or institution on Around the Table, please email Sarah Kernan.

Around the Table

Around the Table: Events

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

Last month, many Recipes Project contributors and readers participated in a virtual conference on Food and the Book: 1300-1800. This exciting event, spread out in sessions over two weeks, was co-sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, a Mellon Foundation initiative in collaborative research at the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I had the pleasure of co-organizing the conference along with David Goldstein and Allen Grieco. Many individuals at the Newberry Library and on the Before Farm to Table team were involved with the planning and execution of this conference, including our very own Recipes Project co-editor Amanda Herbert.

Food and the Book was planned as an interdisciplinary conference which examined the book as a primary intersection for foodways throughout the premodern world. Focused primarily on Europe, the conference examined the language and imagery of food in all kinds of books, including printed cookbooks, manuscript recipe books, literature, historical documents, religious writings, medical treatises, and engravings.

Although the conference had originally been planned as an in-person event, the arrival of COVID-19 necessitated a virtual format. And while many things could have gone awry, the conference appeared to run effortlessly thanks to a flurry of behind-the-scenes technical work by so many at the Newberry and Folger. Each session had a large and enthusiastic audience, particularly our public sessions, which were hosted as Zoom webinars and live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube. Thanks to the widespread interest, the Q&A portions of sessions were lively and full of creative and interdisciplinary inquiry and suggestion.

A screenshot of Food and the Book’s first public session, “Cooking by the Book: A Conversation with Chefs and Writers.”

Two public sessions focusing on current food issues, particularly those of minority and marginalized communities, bookended the conference. The first, a session on food writing, featured a panel of distinguished food writers, historians, and chefs: Tamar Adler, Irina Dumitrescu, Paul Fehribach, and Michael Twitty. Their conversation, linking the premodern topics to be covered over the next two weeks to modern food writing, ranged from the definition of a recipe, hunger, and the pleasure of food. In the final public session, chef Sean Sherman and scholars Elizabeth Hoover and Eli Suzukovich III celebrated Indigenous food cultures. The panelists invited the audience to expand their notions of historical records and consider food beyond colonial contexts and frameworks. They each emphasized that the range of Indigenous culinary activities like food cultivation, cooking, and medicine, actively use a historical knowledge base carefully curated and preserved over time.

The remaining sessions featured innovative programming, incorporating not only a wide range of topics and scholars, but also a variety of formats, including presentations, roundtables, and seminar discussions of pre-circulated papers. In order to build a sense of community potentially lost by hosting a conference online, Food and the Book participants frequently live tweeted, transcribed part of Folger Library recipe book at a virtual Transcribathon with Heather Wolfe, enjoyed a virtual happy hour, and got a taste of the Newberry Library’s holdings of food-related books in brief video collection presentations. So, despite the challenges of a virtual conference in terms of creating community and networking, there were opportunities for personal engagement and conviviality.

The Recipes Project community is undoubtedly familiar with many of the Food and the Book’s thirty-five presenters, as they have frequently appeared on the Recipes Project as contributors. Just to provide a few examples, Marissa Nicosia and Molly Taylor-Poleskey discussed their work in roundtables on “Cookbooks and Recipe Books” and “Documenting Food History in Archival Sources.” Sara Pennell presented recent research on kitchen waste in early modern English households in a session about “Material Kitchens and the Social Life of Early Modern Food,” while Jennifer Park simultaneously delighted and disgusted the audience with her description of eating mummies in a broader discussion with Nicholas Jones and Gitanjali Shahani about “Race and Food in the Early Modern Book.” And in a discussion of pre-circulated papers on literary ecologies, Andy Crow, Madeline Bassnett, and Kathleen Long heartily considered topics ranging from rationing words and food in poetry, weather and climate concerns, and the excesses of Henri III’s court. Larger digital projects like CoReMA, EMROC, and the US-UK Food Digital Scholarship Network were also represented in a panel on “Digitizing Food and the Book.”

While the overall breadth of research throughout the conference was quite energizing, perhaps one of the particularly exciting points was the number of early career researchers and graduate students. ECRs were represented in many sessions and a graduate student lightning round featured the work of seven graduate students. These students, hailing from departments of history, literature, and archeology and institutions around the United States, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany, demonstrate the long future ahead for research in food and the book.

The conference also revealed significant gaps in past and current research, and the need for inclusion of a more diverse body of scholars in this area of study. As evinced by the discussions of premodern racial and identity issues during Food and the Book, there is much more research in this area which can be done. Several sessions also highlighted gaps and drawbacks in both the accessibility of archival and special collections materials and efforts to mitigate accessibility concerns through digitization. There are many opportunities for growth and expansion of the study of food through books, and many prospects for collaboration and support of this scholarly community.

The Food and the Book conference may have concluded, but recordings of all the sessions are available on YouTube. Please watch what you can, and let’s continue the conversations started at the conference and communicate virtually (and hopefully again soon in person!) about all of the exciting research yet to be done.

Thanks to all involved in Food and the Book, including the presenters and the planning teams at the Newberry Library and Folger Institute, especially David Goldstein, Allen Grieco, Lia Markey and the Newberry’s Center for Renaissance Studies, Kathleen Lynch and the Folger Institute, and the Before Farm to Table Team, especially Amanda Herbert and Heather Wolfe! If you’d like to feature a project, scholar, or institution on Around the Table, please email Sarah Kernan.

Around the Table

Around the Table: Events

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

Two weeks ago the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) hosted their fifth annual Transcribathon. I want to share my Transcribathon experience at the site hosted by the Newberry Library in Chicago, as I learned this event can be a successful community-building exercise in addition to a valuable day for teaching and learning about early modern recipes, manuscript culture, paleography, and digital humanities.

Participants listening to a presentation. Photo by Katie Dyson.

Despite being an avid reader of the EMROC blog and regular transcriber and researcher of recipe books, I had not participated in the Transcribathon prior to this year. Something always seemed to come up on the day, and I was admittedly nervous about using the transcription platform, Dromio (which, as I soon realized, was ridiculous! Dromio is quite user-friendly and intuitive, so don’t be afraid to try it!). This year, however, I was determined to participate in some way.

I figured that tying the Transcribathon into a course was a good first step to get involved, so I incorporated it into a class I was teaching on early modern English cookbooks in the Newberry’s Seminars Program. I also approached the Newberry to propose that they host a site. The Newberry was thrilled to host the Transcribathon, and staff from several centers and departments quickly coalesced to help organize the event including Public Engagement, Digital Initiatives, and the Center for Renaissance Studies.

The Newberry was open as a transcription site for four hours. Approximately sixty participants transcribed and many more people at the library wandered in and out throughout that time. Some participants worked for only thirty minutes, many more for one to two hours, and still others transcribed for over three hours! The library hosted a few speakers: I spoke about early modern English recipe books, Megan Heffernan provided a primer on early modern English manuscript culture and paleography, Jen Wolfe (a former Library Chat guest) highlighted the Newberry’s digital humanities initiatives, and Lia Markey talked about the new Italian Paleography site, a digital project of the Center for Renaissance Studies.

Transcribing and monitoring the Twitter feeds. Photo by Katie Dyson.

I am still overwhelmed by the incredible response to the Newberry’s Transcribathon. The participants had a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Instructors brought their classes, including one from Arrupe College. Several DePaul University undergraduates were also present, per their instructor’s suggestion. Many Chicago residents simply interested in recipes decided to try their hands at transcribing. I loved answering questions from many of these individuals; they wanted to know everything about paleography, ingredients, and coding! Scholars and graduate students were also on hand; they made exciting observations in the recipes, like shifting from English to French when describing reproductive unmentionables and a panoply of odd ingredients. In many instances, participants with diverse backgrounds shared tables while working, and I couldn’t help but notice a lot of conversation about their transcription experiences.

Participants and visitors seemed particularly conversational about one aspect of the event: the refreshments table. To celebrate English culinary recipes from the period, I baked seven different cake and biscuit recipes prepared from early modern recipes.

Early modern recipes prepared by Sarah Kernan. Photo by Megan Heffernan.

Most people who sampled the food wanted to talk about it, either with me or one another. The flavors (like rosewater, orange, and caraway) seemed to make early modern England a little more interesting for the students in attendance, while other participants were far more interested in the recipe sources. Suzanne Karr Schmidt, the George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Newberry, even made a surprising connection between the Italian Crusts and a seventeenth-century sonnet series, Enigmes Joyeuses pour les Bons Esprits. It turns out that historic foods can sustain transcribers, create conversation, and forge some curious ties.

After experiencing such a great event and intellectual exercise, I want to encourage other readers to try organizing similar Transcribathon sites at your local libraries and schools in the future. I can’t emphasize enough how exciting it was to meet others who wanted to engage with early modern recipes and begin building that community in Chicago. Additionally, the event was clearly a useful teaching tool for instructors in several disciplines. On the institutional side, I am hopeful the Transcribathon inspired some participants to get involved in other initiatives (digital and otherwise) at the Newberry; several people were eager to learn more about projects specific to the library.

So, readers, I hope to see you at next year’s Transcribathon, whether you are participating from the comfort of your own home or organizing a site for your local recipes community!

Thanks to everyone at the Newberry Library who was a part of the Transcribathon planning, especially Katie Dyson, Lia Markey, Karen Christianson, Alex Teller, Jen Wolfe, Rebecca Fall, Christopher Fletcher, and Elisa Jones! You can follow the Newberry on Twitter @NewberryLibrary and Facebook @NewberryLibrary. If you’d like to feature a project, scholar, or institution on Around the Table, please email Sarah Kernan.