Tag Archives: recipes

Recipes for animals: husbandry and animal medicine in early modern England and Anglo-America

By Dr Leah Astbury

One group of actors has been relatively neglected in scholarship on early modern recipe books: non-human animals. And yet, farmyard animals were also members of the household-family, albeit in unequal ways. Whilst there has been some interest in the use of animal bodies and bodily products in culinary and medicinal remedies including their fat, faeces and the practice of applying alive animals to human bodies to cure, there has been little interest in animals as recipients of care, something my new research project seeks to remedy. [1] 

A great many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipe books contain medical and cosmetic remedies for animals.  Some of these recipes crossed the Atlantic, reaching the Anglo-American world, where they became important tools for those seeking to live a prosperous and healthful life in new territories. In the British Isles, some compilers spliced recipes for animals next to ones for humans like Magdalen Coward’s ‘For a Horse troubled with ye wind’ directly above a treatment for ‘sore Eyes’ in humans, or the Cross family recipe book that listed three recipes for horses beneath one for ‘a sore breast’ [2]. Others like a bundle of loose-leaf recipes in the papers of the Griffith family of Denbighshire in Wales, are exclusively concerned with the treatment and prevention of disease in farmyard animals [3]. Most notable of these kinds of animal-focused recipe books is a collection attributed to Eusebius Ashby (1652-1741), a Leicestershire gentleman, who kept two extensive volumes called ‘The First Book of Horses’ and ‘The Second Book of Horses’. They contained records of his veterinary practice and remedies he had collected for horses, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens and, on one occasion, a cat. He collected his knowledge from friends, cow-leeches, farriers, farmers, travellers, shepherds, rat catchers, ‘The London Carmen’ (members of the Worshipful Company of Carmen) and printed books on medicine and husbandry. Ashby also kept at least one volume of more human-focused recipes [4]. 

A page from Eusebius Ashby’s ‘The First Book of Horses’ 1705-1740, MS.993, Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
A page (95) from Eusebius Ashby’s ‘The First Book of Horses’ 1705-1740, MS.993, Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

These recipes drew on many of the same ingredients and practices used in human recipes, and were occasionally useful for both humans and animals. Indeed, some recipes for animals even drew on human bodily products. Ashby’s remedy to ‘procure a stomach’ in a horse (or increase its appetite) required a pint of ‘Human Urine (the old[e]r the bett[e]r)’ with hen dung ‘the whit[e]r the bett[e]r’ [5]. A remedy in an anonymously penned mid-eighteenth-century book of animal remedies from England, recommended drying and beating ‘mans dung’ and blowing it through a goose feather into the eyes of horses that were struggling to see [6].

Searching for animal remedies in the archives has led me to farmers’ account books and almanacs. These books have been unexplored by historians of recipe cultures. One such example is that of the Ballinger family of Arlingham, Gloucestershire in England and their farm rent account book from 1777-1784 in which William Butt recorded the purchase of cattle and rent of fields and buildings in Gloucester along with remedies like that ‘For staunching the blood of any Beast Cut or hurt and how to make a salve to heal it’ [7]. These books not only tell us about the considerable veterinary knowledge and skill required to be a husbandman (a male head of household who managed a farm), but also provide a much-needed window into the recipe cultures of a relatively non-elite social group.

Ensuring one’s animals were healthy quite obviously had high stakes for families that relied on agriculture to survive. Additionally, however, diagnosing and curing one’s ‘beasts’ was inscribed in sermons and religious texts of the period as an important aspect of masculine piety. The London clergyman John Rawlinson’s 1612 sermon Mercy to a Beast made this explicit when he noted that amongst the six obligations that husbandmen had to their animals, they ought to seek help and ‘heale’ them when they were sick [9]. In managing animal health, in these texts, husbandmen asserted their mastery over the natural world, their masculinity, devotion to God, and importantly, their Englishness. As Wendy Wall, notes, husbandry manuals of the period sought to ‘English the soil’ [10].  

These ideas, practices and literal remedies were taken with colonists when they travelled to North America and sought to establish new communities, the success of which also depended on the health and wellbeing of farmyard animals. Husbandry manuals were some of the first books imported to Virginia including Barnaby Googe’s 1614 The Whole Art and Trade of Husbandry and the 1616 English translation of Charles Estienne’s Maison Rustique [11]. Virginia DeJohn Anderson has noted how farmyard animals were key, if unknowing participants, as the ‘advance guard’ of settler colonialism transforming the environment irrevocably [12]. 

Richard Surflet, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme (London: 1616). Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Richard Surflet, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme (London: 1616). Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

The few recipe books that were penned by settlers from the British Isles in America, or taken from home for use there, show that the culture of inscribing remedies for animal health alongside human health persisted. Peter Dicks (1696-1760), living in rural Pennsylvania, recorded in his recipe book ‘A Cure for Cattle that has murr[a]in’, an infectious disease characterised by fever and general malaise, opposite a remedy for the presumably human ‘Piles’ [13]. The Saffin-Ellis family who spent years in America before moving back to England, included a ‘receipt for the mange in a Hors’ in their book of cures [14]. The 1712 New York and Boston editions of The Husband-man’s Guide contain a chapter on remedying illness in horses, sheep and cows alongside receipts for humans and advice on account keeping [15]. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who owned a farm in Chester, New York, described in the mid-eighteenth century how a good farmer should be knowledgeable about animal medicine and would apply the ‘recipes he possesses’ [16]. The place of recipe collecting for one’s animals did not just persist in Anglo-American colonies but became a key part of economic and social success. 

Recipes for animals in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century receipt and account books point to the complex entanglement of the bodies and health of human and non-human members of the family. Collecting and applying recipes for farmyard animals redounded to husbandmen’s piety, their nationality, masculinity, and, one might argue, the colonial project as a whole. 

*****
Dr Leah Astbury is a Lecturer in Health History at the University of Bristol. Her first book, Making Babies in Early Modern England, will be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2025 and is about pregnancy, childbirth and after birth care. She is currently working on a project on animal medicine and husbandry in the early modern British Isles and Anglo-American colonies.

NOTES

[1] From this site for example see:  R.A. Kashanipour, Canine cures or our best friend…,; Lisa Smith, ‘The puppy water and other early modern canine recipes’, and Robert Ralley and Lauren Kassell, ‘Pigeon slippers’. An exception to this is Catherine Flood’s piece on this blog ‘My Charming Ancestor: Lost Spells and Sick Cattle’. Louise Hill Curth has also been interested in animal medicine but mostly using printed medical texts see: The Cure of Brute Beasts: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England, Leiden, 2009 and ‘A plaine and easie waie to remedie a horse’: equine medicine in early modern England, Leiden, 2013. 

[2] Magdalen Coward, ‘Booke of Receipts’, MS 88, unfoliated, Huntington Library, California and Cross family, ‘Receipt book 1724’, f. MS. 1986 002, unfoliated, University of California, Los Angeles, California.  

[3] Griffith family of Garn, ‘Veterinary recipes 1730-1767’, ED3/2, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales. 

[4] Eusebius Ashby, ‘The First Book of Horses’, MS 993 and ‘The Second Book of Horses’, MS 994, Wellcome Library, London. Ashby’s more human volume is titled ‘The Second Book’ and is held at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland. There is presumably a ‘The First Book [of humans]’ but I have not been able to locate it so far.

[5] Ashby, MS 993, p. 74. 

[6] Anonymous, MS.4124, unfoliated, Wellcome Library, London.  

[7] Ballinger family, ‘Farm rent account and account book, 1777-1784’, D356/1, p. 36, Gloucestershire Heritage Hub, Gloucester. 

[8] John Rawlinson, Mercy to a Beast A Sermon preached at Saint Maries Spittle in London on Tuesday in Easter-weeke (Oxford: 1612), 23-32. 

[9] Wendy Wall, ‘Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27, 3 (1996): 659-976. 

[10] Hillary M. Nunn, Recipes on the Move in Early Modern England and British North America: Domestic Medicine, Mobility, and Manuscript Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025), p.114.   

[11] Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 243.  

[12] Peter Dicks, ‘Home remedies 1715-1718’, unfoliated, Delaware County Historical Society, Media, Pennsylvania. 

[13] Saffin-Ellis Miscellany, Ms. Codex 230 Saffin-Ellis miscellany

[14] The Husband-man’s guide in four parts (New York and Boston: 1712). 

[15] Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Sketches of eighteenth century America: More “Letters from an American farmer” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), p. 40

Puttu, Rockets, and Game Controllers: South Indian Immigrant Recipes in the Video Game Venba

By Haritha Govind

You pick up your game controller and settle down in front of the screen to learn about South Indian family recipes. What you don’t realize is that you are about to be pulled into the emotionally charged world of Venba and her family in Canada, complete with the financial, cultural, and generational hardships and joys that are part of the immigrant experience. While cooking challenges have been a mainstay of video gaming, Venba presents itself almost like a composite ethnography where food means something more than simply cooking, serving, and eating. It introduces the player to a complicated network of what it means to be an immigrant and connect with your home culture through food (Waszkiewicz 2022).

Illustration of South Asian family preparing traditional foods with the title Venba
Venba Video game promotional poster (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/).

As you play through the game, you are introduced to Venba and her husband Paavalan, who have moved to Canada from South India. Amidst the trials and tribulations of fitting into a new country and their son Kavin being born, you are taught how to make traditional Tamilian and South Indian dishes like idli (steamed rice and lentil cakes), biryani (layered rice and meat dish), dosa (fermented rice and lentil crepe), and murukku (crispy lentil and flour snack). All the recipes displayed to you are from Venba’s mother’s cookbook, with smudged and concealed text, inviting you to learn as you go.

There is a section in the video game where Venba asks a young Kavin what he would like to eat, and he requests a pizza with lots of cheese. In an attempt to introduce Kavin to more traditional Tamilian foods, she suggests they make a dish called puttu. At first, Kavin is not convinced, but when Venba explains that the dish reminds her of a rocket, he is excited. You are then whisked to the kitchen to cook puttu, using the smudged family cookbook and ingredients of rice, water, and coconut. This single narrative and cooking section represents the intergenerational struggle between preserving Tamilian culture and integrating into Canadian society. It forces you to think about more than the recipe and consider how foods come to be synonymous with identity in many immigrants’ lives. 

Towards the end of the game, you see adult Kavin opening his mother’s cookbook to feel connected to his culture and childhood. He decides to make nattu kozhi kulambu (spicy country chicken curry/soup) and fumbles his way through the recipe along with you. This section of the game allows you to step into the shoes of a second-generation Tamilian in Canada and understand the complicated connection between culture and identity. 

Biryani cooking process (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/)

Venba creates a cozy atmosphere for its players, with lively Tamil music in the background, sounds of cooking, and vibrant aesthetic ingredients and dishes. The ingredients and foods are designed in an abstract style but are instantly recognizable if you are familiar with them. The cloves, cardamom, bay leaves, and fennel seeds in the biryani cooking section are stylistic yet iconic. Waszkiewicz has suggested that cozy or ludic games like Venba encourage the player to approach the game and recipes with respect and curiosity, pulling them into an unfamiliar culture (2022). The creator of the game, Abhi, shared that he wants players to understand specific details about a recipe whether that involves getting the rice-to-water ratio correct or tempering spices in the correct order (Waszkiewicz 2022; Abhi 2023). To help the player carry on after the play has ended, the game also shares complete recipes with the player to try out in their own home kitchens.

Idli cooking process (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/)

While you will have to play the game to learn Venba’s recipes, many Tamilian chefs and home cooks have recipes for the same dishes. Here is my mother’s recipe for Idli batter:

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups  Idli rice (or short grain starchy rice)
  • 1 cup   Urad (peeled black gram)
  • 1 tsp    Methi seeds (fenugreek)
  • 1 tbsp  Chutney daal (split yellow gram)

Instructions:

  1. Wash and soak ingredients overnight.
  2. Drain and grind ingredients in a high-powered blender until smooth and thick. Add fresh water as needed. Rub the batter between your fingers to ensure it is not gritty.
  3. Pour the batter into a large bowl or container and cover with clingwrap, lid, or plate.
  4. Let the batter ferment in a warm place for around nine hours.
  5. Once the batter has doubled in size and developed bubbles with a yeasty smell, it is ready.
  6. Add salt to the batter and store it in the fridge.
  7. Use it for steaming idli in an idli steamer or thin out the batter to make dosa on a skillet.

The Venba video game is a good opportunity to see how storytelling and recipe sharing can go hand in hand. It is also a good entryway into understanding specifically South Indian cooking techniques and flavors, an area that has not gotten the same attention as North India in the Americas. It also opens the floor for more culturally detailed immigrant stories to be told via interactive mediums such as video games. The video game as a medium does something very different from a perspective of imagery and visuals, compared to other mediums such as text, or a static graphic novel. The movement and paced story development, that you as a player control, work together to remove visualization barriers between the story and the player. This visual storytelling is also an excellent model for sharing subjects like History, Anthropology, Food Studies, and Cultural Studies in a palatable and inclusive manner. I believe that there is great potential for visual storytelling as a way to expand academia beyond university settings. 


Abhi. 2023. Venba. Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series/Xbox One, Playstation 5. Canada: Visai Games. https://venbagame.com/.

Waszkiewicz, Agata. 2022. Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

‘An Extravagant Touch’: Emscote Primary School’s Charity Cookbook

By Bethan Davies
Rootling through my mother’s files in the midst of moving house last year, I came across ‘The Emscote Cookery Book’, a recipe collection created by a group of teachers in the late 1970s as a community fundraiser for their Warwickshire primary school. My maternal grandmother Betty Richards was headmistress at Emscote Primary School and contributed multiple recipes to the collection. Gently flipping through the 18 pages which had been modestly stapled together to form a book, I saw a beautiful calligraphic font which detailed over 30 sweet and savoury recipes for food and drink, alongside careful illustrations of kitchen utensils, platters, and foodstuffs. 

Image 1 The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 1: The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2 The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2: The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.

Beginning to read the recipes, I discovered the community collection to be a tantalising glimpse into culinary trends of the 1970s and the gendered expectations around domestic economies at the time. All of the contributors to this collection, bar one (a Miss Gent) were married women, working both as teachers and as homemakers. The style of many of the recipes are curt, providing the reader with detailed yet precise instructions for culinary success. Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for a ‘Quick Dessert’, which involves boiling some apples and mixing with lime jelly, a dish that could be whipped up rapidly, suggests these women straddled professional and domestic life and possessed strategies for fulfilling the demands of teacher, homemaker, and hostess. The relative sparsity of detail of the personal resonances of these recipes aligns with the cookbook’s role within a boundaried school environment, and is a reminder of the often intensely personal nature of recipe knowledge and exchange, repurposed here within a professional community. There are hints of women’s culinary and domestic responsibilities in moments when the professional façade slips, a Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’ amusingly notes in her recipe ‘there will still be a slurp [of Guinness] to put the cook in a good frame of mind to tackle the washing up’, a tongue in cheek moment which gestures towards 20th c. British women’s multifaceted roles within the home. 

Image 3: Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’. Image courtesy of the author.

Most striking were the clues that suggested that this communal cookbook, despite its overt function as a fundraiser, worked as a compact textual marker of social display and a register of class co-ordinates. This evidently gave teachers power to self-fashion and construct their identities as women of economic means, belonging to part of a larger familial structure that could afford to experiment with recent culinary fashions, which include the protean fusion of Anglo culinary traditions with global ingredients and European recipe cultures. A recipe for ‘Biskotta’ (Mrs Charlesworth) is an English take on tiramisu, and the magnificent ‘Spaghetti Platter’ (Mrs Wigmore) specifies the use of ‘long Italian spaghetti’ but also calls for a tablespoon of Branston pickle, a quintessential English relish. A detailed illustration of said platter indicates spaghetti’s relative novelty on the culinary scene. Other recipes are intriguing both for their use of foreign ingredients and for their relative expense, indicating some teachers’ desire to signal their ability to buy such rarefied goods, and perhaps representing a form of exclusion for those who could not afford to buy such ingredients. Mrs Jackson’s recipe for ‘Hummus’ provides the interpretative tag ‘chick peas’, alongside instructions for where to find ‘tahina’, ‘a paste from sesame paste available from delicatessens’, suggesting hummus’ new-fangled nature and its potential expense. 

Image 4: Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for ‘Spaghetti Platter’. Image courtesy of the author.

Mrs Hammond is an individual keen to demonstrate both her expensive household appliances and her rarefied tastes. She supplies a recipe for ‘Microwave meringues’, using the flashy appliance of the microwave which was only just starting to become affordable for domestic use in the late 1970s. Mrs Hammond also has an indulgent recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’, an adaptation of the Black Forest Gateau, which calls for copious amounts of After Eights and whipped cream, and involves an intricate decorating scheme which would rival that of any British Bake-Off contestant today. In a moment of seemingly false modesty, she instructs that one can add crème de menthe into the layers of the cake: ‘an extravagant touch’, a phrase belying the evident richness of her cake even without the addition of liquor; her recipe is rich both in terms of taste and cost. While this is a community and charity cookbook, it is evident that the teachers are creating specific personas through their recipes which are deeply invested in social and class structures.

Image 5: Mrs Hammond’s recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’. Image courtesy of the author.

Moving for a final moment from the communal to the personal, it is the memories of my grandmother, which are held within the cookbook’s pages, which encourage me to revisit the recipes. Her recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’, a kind of coconutty Florentine biscuit, is easy to make and designed to please a crowd, a reminder of her happily hectic life in multiple roles as headteacher, mother of three, and vicar’s wife. The pages sticky from golden syrup and sugar, this cookbook constitutes a living familial heirloom, and an emblem of family community and continuity in the present day.

Image 6: My grandmother Mrs Richard’s recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’. Image courtesy of the author.

Bethan Davies is a final year PhD student at the University of Roehampton in the Department of English. Her studies are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research council. Her research looks at the global and domestic intersections between sugar and women in English culture at a time when colonial economies were in their nascent stage of development. She has recently worked as a researcher on the BBC history podcast ‘You’re Dead to Me’, and collaborated with The National Archives to produce resources on sugar, tobacco, global trade, and intoxicants for schools and audiences beyond the academy. 

Related Recipes Project blog post: ‘Astonishable Composed Posset’

A Connecticut Yankee in Texas

By Meli Alexander
Growing up in a small state like Connecticut in the 1970s was a great time to be an aspiring chef. Sandwiched between bigger states and bigger cities shaped Hartford Connecticut’s cuisine: NYC-style Chinese takeout, with its ubiquitous packets of duck sauce and hot mustard; Italian-American delights such as baked ziti or sausage and peppers; and Boston deep-fried cod and clams. These foods woke up my taste buds and my curiosity about the world.

Despite the terrible school lunch options offered at my elementary school, I always looked forward to Pizza Fridays. In Connecticut, this meant a Sicilian-style American pizza, thick and hearty, in a perfect rectangular shape. But I couldn’t help but wonder what other pizza styles were out there…just waiting to be discovered.

I knew I had a hidden talent about coming up with my own recipes, especially focusing on food combinations. By age five I was creating fun ice cream flavors such as maraschino cherries and vanilla ice cream. I also studied the very first cookbook I ever saw, which was a community cookbook from my grandmother’s beloved home in New Brunswick, Canada. It was a peek into another culture and I had no idea of the scope of recipes that were waiting for me around the corner.

In 1979, my mother made a huge decision that changed the way I see the world through food. Our sudden  move to Pasadena, Texas was more traumatic than I have ever let on, despite the thrill of flying first class. Being uprooted from everything I knew — my home, my school, my church — was surreal. Trying to understand the heavy Texas accents alone was beyond challenging.

I did my best to fit into my new world. We lived in a huge apartment complex and had year-round access to a swimming pool. My brother and I became latchkey kids. This gave us a lot of freedom mixed with responsibilities, and I did a lot of grocery shopping and cooking.

Thanks to a few of my new neighbors, I also learned about Tex-Mex and Southern cooking. One of my neighbors was a stay-at-home mother, and I absolutely adored her. She was warm and gracious, the classic example of Southern hospitality and charm, and one of the first things she did was to teach me how to make pecan pralines with their signature gooeyness and creaminess. The recipe was found in a community cookbook, which  became a portal into a new culinary world. I was surprised to see many versions of the same recipe but later realized that this was a common feature of community cookbooks.

My neighbor lent me that cookbook for inspiration, and I learned even more about ingredients and dishes that I had never heard of: okra, jalapeño chiles, tamales. My perception of food expanded and honestly, become an addiction! It even influenced my bold choice of constantly trading in my homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a hot meal at my junior high school.

With very little allowance money (despite all of the chores I had to do), I always tried to come up with the 85 cents required for a meal at school. I tried delicious meals featuring fried okra, burritos, and tacos. However, Fridays were never quite the same without Sicilian-style pizza. My pizza cravings were about to change…

One Saturday, my brother and I were taken out to lunch by that wonderful lady who taught me how to make pecan pralines. I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant, but Tex-Mex pizza was featured on the menu. I never had anything like it; I was so used to my favorite toppings of pepperoni and mushrooms. Seeing “new” toppings such as chorizo, jalapeño chiles, and cilantro blew my ten-year-old mind. I was in culinary heaven.

Homemade Tex-Mex Pizza. Image courtesy of the author.
Homemade Tex-Mex Pizza. Image courtesy of the author.

That single meal expanded my desire to experiment with ingredients. Before I knew it, I was exchanging recipe ideas with some of the mothers in my apartment complex. One idea I remember sharing was taco salad, using Doritos instead of regular tortilla chips for added flavor and depth.

By my eleventh birthday, I accepted the fact that I was in charge of grocery shopping and cooking for my family. That Christmas, I opened up one of my presents and it was a Crockpot (or so I thought). However, when I opened the box, it was a wonderful and soft teddy bear. This was a reminder I was still a kid, despite some grown-up responsibilities. 

Soon after that Christmas, my mother ended her relationship with her partner, and we moved back to Connecticut. I never had the chance to return the community cookbook I borrowed, but it had permanently changed my culinary repertoire. Despite how challenging life was in Pasadena, I am forever grateful to our apartment complex neighbors for helping me to learn about an entirely new cuisine. Tex-Mex will always be one of my favorites.

Now, I always encourage people to try new ingredients and dishes. One of the cool things about a particular kind of cuisine is to embrace the regional differences. Recipes are really just guidelines. Most community cookbooks will have slight variations of the same dish. It is up to you to find your favorite version of a classic recipe and share it with your loved ones.

Meli Alexander has been passionate and — honestly, obsessed — about genealogy after going to a family reunion in New Brunswick, Canada when she was a pre-teen. Her love and respect for international cuisines started much earlier; living in New York City fueled that fire. In 2004, Meli made the life-changing decision to go to culinary school. She graduated from the one-year culinary program at the Art Institute of Seattle with honors. Her experience includes working at an Italian restaurant, Whole Foods Market, and a truffle café at the famed Pike Place Market. During the COVID pandemic, Meli put her acting career aside and focused purely on genealogy, joining a vast community of fellow genealogists on social media. Struggling to find her place in that amazing and collaborative world, Meli was inspired by genealogists such as Gena Philibert-Ortega and Michael W. Twitty, authors who combine genealogy with food. Defining herself as a Culinary Genealogist, “a person who combines the disciplines of food and genealogy,” Meli reinvented herself as The DNA Chef in 2022.