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Culinary History, Summer 2026

Gelatin for Pig Rinds: Joyce Chen’s Translations of Chinese Home Cooking

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By Jolin Chan

Joyce Chen’s path to becoming a chef, restaurateur, and author began in an unassuming setting: her children’s school bake sale. In 1957, bearing two dozen homemade egg rolls and a few dozen cookies, Chen dropped off her contributions to the Buckingham School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the introduction to her 1962 cookbook, Joyce Chen Cook Book, she remembers asking her daughter Helen:

Did you see my egg rolls there? She replied, No, I only saw your cookies there, not your egg rolls. I thought they did not like them so they had not put them up for sale. But on the same evening when I was shopping I met one of the mothers who was in charge of the food table. She asked me, Mrs. Chen, do you think you could make some more egg rolls, your egg rolls sold out in five minutes. What a surprise to me. They did like them. I made dozens more the same night for that school.1

Chen was born in Beijing in 1917 to a wealthy family that employed a cook and multiple servants, though she remembers learning from them and her mother as they cooked. In 1949, she, her husband Thomas Chen, and her two young children fled China as the Communist Party took over, catching the second-to-last boat before the ports of Shanghai closed. They settled in Cambridge, worlds away from the life she once knew and where the search for Northern Chinese and Shanghainese foods felt impossible. Not only was Chinese food as you would find it in China rare in 1950s America, American Chinese food—a cuisine developed by Chinese immigrants who had to work with different ingredients and tastes during the Gold Rush—had long been rendered as cheap, unrefined, and even suspect.2 Asian Americans, and by extension, their food, occupied a tenuous position in the U.S. as a foreign “other.”

Rather than yield to her new circumstances, she began hosting dinners for Chinese students from Harvard, M.I.T., and Boston University. Realizing people were interested in Chinese cuisine, she taught cooking classes at adult education centers and, in 1958, opened the first of her four restaurants, the Joyce Chen Restaurant. (Her restaurants were frequented by college students, as well as figures like Julia Child, James Beard, Danny Kaye, and Henry Kissinger.)

It is one thing to introduce a new cuisine by cooking for someone, letting them smell the stir-fried garlic and ginger, taste the wok hei (“breath of the wok”), or feel the velveted meat, made tender with baking soda and a cornstarch coating. It is another thing, however, to introduce a novel cuisine through a list of ingredients, instructions, and if you’re lucky, illustrations. How does a recipe writer translate these experiences and the cultural contexts within which a cuisine has developed and evolved?

Chen’s cookbook answers this question, simultaneously advocating that the complexities of Chinese cuisine have a place at the table.3 With recipes that “still kept the authentic flavor,” her cookbook addressed common complaints: “It was too hard to get the ingredients. The recipes were too complicated to follow …. Many dishes simply did not come out right.”4 Some of her translations are quite literal, such as the handwritten Chinese characters accompanying detailed explanations for ingredients and techniques (Figures 2–4). 

If translation is also a process of interpretation, Chen demonstrates the necessity of translations that extend beyond language, particularly in a diasporic context. Take, for example, how canned bean sprouts cannot replace fresh ones, but home cooks could use shredded lettuce in place of sprouts (Figure 2). Cooking fried rice, then, might require translating one vegetable (bean sprouts) to another (shredded lettuce). She suggests other culinary conversions: a metal can for a bamboo steamer, Smithfield ham for Chinese ham, and—for a Jellied Lamb Loaf—gelatin for pig rinds for a collagenous texture. She invites the readers to engage in their own acts of translation, asking them to transfer the meaning, use, and properties of one tool, ingredient, or flavor to another.

Chen transforms the unfamiliar into something digestible. This includes not only ingredients and techniques but also customs and practices. Sections are dedicated to the particularities of serving tea, the elements of a well-made dish (color, aroma, flavor, and nutrition), and the structure of a Chinese meal. While anthropologist Mary Douglas theorized the minimum structure of an English meal to be a formula of A + 2B (a main course plus two smaller courses), Chen decoded the Chinese meal, which does not have courses but rather “several dishes together.”5 Furthermore, her unique table of contents is a grid of dots that indexes recipes into categories like “Main dish,” “2nd Main dish,” and “Hors d’oeuvres” (Figures 5 and 6).

The beef and pork sections in the table of contents. Joyce Chen Cook Book.

Chen has been called “the Chinese Julia Child.” They had some similarities: both called Cambridge their home and wrote cookbooks on daunting cuisines. They were even friends and shared the same studio for their respective shows. However, to know Chen only as Child’s Chinese counterpart erases the particular translations and renditions she strategically made. This is not to discount Child, a translator of French cuisine in her own right, but instead to present the context within which Chen worked to bridge her two homes. Her cookbook was written with her “blood, sweat, and love”: “love in remembering the old days in China where I was born, grew up and lived for more than thirty years” and “love to my new country for the freedom, wonderful friendships and good opportunities.”6 Honoring her first home and claiming a space in “my new country,” she reveals how recipe-writing can produce a sense of belonging for individuals and cuisines.

Her biggest impact was not necessarily identifying clever substitutes for winter melon (old cucumbers) or Shaoxing wine (a pale dry sherry). It was her translation of knowledge that introduced and championed a new form of Chinese cooking, one that required some adaptations but nevertheless unapologetically established itself as Mandarin, Shanghai, or Cantonese cookery. Recipes and cookbooks often present an argument, and hers was a trailblazing declaration to celebrate a long-disdained cuisine. For Joyce Chen, this was a cuisine that belongs in a dinner party, on a bookshelf, and on a TV screen in American homes.

  1. Joyce Chen, Joyce Chen Cook Book (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962), 2.  ↩︎
  2. Madeline Y. Hsu, “From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining and the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity during the Cold War Era,” in Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Madeline Y. Hsu and Sucheng Chan (Temple University Press, 2008), 189. ↩︎
  3. While I focus on Chen’s cookbook in this article, her 1966 television show, which was produced and broadcasted by WGBH, offers other examples of Chen’s culinary translations. You can find her episodes on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting here: https://americanarchive.org/catalog?q=joyce+chen. ↩︎
  4. Chen, Joyce Chen Cook Book (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962), 2. ↩︎
  5. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972); Chen, 207. ↩︎
  6. Chen, 223. ↩︎

References

Chen, Joyce. Joyce Chen Cook Book. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1962.

Douglas, Mary, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus 101, no. 1 (1972): 61–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024058. 

Hsu, Madeline Y. “From Chop Suey to Mandarin Cuisine: Fine Dining and the Refashioning of Chinese Ethnicity during the Cold War Era.” In Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, edited by Madeline Y. Hsu and Sucheng Chan. Temple University Press, 2008. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/183/edited_volume/book/45919.

Jolin Chan is a recipe developer, content creator, and recent History & Literature and Social Anthropology graduate from Harvard College. Her undergraduate research focused on food studies and Asian American studies. After graduating, she continues to work within the world of food, collaborating with brands and businesses to develop recipes and social media content. You can find her cooking, baking, reading, and writing on @jolinfromscratch.

Culinary History, Food and Drink, Summer 2026

From Tuscany to the Classroom: How Biroldo Continues to Evolve

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By Daniel Bazzinotti

Severino in his salumeria. Image credit: Daniel Bazzinotti.

The first piece of biroldo (Tuscan blood sausage) that I tasted was handed to me by an 89-year-old butcher named Severino. Standing in a small family salumeria (a traditional Italian shop found in every neighborhood in Tuscany, specializing in cured meats) overlooking the ancient walls of Lucca, Tuscany, I watched as Severino chopped braised pork from the head and jowls of a local pig before sliding a small piece across the table. Smiling, he said in Italian, “This is my favorite part of the head. It makes our biroldo unique.” It was the tongue—rich, tender, and deeply flavorful from hours of slow braising.

Moments later, his son Gino carried in a white bucket filled with fresh pig’s blood. Together, they mixed it with the meat, tasting the uncooked mixture several times while adjusting the salt and their family’s closely guarded spice blend, droga—a name that literally translates to “drugs” in English—until Severino nodded with approval. The mixture was then hand-stuffed into beef casings and gently lowered into a century-old copper kettle filled with the broth used to braise the pig’s heads. Severino mentioned that the century-old pot was the key to successfully cooking the biroldo. Then, the sausage was poached until Gino felt it was firm. After their biroldo was cooled, it was ready to be sold in their shop.

As I watched this father-and-son team work together, I realized that I was witnessing much more than the preparation of sausage. I was watching knowledge pass from one generation to the next, not through written recipes, but through observation, repetition, taste, and trust. As Gino explained, he does it the way he does because his dad did it that way, and his dad has done it that way because that’s how his dad did. Thankfully, his great grandpa knew what he was doing! That experience forever changed the way I teach charcuterie and salumi and respect the tradition.

The author with Gino. Image credit: Daniel Bazzinotti.

When my Banquets and Catering students at Johnson & Wales University learn to prepare blood sausage in my class, they are often surprised to discover that there is no single recipe. Blood sausage exists in countless forms throughout Europe: black pudding in the British Isles, boudin noir in France, morcilla in Spain, blutwurst in Germany, and biroldo and sanguinaccio throughout Italy. Although each begins with the same basic ingredients, blood, fat, meat, and seasoning—every region, village, and family has adapted the recipe to reflect hyper-local ingredients and family traditions.

As such recipes crossed the Atlantic, they continued to evolve. Familiar ingredients were not always available, American tastes differed, and regulations including the prohibition on collecting swine blood during commercial production for much of the twentieth century – forced producers to modify traditional practices. Some families carefully preserved recipes handed down for generations, while others adapted them to new ingredients and new audiences. Like those who carried them, these recipes changed while maintaining a connection to their origins.

The author holding the prepared biroldo outside the salumeria in Tuscany where it was made. Image credit: Daniel Bazzinotti.

Today, another transformation is taking place. Traditional blood sausages are becoming less common as eating habits change and fewer people continue the craft. What was once an essential part of whole-animal butchery has become unfamiliar to many younger cooks and diners.

In my classroom, I try to bridge that gap. Rather than simply teaching students how to make blood sausage, I teach them why it exists. We discuss cucina povera (the poor kitchen), the Italian tradition of resourceful cooking, emphasizing whole-animal utilization, its relationship to sustainability, and the cultural traditions that gave rise to these foods. What begins as a lesson in ingredients quickly becomes a discussion about migration, adaptation, and cultural identity.  Once students understand the story behind the recipe, they begin to see it as an expression of ingenuity and respect for ingredients.

From there, I encourage them to adapt these techniques using their own culinary backgrounds. For example, one student from the American South created blood sausage using cornbread and Creole spices. It was unmistakably inspired by Tuscan technique, yet distinctly Southern in flavor and identity. The recipe had traveled once again—not by abandoning tradition, but by building upon it.

That lesson is perhaps the most important one I can teach. Recipes are not preserved by remaining unchanged. They survive because each generation learns the techniques, understands the history, and thoughtfully adapts them to new places, cultures, and ingredients.

The biroldo I helped make in a small Tuscan salumeria is different from the blood sausage my students prepare in New England. However, they remain connected by something deeper than ingredients: they share a commitment to craftsmanship, whole-animal utilization, and the belief that food carries history with it. Every time a student creates a new interpretation of an old recipe, another chapter is added to that story.

 

American Studies, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026

tsp to smbc: Culinary Vernacular and the Evolution of Language in Personal Recipes

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By KC Hysmith

Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe. No matter how you learned to shorten it, the way you write “teaspoon” reveals ample information about your culinary influences. Looking at a larger body of work, such as someone’s personal recipe collection, provides even more details.  

Personal recipe collections contain countless semiotic clues about their authors, but they also hold linguistic tells of shared experiences and community, revealing historical, social, and economical insights about all the people and places that made each recipe possible. Through the lens of measurement abbreviations, this post considers the importance of a shared culinary vernacular and how it passes between recipe collections (from one generation to the next; from one demographic to another) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American world, and analyzes the evolution of language, especially in regards to transcription and the shift from analog to digital.

Food scholars Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth argue that recipe writing serves as a kind of literary vernacular practice with “quotidian modes of writing that develop within specific historical contexts and that intermix rhetorical and aesthetic craft with the dissemination of applied knowledge that is variously empirical, sensory, instructive, interactive, and intergenerational.”[i] The deliberate use of the concept of vernacular versus “jargon,” “dialect,” or “code” highlights the particularity of recipe language and its functional design (which Tigner and Carruth align with the word’s “Latin root vernaculus, meaning domestic”).

There’s no official abbreviation, as each major publication from published cookbooks to legacy media outlets has their own preference, but common versions include: “tsp.” (with period), “tsp” (sans period), a lowercase “t,” “ts,” and “tspn”. It’s never a capital “T,” because that is typically saved for denoting tablespoons (unless you’re German or Dutch, then you’ll likely use a capital “TL” for Teelöffel or Theelepel, which translates to “teaspoon,” respectively). All of these variations came about thanks to numerous colliding forces including culinary literacy, generational trends, cooking methods, and technologies ranging from writing implements to autocorrect (and now, AI).

While personal recipes might start as strictly private, ephemeral texts, they sometimes become shared semi-public artefacts. Countless personal recipes have been shared in community and church cookbooks (often with myriad culinary vernacular stylings)). My departed mother’s recipe for pan de campo (she also uses “tsp,” but funnily does not abbreviate “cup”) sits framed on my office wall. And my personal recipe for cornbread (I use the little “t” notation, when I’m not dealing in metric), has been passed through many hands, in both written and digital forms. Even celebrity chefs with professionally published cookbooks sometimes find their personal recipes in the public eye; consider Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie (she uses “tsp” and “c.”) which was pulled from her personal collection and is now on display at the National Museum of American History.

Sharing culinary information is part of our society’s cultural tradition, a custom that blurs the relationship between private recipe text and public artefact.

A scanned image of a page with cake recipes from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896.
Fig. 1. Recipes for cake, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer, 1896, Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.

 

The ubiquitous use of standardized measurements—using a “tsp” versus the more obscure “spoonful”—transformed the world of recipe writing. Until the early twentieth century, recipes were incredibly imprecise, according to food historian Helen Zoe Veit, owing to the lack of oven thermometers, timepieces, and “scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.”[ii] Though many contributed to this shift, domestic scientist and culinary lead of the famous nineteenth-century Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer, is widely considered the “mother of level measurements” in the United States. Farmer’s methods—along with several other recipe writing “best practices” such as ingredient lists and ordinal instructions—were quickly adopted along with a nationwide trend towards the scientific standardization of all spaces in the age of industrialization.

But recipes are more than their measured ingredients. How we name recipes (or don’t) plays a part in this vernacular, too, with longer titles losing adjectives along the way. When we write recipes for ourselves, we often write instructions as truncated actions, generously detailed instructions, or some combination. And then there are the recipes that are mere lists of ingredient ratios that expect the reader to know how to combine them, a shift from early historical recipes that were mostly instructions with a few non-standard measurements sprinkled in (if you were lucky).

A folded over lined notebook, messy with ingredient smudges and drips, lists ingredients in metric measurements for a banana and tahini baked good.
Fig. 2. Recipe for Banana Tahini Muffins by Oona O’Toole, baker at While You’re Up Bakery in Carrboro, NC, texted to the author without instructions.
A scanned image of a manuscript page full of sprawling handwriting explaining a 17th century gingerbread recipe.
Fig. 3. A recipe for gingerbread, “A collection of medical receipts and prescriptions,” MS502, 1650, Royal College of Physicians catalogue

 

The advent and exponential use of the Internet in the aughts and 2010s created additional influences on the recipe vernacular, for as the amount of information available grew, our attention spans shrunk even as recipe titles grew longer (ex: Briny, Garlicky, Lemony Green Beans with Quick-Pickled Red Onions). The acronyms and abbreviated words of Internetspeak (LOL) were already well worn linguistic territory of recipe writing. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues that “Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality.”[iii] Then came social media. At first there were character limits, 140 characters for X (formerly Twitter) and 2200 for Instagram. Early Twitter users relied on code-like workarounds—slashes, no spaces, symbols—to fit full recipes into the character container.

A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.
Fig. 4. A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.

 

A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.
Fig. 5. A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.

 

On Instagram, where hashtags once helped drive more traffic to your post, bakers would use the tag #smbc to share a recipe for Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting. With far more characters to work with but even shorter user attention spans, Instagram recipes take on many abbreviated forms using bullet points, articleless phrases, and the ample use of symbolic emoji.

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking featuring a recipe for Funfetti sourdough. An image of a jar of sprinkled, rising dough is on the left and a caption with the emoji-sprinkled recipe is on the right.
Fig. 6. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking.

 

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury featuring a recipe for SMBC. The recipe is listed in detail in the caption and as an ingredient list in the image.
Fig. 7. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury.

 

Even with more technology than ever before, the way we share recipes still tends to rely on a shared culinary vernacular. And while McCulloch argues that “writing systems are greatly affected by the tools available to make them,”[iv] our collective understanding of “tsp” (or “TL” for German speakers) remains. However we abbreviate or piece together our instructions, recipe writers both professional and personal recognize one another by our shared understanding and appreciation of the small—but important—details of recipe writing.

 

[i] Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth, Literature and Food Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 3.

[ii] Helen Zoe Veit, “The Making of the Modern American Recipe,” Smithsonian Magazine, 19 September 2017.

[iii] Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Penguin, 2019), 11.

[iv] McCulloch, Because Internet, 13.

KC Hysmith, PhD, is a food scholar and writer who focuses on the intersections of food history, gender, and digital media. She is the co-author and co-editor of several books on food culture including When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen) and An American Girl Anthology. She holds a PhD in food studies from the University of North Carolina and an MLA in Gastronomy. See more of her work at kchysmith.com.

18th Century, 19th Century History, British Studies, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026

Culinary Literacy in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Personal Recipe Collections

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By Elizabeth M. Schmidt

When I graduated from college in 2011, my cousin Aurora gave me a cookbook she had compiled. Titled “Everything but the Kitchen Sink,” it was a binder filled with her favorite recipes: some she wrote herself and others she collected from friends online. Over the years, I added to the binder, slipping magazine cutouts between the pages and taping in small pieces of note paper on which I had scribbled instructions. The cookbook Aurora gave me is part of a long tradition of personal recipe collections created by, and for, women. These collections can be found in kitchens, attics, drawers, libraries, and archives around the world. As readers of The Recipes Project will know, historians have found recipes useful for thinking about how and what households ate, and they are often prized for their access to women’s voices and perspectives.

The varied nature of these collections make them tricky to catalog, and the lack of information on the compilers is often perplexing. An eighteenth-century recipe collection by Elizabeth Michel, currently housed at the Wellcome Library, was initially catalogued by someone around 1931 who referred to Michel as “illiterate,” even though the book was clearly written by someone familiar with the written word and educated to some degree. In 2010, literary historian Wendy Wall used this cookbook and catalog entry as the impetus for an essay that confronted the question of literacy in relation to what she called “the domestic arts,” specifically pointing out the ways that literacy is often unfairly gendered.[1]

What I want to make clear is that the people building these recipe collections were both compilers and authors. Women like Michel were acting as compilers by collecting recipes from various sources, but also as writers by modifying the recipes they collected and creating the books themselves. This became evident when I initially began researching personal recipe collections and wanted to find evidence of real-world use of published cookbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like many, I have shelves of cookbooks that I have collected but rarely cooked from. I wanted to know if this was the case centuries earlier: if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts were also collector pieces rather than used on a regular basis. In two nineteenth-century manuscripts I found explicit evidence of engagement with a published book. In the cookbook collection at Texas Woman’s University’s Blagg-Huey Library was a recipe book by Mrs. E. A. Foord, an author who copied out a “Claret Cup” recipe from Isabella Beeton’s 1865 book The Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery. Then, at the Huntington Library, I found a recipe collection written by Susannah Judith Blencowe which included the following note: “For Oyster Sauce refer to Miss Rundell page 320 Calves foot jelly Mrs. Glasse page 295 Carrot Soup Cobbet’s 131,” referencing Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1842), Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1784), and Anne Cobbett’s The English Housekeeper: or, Manual of Domestic Management (1840).

These were certainly classic examples of literacy, but what I found in the rest of the pages of Foord and Blencowe’s collections, as well as in countless other manuscripts I examined, were examples of a larger “culinary literacy.” Culinary literacy includes the ability to read published cookbooks and competently write out recipes, but it also entails engagement with information networks, friends and family sharing recipes amongst themselves, as well as the ability to modify recipes based on experience, knowledge of how to find appropriate ingredients, and practical skills.

For example, in addition to Beeton’s “Claret Cup,” Mrs. Foord’s recipe collection had attributions to at least forty-nine different people, including a recipe for “Curry” attributed to Abraham Cook, one for “Mango Pickle” she received from Mrs. Norfor while Foord was living in Cuddalore, and a recipe for “Little Cakes” from a butler working for a family named Caldwell. Michel’s book, which instigated Wall’s initial inquiry into literacy, also includes attributions, such as “To Make Plum Cakes My Lady Nowell’s Way,” “My Lady Lucas’s Receipt to Pickle Wallnuts,” and “Sugar Cakes Mrs. Carter’s Way.” The networks accessed by Foord and Michel, evidenced by these examples, crossed international boundaries within the British empire, as well as class boundaries. Michel’s distinction between Lady Nowell and Mrs. Carter indicates that she was sharing recipes with women in the nobility as well as the middling classes.

Fig. 1. Page from Elizabeth Michel’s recipe book. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Beyond published cookbooks and acquaintances, culinary literacy includes engagement with other sources. Foord included clippings from newspapers in her recipe collection, such as three recipes for marmalades and five “tea-time” recipes for using marrow (a squash similar to a zucchini), and recipes cut from an advertising pamphlet created by a commercial flour company, Paisley.

Fig. 2. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

Beyond just incorporating the recipes into their collections, our compilers also often made changes to them. Michel felt it necessary to include the caveat “my own way” on a recipe for cakes, implying that while this particular recipe was something she had invented, any other unattributed recipes in her collection were likely copied from books; by writing “my own way” she claimed authorship and exhibited pride in that fact. On a clipping for “A Breakfast Preserve,” an M. J. Foord added notes modifying the recipe to utilize the natural pectin in the orange seeds but avoid leaving them in the finished product. This example of “kitchen literacy” is key in understanding how these personal recipe collections are products of a larger culinary literacy that encompassed engagement with published texts, exchange of information within social networks, and a body of knowledge gained through experience. Incidentally, Elizabeth Michel’s entry at the Wellcome Library still describes the recipe book as being written in an “illiterate hand,” which showcases the need for resources to re-evaluate catalog descriptions across all archives and adjust them to reflect this idea of culinary literacy.

Fig. 3. Page from Mrs. E. A. Foord’s recipe book. Photo taken by author, permission from TWU

[1] Wendy Wall, “Literacy and the Domestic Arts,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 73:3 (September 2010), 384. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.383.pdf

 

Elizabeth M. Schmidt is a recent PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara specializing in British Atlantic foodways of the eighteenth century. From roast beef to turtle soup, she researches the intersection of eating and identity during the Age of Revolutions and imperial turmoil. Using microhistories of figures like sailors, military generals, merchants, and housewives, she explores the impact of foodways on discussions of identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusions. Elizabeth also enjoys cooking historical manuscript recipes, translating eighteenth and nineteenth century instructions, measurements, and tools into their modern equivalent to learn what she can about culinary knowledge and labor.