By Sarah Peters Kernan Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and anthropological archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is Chair for the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the city of Wichita. Crystal describes researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including expe...| The Recipes Project
By Anna Marie Smith and Tom Cook, Fatto a Mano Project Into the depths of Italian culinary history, there remains a search for the most exotic pasta shape; a culinary journey into transitory perfection and ephemeral uniqueness. Then, lies the humble gnocchi. A lump. A dumpling shaped and formed by old hands crooked and weathered or tiny fingers touching raw dough for the first time. The singular gnocco stands alone as Italy’s poor mass of unhinged flour. Like the sculptor before us, gnoc...| The Recipes Project
By Sarah Peters Kernan Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to Victoria Flexner, food historian and founder of the historical dining collective, Edible History. She is the author of A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes, published by Rizzoli in 2023. Through these projects and her Substack newsletter, Victoria expertly communicates history through food. Follow Victoria Flexner on Substack and Instagram for upda...| The Recipes Project
By Bonnie Shishko and Shawn Bowers As college professors with three combined decades of First-Year Writing experience, we’re observing two unsettling trends: first, that traditional undergraduate students are increasingly unlikely to tackle academic writing without relying on AI-tools, and second, that they are increasingly likely to hold rigid beliefs about writing—what it is, what it can do, and what it should sound and look like. As a result, we’re noting a third phenomenon: in the...| The Recipes Project
By Ángel Tuninetti and the Centro de Estudios Heñói Team Paraguay is a poster case for the damage that industrial agriculture can cause on food security and food sovereignty. The landlocked South American country was almost self-sufficient in food production until the 1990s, mainly thanks to the diversified crops and animal production of the fincas … Continue reading “Recetario Soberano”: Defending Sovereignty One Recipe at a Time →| The Recipes Project
FOOD AND WAR: RECIPES OF SURVIVAL, RESISTANCE, AND POWER INTRODUCTION By Vanesa Miseres, Guest Editor, Spring 2025 In an era marked by the detached violence of drone warfare, where international conflicts are often debated and seemingly resolved on social media or in a simple tweet, it becomes easy to overlook the fundamental role of bodies … Continue reading Spring 2025 →| The Recipes Project
By Chang Xu If you were stocking up on disaster relief supplies, what kind of reference would you want by your side? Expedient Formulas for Military Marches (1852) reads like just such a survival guide. Compiled during and after the turmoil of the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), this text … Continue reading Preparedness for the Unexpected: Expedient Recipes for Survival in Wartime China →| The Recipes Project
By Kathleen Sheldon In 1982 I moved to Mozambique in southern Africa to pursue dissertation research on urban working women. I was a doctoral candidate in African history at the University of California in Los Angeles. I went there with my husband, a pediatrician, who had a two-year contract with the Ministry of Health, and our toddler-aged daughter. We were somewhat prepared for living in a newly independent socialist country that ranked as one of the poorest in the world. Mozambique had g...| The Recipes Project
By Noha Atef In Gaza’s displacement camps, cooking has taken on a new meaning. It is no longer just a routine task; it has become a form of survival, storytelling, and resistance. Since October 2023, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza strip have been forced from their homes, taking refuge in makeshift tents, often with little more than flour, canned goods, and the clay ovens they crafted. Amid this devastation, a form of digital documentation emerged: Instagram reels of people cooking with w...| The Recipes Project
By Anne Sarah Rubin Coffee, I must have coffee, and if anyone wants to give me a treat, ah!, just give me some coffee! Although written by J.S. Bach and the librettist Picander in the 1730s, the Coffee Cantata’s homage to the world’s favorite stimulant certainly rang true in the Civil War South. Recipes for coffee substitutes pepper the pages of Confederate newspapers and reminiscences. Elite white women wrote down their personal formulas and debated the virtues of one concoction over ano...| The Recipes Project
By Karina Elizabeth Vázquez There are only a few steps between my living room and kitchen, so a section of the library stands directly opposite to a countertop stacked with cookbooks. It wasn’t until I began to think about what to write about Lee Miller (1907-1977), her work as a war correspondent, battlefield photographer, and her relationship with gastronomy, that I realized that two books sit opposite one another, one in the library and one in the kitchen: The Unwomanly Face of War (201...| The Recipes Project
By Oriele Benavides The Venezuelan crisis of 2014-2015, broadly characterized by a drastic drop in oil production and prices and harsh international economic sanctions, caused absolute disorder and intensified a diaspora that continues today. Effects included hyperinflation, beginning in 2015, that reached stratospheric levels when it hit 103,008% in 2018. At that moment, the government’s … Continue reading Food, Community, and Resistance in Hyperinflationary Venezuela →| The Recipes Project
By Yanet Acosta A cookbook is much more than a simple collection of recipes.[i] In the case of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) by Ignacio Doménech, the cookbook is not only a tool of critique but also a form of resistance. It pushes back against the devastation of war, a devastation that leaves its … Continue reading Anguish as a Form of Resistance: Ignacio Doménech’s Cocina de Recursos (Deseo mi comida) in Civil War Spain →| The Recipes Project
By Pradeep Barua The Indian Army participated in both world wars in the twentieth century. During the First World War (1914-1918,) 1.3 million Indian soldiers fought for the British Empire. Another two million men joined the Indian Army and fought for the allies in World War Two (1939-1945).[i] In the latter case, feeding this massive … Continue reading Curry Goes to War: Indian Army Field Rations in World War Two →| The Recipes Project
By Bridget María Chesterton The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil … Continue reading Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay →| The Recipes Project
By Enemchukwu Nnaemeka Wars in post-colonial Africa, like in other places across the world, were not only fought with guns, ammunitions, and bombardments but also with strategies of starvation. Starvation as a military strategy has been employed by various groups throughout history, with the primary intent of forcing an enemy to surrender or retreat. These … Continue reading Of Rodents, Stockfish, and Win-the-War Soup: Surviving Starvation in Biafra →| The Recipes Project
By Nikianna Dinenis A familiar image of the English Reformation is one of destruction, of Henry VIII dissolving nine hundred monasteries, scattering their rich manuscript collections to the four winds, and transforming the English landscape into a graveyard of Catholic belief and practice. In her new book Reading Practice, Melissa Reynolds presents us with a … Continue reading The Uses and Abuses of Medieval Manuscripts in Reformation England →| The Recipes Project
By: Caleb Prus In 1485, during London’s first epidemic of the sweating sickness, the physician Thomas Forestier complained to Henry VII about certain “false leeches” ⎯healers deceiving the public through “writing of the kind[s] of powders and of medicines.” These “unexpert men” were not university-educated physicians like Forestier but ordinary tradespeople⎯ “carpenters and mill keepers”⎯who … Continue reading On Medical Manuscripts in Reynolds’ Reading Practice →| The Recipes Project
By Sarah Kernan and Helga Müllneritsch Culinary Texts in Context began as an idea for collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were interested in working together, given our shared interests in early modern recipe books, and the new emphasis on Zoom calls and digital resources presented a great opportunity for us to easily collaborate, despite … Continue reading Culinary Texts in Context: Continuing the Conversation →| The Recipes Project
By Kimba Stahler Flipping through recipe cards or a cookbook is not the apolitical exercise some might think. Whether picked by workers earning a fair wage in a safe environment or transported by truck drivers fighting for a better union contract, ingredients politicize meals. Historically and recently, American consumer boycotts have moved the picket line … Continue reading Stovetop Solidarity: “Recipes for Semi-Starvation” and Antipoverty Organizing in American Cities →| The Recipes Project
By KC Hysmith, PhDPackaged in a brown paper and cellophane fold-over bag, not unlike those you’d find at your corner bakery or at the farmers’ market, the Beaux “Bread Bag” contains a hefty stack of paper printed with information about reproductive rights and health care access. Activists gather in-person around a table to share this … Continue reading “Pain au Levain”: Reproductive Rights, Recipes, and Community Cookbooks →| The Recipes Project
By Jennifer “JJ” HarbsterThe Library of Congress has been collecting U.S. community cookbooks since the copyright deposit of one of the country’s first community cookbooks, Maria Moss’s 1864 “Poetical Cook Book” which raised funds for wounded Civil War soldiers. What has amassed since are thousands of titles that represent more than a century of U.S. … Continue reading In Search of Meat Substitute Recipes in Historical U.S. Community Cookbooks →| The Recipes Project
By Suzanne Zoe Joskow When I began building The Community Cookbook Archive — made up of over four hundred Los Angeles-based collective recipe books, spanning three centuries — I was struck by the books’ role in Southern California place-making. The majority of community cookbooks are self-published, which means the included recipes are not from professional chefs. … Continue reading Community Cookbooks as Mapping Resources →| The Recipes Project
By Agnibha MaityIn Bengal, culinary practices have been influenced at different times in history by different communities, and modern-day Bengali cookbooks celebrate the amalgamation of the various cooking techniques Bengali cooks picked up during these cross-continental interactions. However, the rise of the Bengali middle class and modernisation project – including kitchens – in the nineteenth … Continue reading Handbook for Everyday Cooking: Leela Majumdar’s Infusion Approach →| The Recipes Project
By Jolie BraunIncreasingly, cookbooks are finding a place in the classroom. In recent years, they have been used for teaching a variety of topics, including storytelling and language,[1] women’s lives,[2] and African American history.[3] In this piece, I will share my experience taking a book history approach in a session on community cookbooks. This method … Continue reading Teaching with Community Cookbooks →| The Recipes Project
By Annima Bahukhandi British-Iranian food writer, Yasmin Khan, opens her recipe book, “The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen” (2016), with a frank admission of her lifelong obsession with pomegranates. She fondly recalls the multi-sensory pleasure of eating pomegranates—from the visceral feel of the fruit’s leathery skin, to the crunch of the pomegranate pearls, … Continue reading “It Tastes/Smells like Home!”: Memory, Food Nostalgia & the Immigrant Experience →| The Recipes Project
By James Edward Malin and Gary Thompson This two-part post elaborates on three problems inhibiting the building and connecting of culinary research databases: obstacles to combining historical mediums, differences in data entry structures, and challenges of historical culinary ontologies. It could be said that culinary history’s multidisciplinarity nature makes it difficult to marshal a level … Continue reading Pasta, Pasta, or Maccheroni? Obstacles in the Digital Culinary History Environ...| The Recipes Project
By Maggie Vanderford, Juli McLoone, and Kira Dietz Whoever coined the phrase “easy as pie!” has never made an eighteenth-century historic pie recipe before. Historical recipes represent opportunities to build community and establish connections to the past. The challenges of such a project are multifold: Fining a recipe in the archives, “translating” it for modern-day … Continue reading Sifting Through the Archives: Pi(e)Day and Creating Community Through Experiential Historic Bakin...| The Recipes Project
