By Sarah Peters Kernan Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! Sarah Kernan speaks with Sara Charles, a medieval book historian at the University of London. Sara recently published The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2024). She incorporates “historical remaking” into her research practices and she shares her knowledge with broader audiences through workshops, social media, and her website, teachingmanuscripts.com. Follow Sara on B...| The Recipes Project
By Caleb Prus Grief often feels as physical as it does emotional—like a weight on the chest, a flutter of the heart, or a tightening in the throat. The distinction between these physical and emotional symptoms is largely a product of modern medicine; in the premodern world, those boundaries were far blurrier. In The Canterbury Tales (c.1390), Chaucer’s Physician tells a story so tragic that the Host cries out, “I almost have caught a cardiacle”—a heart pain brought on by pity and so...| The Recipes Project
By Sarah Peters Kernan Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! Sarah Kernan has a conversation with Marissa Nicosia, an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington. She teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. Marissa speaks about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website, Cooking in the Archives: ...| The Recipes Project
By Sara de Blas Hernández Since starting my Ph.D. journey at UC Davis, I have collaborated with Prof. Daniela Gutiérrez-Flores to enhance medieval and early modern Spanish literature classes using multisensory pedagogical approaches. The goal is to help students connect with the literary production of the time, one that often feels culturally distant, through tangible … Continue reading Chocolate, Poems, and Virtual Kitchens: Reconstructing the Early Modern Experience →| The Recipes Project
Making Introduction By Sarah Peters Kernan, Kelli Kimura, and Melissa Reynolds, Editors Recipes are more than simple instructions—they invite us to enact their processes and physically engage with texts from the past. Whether termed “making,” “remaking,” “recreating,” or “reenacting,” this act of following historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the … Continue reading Summer 2025 →| The Recipes Project
By Sarah Peters Kernan Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! Sarah Kernan talks to Alexandra Makin, a textile archaeologist specializing in early medieval embroidery. She is a professional embroiderer, trained at the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and also holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon Studies. Alex is a Third Century Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic: Analysis, Interpretation, Re...| The Recipes Project
By Esther Martin People love Stuff. They’ve always loved Stuff. For hundreds of years, humanity has made a practice of collecting the Stuff they love. These collections carry alternative implications, showcased and flaunted to establish both the status and identity of the owner. The act of collecting is easy to dismiss as a type of overconsumption, but it is deeply tied to a person’s need to establish their sense of self, and to identify where they fit into the social spectrum. Collectors...| The Recipes Project
By Charlotte Gaudry When we talk about historical reconstruction, “making” can be understood as the act of bringing the past back to life, recreating what once existed. This fits closely with the goals of the reconstruction I have in mind for my thesis project. It is not just about restoring objects or practices, but about exploring new ways of understanding and “making” history itself. It’s a process that can engage all our senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. In this s...| The Recipes Project
By Sarah Peters Kernan Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! A content warning. Please note that this episode contains a detailed description of the death of eels in preparation for a meal. In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Neil Buttery, a historian of British food. He is an award-winning author of several books, including A Dark History of Sugar; Before Mrs. Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper; The Philosophy of Puddings; and Knea...| The Recipes Project
By R. Claire Bunschoten & Ben D. Lee On the Netflix show Culinary Class Wars, Korean American chef Edward Lee makes food to make identity. In the semi-final round of the South Korean cooking competition show, chefs are tasked to create a dish communicating their life story. Signature dishes abound: elaborately crafted songshu guiyu and … Continue reading Mixing Rice, Making Self: Chef Edward Lee’s Theory of Bibimbap →| The Recipes Project
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 … Continue reading Retracing our Roots →| 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. … Continue reading Around the Table Podcast: Edible History with Victoria Flexner →| 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 … Continue reading Recipes as Pedagogical Resistance: Teaching Food Writing in an AI-Era →| 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
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
