Dyeing to Impress: Hair Products and Beauty Culture in Nineteenth-Century...
Sean Trainor Readers of a certain age will surely recall their first gray hair. Perhaps they can even relate to the panic that absorbed the nameless protagonist of an April 1831 story in The Ladies’...
View ArticleWild Thyme, Bitter Almonds, and Extract of Beavers – The Medicinal Recipes of...
Written in the mid-first century CE, the Compositiones medicamentorum (The Composition of Remedies, sometimes simply translated as Recipes) of Scribonius Largus falls into the same historical context...
View ArticleListening, Tasting, Reading, Touching: Interdisciplinary Histories of...
By Theresa McCulla When members of the American Historical Association gathered for their annual meeting in New York City in January, attendees set out to explore disciplines other than history. Or...
View ArticleMedieval Cookery Rolls as Practical Kitchen Texts
By Sarah Peters Kernan A cookery copied on a roll might seem unwieldy and impractical to the modern mind. Who would record lists of recipes on a long strip of parchment, only to roll it up again for...
View ArticleSpa Culture, Recipes, and Eighteenth-Century Elite Healthcare
By Katherine Allen Earlier this month I took a day off from my thesis (or so I thought) and went to the spa at Bath. While relaxing in the rooftop pool I couldn’t help but imagine myself as an...
View ArticleNew-Fashioned Recipe: Angel Food Cake and Nineteenth-Century Technological...
By Rachel A. Snell When I was growing up, my mother would bake Angel Food Cake as a special summertime dessert. I remember the anticipation of seeing the freshly baked cake in its distinctive pan,...
View Article“Look’d Like Milk”: Breastmilk Substitutes in New England’s Borderlands
By Carla Cevasco Captured by the Abenaki in 1724, the English colonist Elizabeth Hanson fretted as “my daily Travel and hard Living made my Milk dry almost quite up.” As Hanson recorded in her...
View ArticleThe Politics of Chocolate: Cosimo III’s Secret Jasmine Chocolate Recipe
By Ashley Buchanan By 1708 the Medici grand ducal “spezieria,” or pharmacy, had grown into a complex of eleven rooms located in the main ducal residence, the Palazzo Pitti. It included a medical...
View ArticleTranscription-as-collaboration
In a recent class session of my graduate seminar, “Thinking Green: Eco-Approaches to Texts,” my students and I transcribed and discussed at length the first recipe that appears in a manuscript book in...
View ArticleThe wrong trousers? Common folk in striped clothes as readers of early modern...
By Tillmann Taape When trying to make historical sense of printed medical recipe collections, one tricky but important question always recurs: who did the author and/or publisher think would be likely...
View ArticleRotten or Fermented?: Disgusting Cross-Cultural Foods in Early America
By Carla Cevasco In Autumn 1764, the English missionary Samuel Kirkland was dispatched to a Seneca Indian village in western New York, where a Seneca family adopted him, as was common practice. A hard...
View ArticleSnowballs: Intermixing Gentility and Frugality in Nineteenth Century Baking
By Rachel A. Snell For most readers, snowballs likely conjure memories of childhood winter games or, perhaps, the small, rounded cookies covered with shaved coconut or powdered sugar often prepared...
View ArticleTeaching High School American History With Cookbooks
By Carla Cevasco “Ew! Peanut butter in tamales?” a student exclaims. This unappetizing take on Mexican food, from the 1922 cookbook Foods of the Foreign-Born in Relation to Health, provides a perfect...
View ArticleTeaching Recipes in the Wangensteen Library
By Emily Beck Over the course of my graduate career at the University of Minnesota, I’ve become interested in the ways that libraries function as spaces for both academic and public teaching. I began...
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