A Recipe for Teaching (and Learning) Atlantic World History: Food and the Columbian Exchange

Chances are that all the students in my Atlantic World history courses have tasted sugar. Tracing the eclectic and often devastating histories linked to it—from histories of medicine to histories of slavery—is a useful tool for teaching students about the role producing and consuming edible commodities played in shaping the early modern Atlantic World. Anthropologist/food historian Sidney Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power, accordingly, always holds a starring role in my Atlantic World history course syllabi. This year, however, inspired in part by work on “The Recipes Project,” I decided to ask my students to think not just about the history of edible commodities and food, but about the food itself. What, I wondered, would teaching and learning about the Columbian Exchange, for example, or the theoretical construct of creolization, look like if I asked my students to think about them from the perspective of culinary studies? How would researching recipes that exist today only due to the Columbian Exchange change our understanding about that history? What does following food back and forth across the Atlantic tell us about the ability of Native Americans and Africans to retain cultural heritage through culinary techniques and ingredient choices? What would looking at such recipes tell students not only about the past, but also about how early modern history continues to affect our world today? As I will discuss in my portion of the lightning round, the pedagogical results (for the professor as well as the students) were, well, delicious.