Cooking on the Internet: Historical Recipes and Public Scholarship

Manuscript recipe books are full of intriguing, strange, and familiar concoctions: recipes for syllabubs, turnip cordial water, jumballs, and carrot pudding that call for citterns, ambergris, almond milk, and rosemary picked when it flowers in the month of May. When we launched Cooking in the Archives in 2014, we wanted to know what would happen if culinary historians asked questions in the kitchen as well as in the library. We wanted to see if four-hundred-year-old recipes would still work if we tried them in our tiny, Philadelphia apartment kitchens. Our project sets out to find, investigate, update, cook, and blog about recipes from manuscript recipe books produced between 1600 and 1800. Although we have presented our findings in a scholarly context through presentations and publications, Cooking in the Archives is first and foremost a blog for a wide community of readers, academics and gourmands alike. We are not only cooking in the archives – we are also cooking on the internet. This kind of public writing poses unique challenges and opportunities. In this lightning talk we will explore our process, from surveying manuscripts to monitoring the comments section of a post, by walking through one recipe and describing our methods for research, cooking, writing, and engaging with the general public.