The Wellcome Library’s Manuscript Recipe Books: Reflections on a...
By Richard Aspin Manuscript recipe books were at the forefront of Henry Wellcome’s collecting activities. Perhaps no other genre of European written artefact spoke more directly to his conception of...
View Article“Lunch Shaming” and Lessons from History
By Nadja Durbach Early last year the news media reported on a surge in what has been called “lunch shaming”: practices that deliberately and publicly humiliate children whose parents have not settled...
View ArticleThe “Nutrition Song”: Imperial Japan’s Recipe for National Nutrition
Nathan Hopson This is the first in a planned series of posts on nutrition science and government-sanctioned recipes in imperial Japan. In May 1922, Japan’s preeminent nutritionist, Saiki Tadasu,...
View ArticleEating Right in 1950s Educational Films
By Jonathan MacDonald There is a right way and a wrong way to do everything, or so argued the creators of Coronet Instructional Films. In their mission to educate American youth in the post-World War...
View ArticleRegulations and Realities: Standardizing Diets in British Prisons
By Jess Clark I was recently in the British Library, and among the sources that came across my desk was a small, thin text published in 1902: Manual of Cooking & Baking for the Use of Prison...
View ArticleAround the Table: Research Technologies
This month on Around the Table, I am chatting with Christian Reynolds, a lead investigator on the US-UK Food Digital Scholarship network. Since the Recipes Project is a partner organization to the...
View ArticleJanuary 2020: a Taste of “Before ‘Farm to Table'” Part II
Dear Recipes Project community, Happy 2020! This month we’ll mark the new year by highlighting some discoveries from the Before “Farm to Table”: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures project, a Mellon...
View ArticleMeals on Wheels: The “Kitchen Cars” and American Recipes for the Postwar...
By Nathan Hopson From 1956 to 1960, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) sponsored a fleet of food demonstration buses in Japan (“kitchen cars”) to improve national nutrition and fuel the...
View ArticleSay Ohm: Japanese Electric Bread and the Joy of Panko
By Nathan Hopson In 1998, the New York Times introduced readers to an exotic new ingredient described as “a light, airy variety [of breadcrumb] worlds away from the acrid, herb-flecked, additive-laden...
View ArticleRemembering Terry Turner (1929-2019): Pharmaceutical History Collector...
By Laurence Totelin, with input from Briony Hudson A few years ago, my colleagues Heather Trickey (social sciences), Julia Sanders (midwifery) and I decided to put together a small exhibition on the...
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