Of Hedgehogs, Whale Vomit, and Fire-Breathing Peacocks
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts I told my children we were making hedgehog pudding for Halloween. They were horrified. So was I when I read the title of an entry in the recipe book of Lady Ann Fanshawe...
View ArticleLittle Shop of Horrors, Early Modern Style
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts I like pretty words. Old, pretty words. The problem with old, pretty words is that they can be awfully deceptive. While (electronically) flipping through the recipe book of...
View ArticlePigeon Blood Visine?: An Early Modern Eye Wash
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts Close your eyes and imagine a chicken. Now a duck. Now a turkey. Now a pigeon. If this little experiment has worked the way I envisioned, when you thought of a pigeon you...
View ArticleMrs. Corlyon’s Pimple Cream: A Toxic Topical
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts Reading an early recipe book can be an emotional roller coaster. There’s disgust (“’Snail water’? With real snails? Eww”), delight (“’A pudding of pippins’? That’s like...
View ArticleScratching “The Itch Infalable”: Johanna St. John’s Anti-Itch Cure
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts Physical or metaphorical, itches are funny things. Physical itches, as Atul Gawande points out, may well have been a response that evolved to alert us to insects and...
View ArticleWigging Out: Mrs. Corlyon’s Method for Extracting Earwigs From The Ear
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts There is a remarkable passage in a sermon John Donne preached before the king in Whitehall in 1627. Donne reiterates the need for an openness to the word of God, to an ear...
View ArticlePrick’t By Benedictus: Blessed Thistle and Much Ado About Nothing
by Jennifer Sherman Roberts There’s a playful moment in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing that occurs after the darker elements of the play have been set in motion but while the tone is still...
View ArticleHang Your Head: Mrs. Corlyon’s Unique Headache Treatment
Jennifer Sherman Roberts One of the most challenging tasks in deciphering early modern medical recipes is knowing what illness the recipe is meant to treat. Some recipes address recognizable...
View ArticleA Stitch in Thyme?: Why Are There So Few Knitting Patterns in Recipe Books?
by Jennifer Sherman Roberts When I first began researching early modern recipe books, I was struck by how they upended my expectations of the genre. Some of the recipes seemed to me, quite frankly,...
View ArticleStone Soup: A new project about recipes and community
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts There’s a beautiful moment in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Gate A-4” in which travelers from all over the world come together—despite differences in language, experience, and...
View ArticleMucus Cure-Alls: Snail Waters and Spa Treatments
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts In a world view that relied on correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm, and in a humoral medical system that utilized similarities between bodily functions and...
View Article“Stone Soup”: Reflections on Community Conversations
Editorial: This is the final of a series of reflection posts from Recipe Project contributors and editors. By Jennifer Sherman Roberts Recipes form communities. Readers of The Recipes Project know this...
View ArticleThe CIA’s “Secret” Weapon: Dorothy Pompeo’s Christmas Fudge Recipe
By Jennifer Sherman Roberts Twitter is a funny, messy place where topics and tropes wantonly mingle and merge. Memes about Tide pods follow presidential proclamations. Rankings of Very Good Dogs scroll...
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