Curing Coughs and the Common Cold in Eighteenth-Century England
By Katherine Allen It happens at every university, every year, and is often known as ‘fresher’s flu’. This cocktail of viruses arrives at the start of term, along with students and their unprepared...
View ArticleNewspaper Remedies and Commercial Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Recipe Books
By Katherine Allen This post examines medical recipes and commercial medicine published in newspapers that were incorporated into recipe books. In a previous post, I discussed newspapers as sources of...
View ArticlePimples, Corns, and Correspondence: Remedying Victorian Beauty Dilemmas
By Jessica P. Clark As we’ve seen in previous posts, eighteenth-century English newspapers were important sites for exchanging recipes and knowledge. This tradition flourished in the nineteenth century...
View ArticleDyeing to Impress: Hair Products and Beauty Culture in Nineteenth-Century...
By 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 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 ArticleSpringtime in Recipe Books
By: Katherine Allen Spring has sprung and I can’t help but ponder the significance of spring for recipe collectors in the late 17th and 18th century. Citations of spring in recipes highlight the...
View ArticleRecipes Round-up: Research Presented at Scientiae and SSHM 2016
by Katherine Allen In early July I attended two conferences: Scientiae (on early modern science), and the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) conference. Both had an impressive range of...
View Article‘The Cholera Manuscript’: A collection of recipes and cures from Co Limerick
By Dorothy Cashman Several years ago a manuscript collection of recipes came up for auction in Dublin. At the time, Ireland was in the throes of an IMF bailout and funding across all cultural...
View Article“Daily Recipes for Home Cooking” (1924)
By Nathan Hopson This is the second in a planned series of posts on nutrition science and government-sanctioned recipes in imperial Japan. Imagine a national cookbook. What would that look like? What...
View ArticleWaste Not, Want Not: Transforming Waste into Food – Skimmed Milk
By Lesley Steinitz Fancy some pig’s wash with your granola? In the late nineteenth century, the ‘pig’s wash’ – a euphemism also for vomit – was skimmed milk. It was so-named because it had been the...
View Article“A Recipe for Cooking Husbands,” and Nineteenth-Century Joke Recipes
Avery Blankenship, PhD Student, Department of English, Northeastern University “A good many husbands are utterly spoiled by mismanagement,” begins a recipe printed in the December 31, 1885 edition of...
View ArticleFrom the Archives: Springtime in Recipe Books
As spring is on the horizon in the northern hemisphere, this post from our archives presents a wonderful reminder of the ways that seasonality figured into early modern remedies and recipes. This piece...
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