John Mitchell

Dr. Marissa Nicosia, Assistant Professor of Renaissance Literature, was kind enough to sit down and talk to us about her research on historical recipes. One of her projects, Cooking in the Archives, is a public humanities project that curates transcribed and updated recipes from early modern English household manuscripts for an audience including: food historians, students researching early modern culture, culinary enthusiasts, and the general public. It has been featured in the Washington Post, HuffPost: Taste, Edible Philly, CNN.com, and on Talk of Iowa (NPR). You can check it out here, or on Facebook. You can also follow @Rare_Cooking on Twitter and Instagram.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

So, what topics or recipes have you been researching lately?

I’ve had a couple of special topics this fall because of speaking engagements that I’ve been invited to undertake. So, the most the most recent post on Cooking in the Archives is a recipe to candy apples to look like amber, and I prepared that recipe for an event that I did that was on Zoom. It was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Arthur F. Kinney Center for Renaissance Studies and was part of their Grounded Knowledge series. It was an event with me and also with a wild apple forager named Matt Kaminsky, who goes by Gnarly Pippins, and our topic was apples and preservation.

Matt was talking a lot about grafting as a technology for preserving different kinds of apple trees—that’s where you cut a bit of the new wood and you bind it to older rootstock and it grows, and that’s the main way we propagate apples. I came up with an apple preservation recipe, and a lot of the apple preservation recipes that are in the cookbooks, the manuscript cookbooks that people kept in their houses in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries, a lot of those are jams or apple jellies, marmalade of apples is a common term. I know when we think about marmalade, we tend to think about orange marmalade, like an orange jam or preserve, but marmalade, the word actually comes from the Spanish word for quince. And you may have heard of quince membrillo as a kind of preserved quince taste. So, marmalade is used as a sort of catch-all for a preserve of fruits in the period.

I spent a while back in September looking at all sorts of different apple preserve recipes, and decided to do this one because it was one that I could actually do with the people at the event. So, we peeled and cored apples together and sprinkled them with sugar and rosewater, and they put them in the oven and they were finished after the event, but we could kind of do it together unlike making a jam on the stove where you have to really be stirring and using a thermometer and it’s much more complicated. So that’s what I was working on, this apple recipe that’s more recently been up on the site.

I’m also doing an event with the Free Library of Philadelphia coming up in December, and for that I’ll be in dialogue with Ange Branca, who’s the chef of Saté Kampar, a South Philadelphia restaurant that recently closed during the pandemic, but that’s been continuing through pop-up events throughout the city. Ange is from Malaysia and has a really thoughtful way of thinking about spices in her cooking. The recipe I’m working on for that is basically a shortbread cookie seasoned with cloves and we’re going to have a dialogue about cloves and the spice trade that connected South Asia and Europe in the 16^th century, but also continues to connect across cultures today.

What would you say your favorite recipe that you’ve researched is?

One that I think is my favorite after doing this for six years is a hot chocolate recipe, Rebeckah Winche’s hot chocolate. It’s from the late 17^th century and it really shows the circulation of chocolate from indigenous peoples in South and Central America, in what’s now Mexico and the Caribbean, who grew cacao and introduced it into their diets, and how the knowledge of how indigenous peoples prepared that bean, because when you look at photos of a cocoa bean it’s not immediately apparent what you might do with this. The processing of chocolate is pretty intense. So, it’s a recipe that really shows this transfer of knowledge and of ingredients and it also is really delicious so it’s about the time of year when I’m going to make myself up a big jar of the hot chocolate mix so I can have that throughout the colder months. And there are some of the other cookies and tarts and cake recipes that are things I’ll occasionally make for fun and not just for posting on the website.

And another one, which is funny, I keep coming back to this one, there’s a recipe for macaroni and cheese, it’s actually the first recipe on the site. It’s an 18^th century macaroni and cheese dish. And instead of making a full Béchamel sauce, which is the traditional way you’d make mac and cheese right now—or of course making from a box—this one you cook some pasta and then you coat that pasta with a whipped-up egg, a bunch of grated cheese, a little bit of mace, and some pepper and altogether you put that into the oven to bake and it’s really nice. So, if I find myself without any Annie’s mac and cheese in the house and wanting some mac and cheese or wanting just a little bit cheesier or fresher mac and cheese, I will go back to that recipe, it’s one that I actually do eat.

How difficult has it been to make most of these recipes, has it been more or less difficult than you might have expected when you first got into it?

It’s been difficult in different ways than what I expected when I started, and some of that’s been more about how I share the information on the internet and how I write and connect with my audience than about the actual cooking of the recipes. There’s a whole bunch of recipes I just don’t make because I can’t make them in a kitchen in a Philadelphia rowhome or in the various apartments that I’ve lived in over the course of the project. So, anything that involves roasting a whole swan on a spit is not going to get made, and there are certain other items where I simply can’t get the appropriate ingredients to make them. So that leaves out some fairly difficult recipes and the others have just forced me to learn certain skills I didn’t have as a cook. I hadn’t ever made jam before I started this project so I had to learn how to do that, as I was also trying to adapt historical recipes for jam. And the ingredients and the methods for the recipes are usually partial and they’re written to cook in a hearth and not in a modern stove, so that’s been pretty difficult.

Back then they couldn’t just say preheat the oven to 400 degrees?

Yea, so it’ll be like “on a soft fire” or “on a fast fire.” There’s a lot of different descriptions for how your fire is supposed to be to get the culinary effect you’re going for.

How you ever found a guide for what exactly a “fast fire” is?

Nope, but I’m part of a collective called the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC). That keeps me in touch with a lot of the other people doing research on these recipes and it’s also a project for transcribing recipe books. By transcribe, I mean to copy down what’s on the page, to type it out from the early handwriting, so that we can create searchable transcriptions of recipe books so you could basically ctrl-f to search these documents. It’s a little bit more complicated than that with the interface that they’re in, but that’s work I do with ACURA students in my “What’s in a Recipe?” ongoing ACURA project where we contribute to that collective project of transcribing recipe manuscripts. So, I’ve had conversations about what a “soft fire” is with other scholars doing this research and we’ve been able to search, I think at this point there’s five manuscripts, in the corpus that they’ve developed for like uses of the word “fast”, so we’re trying to figure it out. But there isn’t a guide for household cooks, mostly because I think a lot of that information was passed down orally and through embodied experience from one person to another laboring in the kitchen, and the people who were doing that work of managing the fire may not have had the literacy to read a guide, so we’re doing a lot of work trying to relearn what other people just knew.

How do you go about finding new recipes? Obviously, you can’t just google them. You have to do some of the indexing, but where do you go about finding old cookbooks from that far back, you have to go to libraries I imagine?

Yea, so the project started when I was working with the collaborator, but I was learning how to read 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th century handwriting to do my research in literary studies, so I was introduced to these books that I knew were in libraries and museums in the U.S. and the U.K. I’m mostly working with the English-language materials and those are the main places that hold those materials. I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when I started the project, and I’d been working on manuscript recipe books in that collection, so I knew that that library has also digitized all of their manuscripts, which means that they had high-quality digital images available online.

But even though they’d gotten a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to make these materials public, that didn’t mean that the public could actually, one: know that these materials were out there, two: read them even if they knew if they knew that they were out there, or three: there certainty wasn’t enough contextual information for most people to be able to prepare the recipes. I knew those were out there.

The other two libraries where I’ve done most of my research are the Folger Shakespeare library in Washington, D.C. and the Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library of UCLA in Los Angeles. With both of those collections, all of their manuscript recipe books have either been digitized so there’s high-quality digital images online, or the Folger has some new ones that they’re digitalizing right now, so that’s been a priority for these collections to make images of these materials available. So sometimes, especially before COVID-19, I would go and sit in the library and literally sit there with the manuscript and flip through it, read recipes, take notes on things I thought might be tasty or that I was interested in researching and writing about. But honestly, even before COVID a lot of my research has been looking at these images of the actual manuscripts online, and then when I happen to be, say, in Los Angeles, where I had a fellowship for a month in 2019, or the Folger where I had a fellowship in 2016. I also did a lot of work on an exhibition they had so I was back there a lot in 2018, 2017. So, when I was there, I was able to spend time with the actual manuscripts that I’d looked at a lot online in advance. That’s a big change that’s happened, I think, in the last decade in scholarship on this kind of materials is that there’s a lot of high-quality digital images that scholars can look at from a distance now.

So that’s a nice segue into my next question, how do you feel the pandemic has affected everything, has it given you more time to focus or has basically just wreaked havoc on your plans?

It’s wreaked a lot of havoc on my plans in terms of places I was supposed to go and speak about this research and conversations that I was supposed to have with other scholars. It means I haven’t been able to spend any time with any of the manuscripts I work on, even the ones across the city in Philadelphia, where I live, and it means that supply chains have been disrupted by COVID, and the idea of what it means to go to a grocery store has really changed. So, in the past I wouldn’t have minded going to multiple stores, searching out a particular ingredient, or if I had to make something again, kind of devoting the resource to doing that. But as I was watching my flour stock decline in the spring, I wasn’t going to start testing a lot of flour recipes, so it’s changed some of the ways I’ve shopped for ingredients to do recipe testing and it’s also shaped some of the recipes I’ve started doing, I’ve been leaning a little more towards preserving recipes on the site since March because that’s felt like an appropriate kind of recipe to be working on right now.

The other thing that’s happened, which I’m sure you could talk to any working person about, is that work life in general has really changed, and you might hear this from other faculty, but our workload is sort of doubled for the courses that we’re doing in order to teach them well in remote synchronous, and in asynchronous, or hybrid, or however people are teaching, I’ve been teaching for a decade and I have really good lessons that I can pick up and walk into a classroom with and teach them, but translating those into an online environment takes just an incredible amount of time, so I’ve had a lot less time for the research than I would’ve if it were not during COVID-19. That said, it has been very nice when I’ve been able to spend some time doing that work testing recipes and enjoying the process of it like I always do.

What inspired you to start researching in this particular subarea of recipes?

I’ve always loved to cook and loved to eat, and I’ve been curious about tasting different things and thinking about food really carefully. As a late-stage graduate student, I saw that there was a grant opportunity for interdisciplinary innovation, and my collaborator at the time and I put together a grant application because we’d been reading these recipes in our study of paleography—our study to learn how to read 16, 17^th,and 18^th century handwriting, which is different than modern handwriting. We were trying to learn that just so we could do good research as scholars, and we’d been practicing recipes, and we’d been joking with one another “oh yea, we could probably cook these, we’re good cooks, we like cooking, we could probably cook these recipes” and we applied for a grant so that we could pay for our rent for the summer basically.

Then we got the grant, and we’re like “ok guess we have to figure out how we’re going to do this historical cooking thing” and the project really took off from there. We thought we were just going to do a little summertime blog project where we updated six recipes and we would share that with the community, but we had an immediate response that was really exciting. It was both about the fact that we were cooking these historical recipes, but also about our style of writing on the site and the way that we were communicating historical information to a public audience in ways that people really connected with, and that was exciting and that was one of the reason why the project is still going, because it’s been an amazing way to interact with people in the general public.

Before the project launched, I actually did not know very much about Renaissance food at all, but I did know how to cook in general and I knew how to read the handwriting. It’s been a very steep learning curve to develop that whole subfield of research over the past six years, and now I’m really fluent in the conversations in food studies, and in food in literature and in the Renaissance. But these were not things that were a part of my first book project that is underway and is under review, and it’s not a part of some of the published articles that I’d been working on before. It’s been something that’s really come out of the public work and has really led me to do a lot more in this subfield than I’d ever would have done if I hadn’t started it. It’s sort of a backwards story, normally someone has a really good area of research expertise and then they decide to share it with the public, but that is not how this happened.

You never know how things will happen. So, if students could only take one key thing away from your research, what should it be?

Everything you eat has a history and I’m going to make a bet that that history has to do with some ingredient travelling around the globe, probably earlier than you thought that the food system was global. The food system was global in the Renaissance, the food system was really transnational, if not fully global, in the medieval period and in the ancient world. The idea of local cuisine has to be reconsidered in ways that consider and account for international exchange. An example of this that is more the area of my research but is a little different, is that tomatoes are from the Americas, so if you went to Italy in 1600, no one was eating tomatoes and there was no red sauce or pizza with tomato sauce. Italian food from the Renaissance did not have tomatoes in it, and tomatoes only came to Italy through European exploration in the Americas and through interactions with indigenous peoples in the Americas who’d been growing tomatoes. So that’s just a classic example of the tomatoes, but there were no potatoes in Ireland or England in this period either because those are also indigenous American plants, and that’s one of the reasons why I find it really exciting to study 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th century food ways because you can watch how ingredients move across the world, and when they get taken up in European cuisines. So, it goes back to everything you eat has a history.

Is there anything else you want to put out there for students?

If students are interested in learning more about this, I teach an ACURA project every year called “What’s in a Recipe?” where students do recipe research with me, and some students have actually tested recipes and written up blog posts about recipes, like I do on the site. So, if students are interested, they can take that course. I believe in the fall of 2021 I’ll be teaching it in an upper level course about recipes. That’ll be a sort of stay tuned. And my first-year composition classes, English 15 and 30, are food studies themed. So, if they want to learn more from me, those are ways to do it. Also, the blog is for reading and for cooking, so I hope that there’ll be things on there that students are interested to read even if they don’t see themselves as cooks or want to cook. If you try something and it’s a failure, it’s okay. I’ve burned a lot of things along the way, both in my own general cooking, but also in my recipe testing for Cooking in the Archives, so don’t be scared to try to cook, if you burn something it’ll be okay, just try.