This is a public history project researched and created by students in Professor Stephanie Koscak's Fall 2020 course, "HST 311. Wives, Writers, and Witches: Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe." Manuscript recipe books, which include recipes for cookery, food preservation, health cures, medicines, household goods, and cosmetics, are a remarkable source that offer a unique window into early modern society and culture. They reveal the construction of contemporary gender roles, networks of women's knowledge, learning, and correspondence, patterns of domestic labor, cultures of healing and scientific experimentation, and the impact of imperial expansion on food, family life, and the domestic sphere. They also offer opportunity to study the history of women in early modern Europe.

Focusing on recipe books housed at the Wellcome Library in London, this website aims to make these sources more accessible. Our site includes transcriptions of recipe books written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; recreations of historical recipes and reflections about recent scholarship on historic food cultures and foodways; and research essays about early modern cookery, domestic science and medicine, and culinary recipes and recipe books from a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches.

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