Educators all over the world use Cooking in the Archives in the classroom. In introductory college courses on early modern literature, I often show the image of this recipe “To presarue aprecockes” and ask students to try to decipher the difficult handwriting and non-standard spelling. After reading the recipe we can discuss sugar, domestic labor, manuscript cookbooks, humoral theory, preservation strategies, and a range of other topics.

At Penn State Abington, I work with undergraduate researchers on a project called “What’s in a Recipe?” Students transcribe recipe manuscripts, learn about food and medicine in the early modern period, and develop individual research projects. I’ve reflected on this project on the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective site: “Undergraduate Recipe Research”

I have also cooked recipes with various kinds of classes. John Kuhn and I wrote about co-teaching a lesson on chocolate in the early modern Atlantic world that included paleography and preparing hot chocolate: “Early Modern Euro-Indigenous Culinary Connections: Chocolate.” I’ve also written about joining Heather Wolfe’s paleography class and leading them in testing a recipe “Cooking Almond Jumballs at the Folger Shakespeare Library.”

Other Resources:

Handout from MLA/SAA 2019 – Teaching Transcription with “My Lady Chanworth’s Receipt for Jumballs” (download a printable PDF)

Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) – teaching resources

Folger Shakespeare Library – Folgerpedia “Practical Paleography” page includes helpful materials including this essential Alphabet Book and “Early Modern Measurements” page is very helpful for working with recipes.

The Recipes Project – teaching series and recent “Teaching Resource Roundup”

The Recipes Project – undergraduate series

The Historical Cooking Project – pedagogy series

Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights

“The World of Shakespeare’s Humors” NIH – National Library of Medicine

John Rees, “Digitizing Material Culture: Handwritten Recipe Books, 1600-1900” NIH – National Library of Medicine