Calling all Student Researchers!

Pitch us your best ideas for the Winter 2024 edition

Dear Recipes Project readers,

Somehow the days have gotten shorter and the wind a little brisker, which must mean that winter is nearly upon us. We spent this Autumn celebrating RECIPES AS LITERATURE—and if you haven’t caught up on all the posts in that fabulous issue, co-edited by Esme Curtis and our own Jessica Clark, what are you waiting for?—and now we’ve begun work on our Winter 2024 issue, which we’re calling NEW YEAR, NEW DIRECTIONS.

In this issue, we hope to highlight and champion student research on recipes of all kinds, from all places. Whether you’re an undergraduate, master’s student, or doctoral candidate, we hope you’ll consider pitching us on a recipes-related topic that has emerged from your research. And if you’re an educator working with brilliant students (whose final papers may be crossing your desk in the next couple of weeks) we hope you’ll nudge these up-and-coming scholars to share their research with our engaged and supportive online community. Here are the details:

The Recipes Project is seeking contributions from student researchers at all levels for their Winter 2024 issue: NEW YEAR, NEW DIRECTIONS. Students working in the fields of literature, art history, history, history of medicine and science, area and cultural studies, culinary studies, or folk studies are invited to share their recipe-related research in 500- to 850-word posts. We are particularly interested in scholarship that breaks new ground or explores new directions in the history of recipes, especially within the Indian Ocean World; African contexts and in the African Diaspora; Latin America; the Middle East; and among global Indigenous communities. Interested contributors should send a two- to three-sentence proposal outlining the topic of their post to recipesproject@brocku.ca no later than December 15, 2023. Contributors will be notified about accepted proposals the following week. Posts will be due by January 19, 2024 for publication in February and March 2024.

Traditional gingerbread moulds from Toruń, Poland, home of a robust gingerbread-making industry from the later Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.

And finally, because the holidays are nearly upon us, and because we know that nothing quite captures the holiday spirit like a little time in the kitchen, we close this newsletter with an eighteenth-century recipe for gingerbread from a manuscript in the New York Academy of Medicine. You can read all about this recipe, and another from the eighteenth century, in Stephen Schmidt’s post from 2012, “English Gingerbread Old and New.” While you’re at it, you might as well browse our Series on Christmas-related recipes, which features posts on historical holiday baking in early modern Spain, modern Germany, and—believe it or not—within the halls of the CIA.

To Make Ginger bread

Take a pound & quarter of bread, a pound of sugar, one ounce of red Sanders, one ounce of Cinamon three quarters of an ounce of ginger half an ounce of mace & cloves, half an ounce of nutmegs, then put your Sugar & spices into a Skillet with half a pint of Brandy & half a pint of ale, sett it over a gentle fire till your Sugar be melted, Let it have a boyl then put in half of your bread Stirre it well in the  Skellet & Let it boyle also, have the other half of your bread in a Stone panchon, then pour your Stuffe to it & work it to a past make it up in prints or as you please.

Gingerbread recipe from Recipe book England 18^th century. In two unidentified hands. Credit: New York Academy of Medicine.

Whether or not you spend the holidays in the kitchen, the team at the The Recipes Project wishes you joy and peace this holiday season—and maybe even a little downtime for recipe-related reading. Look out for more from us in 2024!

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