CfP: Taste and Translation
We want to read your pitches for the Summer 2026 issue of the RP!
Dear RP subscribers,
The Summer 2026 issue of The Recipes Project, guest edited by Angela Whitlock and Jennifer McGillan, will explore the ways recipes travel across borders, generations, and languages. Using the theme “Taste and Translation,” this issue asks how recipes change as they move through immigrant and diasporic communities, and how food becomes a site of adaptation, memory, and cultural expression.
Food can serve as a powerful connector for immigrants, reflecting heritage, identity, and cultural memory. Yet recreating traditional dishes in a new location can also present challenges. Essential ingredients may be unavailable, familiar cooking tools may be difficult to find, and preparation methods may need to be adapted to new environments. In this sense, immigrant food cultures are continually in transition. Recipes are repeatedly translated, not only between languages, but also between places, ingredients, and generations.
As recipes move through time and space, they are shaped by the people who cook them and the conditions in which they are made. Ingredients are substituted, techniques are modified, and dishes take on new meanings while still maintaining connections to earlier traditions. This issue seeks to explore how recipes travel and are transformed through migration, adaptation, and transmission.
For this issue, we invite proposals for 500–850-word posts that examine how recipes change as they move across cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries. We welcome contributions based on original research as well as posts that engage archival collections, museum work, pedagogy, public history, or community knowledge. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds are encouraged to apply.
Topics could include:
Recipes and migration
Translating recipes across languages or cultural contexts
Ingredient substitution and adaptation in immigrant cooking
Recipes as expressions of cultural memory and identity
Intergenerational transmission of food knowledge
The genealogy of recipes within families or communities
Diasporic food traditions and culinary hybridity
Archival or museum collections related to immigrant foodways
Teaching or public history projects involving immigrant recipes
Please send a brief pitch (2–3 sentences) along with an abbreviated CV to guest editors Angela Whitlock and Jennifer McGillan by 15 May 2026.
Accepted authors will be notified by the end of May, and completed posts will be due 30 June 2026. The issue will launch in late July, with posts appearing weekly thereafter. Posts should include one or two copyright-cleared images whenever possible, in keeping with The Recipes Project’s emphasis on visual storytelling.
If you have questions about the theme or whether your topic might fit within the issue, please feel free to contact the editors.
We look forward to reading your pitches!
—The Recipes Project Editorial Team