Introducing a NEW WORK FORUM
Our Winter 2025 issue celebrates the publication of two books near and dear to our hearts.
For our Winter Edition of the Recipes Project, we’re delighted to feature a New Work Forum on two recently-published books that will be of interest to our community: Sarah Kernan’s and Helga Müllneritsch’s Culinary Texts in Context, 1500–1800: Manuscript Recipe Books in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and Melissa Reynolds’ Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).
The New Work Forum is part of the RP’s ongoing project to support and amplify recipes scholars and writers, especially when they are emerging or early career colleagues. This particular edition is especially important to us, as Sarah Kernan and Melissa Reynolds are editors of the RP themselves.
This edition is designed to represent a virtual version of a conference roundtable or a book forum. The posts are not book reviews per se. Rather each contributor has designed their post around a key theme, source, or topic. This typically makes for more engaging reading, but it also fosters better senses of collaboration and conversation: hallmarks of what we do here at the RP.
The New Work Forum features three posts on Culinary Texts in Context by Lino Mioni, Anil Paralkar, and Thomas Gloning, followed by three posts on Reading Practice by Nikianna Dinenis, Grace Murray, and Caleb Prus. The series concludes with reflection posts by Sarah, Helga, and Melissa, where they think alongside these six readers to consider things like the process from idea to book, what makes a good history or a good collection of histories, and how their new works help to advance the field.
Recipes scholarship and recipes writing are created within vibrant, thriving communities, and we welcome these two new books for all that they represent about our ongoing work.
Happy Reading!
The RP Editorial Team