Inspiration

My interest in this topic stems largely from my background in history, and was spurred by a series of episodes on medieval cooking from the history podcast We’re Not So Different. Medieval manuscripts are extremely difficult to a) access, and b) read, so I moved my search for primary sources to the early modern era and found myself extensively interested in what these manuscripts could offer me that medieval could not (spoiler: it’s a close-up to the relationship between foodways and empire).

Scope

This project pulls from the source material of the Whitney cookery collection, which consists of seventeen English and American manuscripts, dating from the early 15th to late 19th centuries. The Whitney collection is currently located in the Manuscripts and Archives Division at The New York Public Library (NYPL). I limited the scope of this project to material from the collection created after 1650 and before 1800 for several reasons: first, the only manuscript in the collection created pre-1650 is currently on display as part of the NYPL’s “Treasures” exhibition and I was not able to access it for in-person study; second, I wanted to focus this exhibit on early modern empire, and fall into the historical school that believes the early modern period ended in England with the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century.

To access the Whitney collection, I set aside several days of in-person research at the NYPL, aided by reference staff in researching relevant bibliographic and biographic information to broaden my understanding of the manuscripts as political objects. I carefully read through each manuscript, noting pages of interest and taking photos for use in this exhibit. I used a master document to gradually organize photos of interest into what would become the narrative structure of this exhibit. These photos are also stored in the Objects repository in the header bar.

Challenges

Producing this project was made significantly more difficult by the material nature of my study: the Whitney collection is currently accessible for use in-person, rather than via digital. This was a monetary stressor as well as a safety risk (New York City currently has many active cases of COVID). On a more technical note, the Whitney collection is largely handwritten; though some of the manuscripts were readable in my capacity as a reader, some were simply indecipherable and I don’t have the time available to spend more time on transcription. I did not use material from those manuscripts.