Cooking in the Archives | Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in...

This post was written by Marissa Nicosia and Sarah Peters Kernan. Sarah, a culinary historian,  is co-editor of The Recipes Project and host of the Around the Table podcast.
When Sarah and I realized that we had a shared interest in Lady Anne Percy’s recipe book, we decided to try out a recipe for a kind of cookie, called a cracknell, that we both found very curious: “To make the Lady Duthes Crakenles.”...

I always buy too many quinces. I am so excited when I first encounter them at the market in the autumn. I fill my bag. (I’ve written about my love of quinces here before.)
So it was a good thing that I had already transcribed these two recipes for baked quinces from an early seventeenth-century manuscript cookbook now held at the British Library — Add MS 28319....

I have wanted to share this mushroom recipe with you for a long time. In the autumn of 2023, I puzzled over an image of this recipe from the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA f MS. 1968.004 on my laptop screen – how did the two parts of the...

Bake this recipe October 5-13, 2024 to participate in the fifth annual Great Rare Books Bakeoff! (More information at the end of the post.)
It is always a thrill to take a look at a receipt book that I have never seen before. About a year ago, I sat down with Mistress Anna Campbell’s early eighteenth-century Scottish recipe book in the reading room at Penn State Libraries Eberly Family Special...