Researching Food History

This incredible kiln to smoke red herring is pictured in a French book published in 1779.  The fish were strung through sticks which were t...

How to bard, how to lard?  Images of larded and barded meat with instructions appeared in Miss Corson's Practical American Cookery in ...

Odd bottle #2.  Once the dressing for the salad was made, it was put in a bottle or poured down the side of the 'salad dish', to b...

Marbles inside soda bottles??  This ingeneous replacement for the cork used the soda water's own pressure to keep the marble secured aga...

Selling milk from 12 gallon cans, from the 1808 book The Cries of New-York with a description.  Also pictures from 1795 and 1805 Great Bri...

Rhubarb, with its strikingly red stalks and large green leaves, became popular in Victorian England and by 1822 was the main ingredient in S...

The weather is warming and the Shad are running.  Actually they are swimming up the rivers to spawn.  The following 14 images [click to enla...

FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000, at the National Museum of American History in DC contains Julia Child's home kitchen, ...

For April Fools Day... a variety of Fools.   While most of the Fool recipes were for Gooseberry, other cooked and mashed fruits included Str...

15 events in the USA and Europe

When a Sweet Potato Pie is a sweet, Potato Pie.  Using Irish or white potatoes.  One of the recipes, by Mary Randolph, states 1 pound of pot...

The most striking images of a Papal Conclave - at least for food historians - are found in The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi , 1570.   Close-u...

Jean-Etienne Liotards pictures, including an interesting one of a boy cutting a piece off a butter cone, highlight an interesting 1803 brea...

Last month I started making some Pinterest boards.   Most of the pictures so far are from my old postings, so I am using it as an pictorial ...

Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) did the famous watercolor "The Chocolate Girl" (La Belle Chocolatiere) c1744 which has been...

A recipe for Chocolate Hearts is from the Baker's Chocolate booklet, 1913.

7 great images showing the equipment being made and used to refine sugar from a french book, 1764.

Zoar Village in Ohio has a gorgeous flour bin in their 1845 bakery.  The top lid was made from one large width of wood and was constructed b...

Emma Darwin kept a small handwritten recipe book, and about fifty of her recipes with modern interpretations are in Mrs. Charles Darwin'...

The tiny purple shells of the Cochineal (found on cactus - see last section of this post) was used as a dye.   The scale insects were gener...