Researching Food History

On January 25, 1759 the great Robert Burns was born in the bed on the right side of the kitchen which became an ale-house and is now a mus...

So why did the following two mustard recipes (one by the famed Alexis Soyer), use a hot fireplace poker?  The poker's heat was suppose...

What to send on the journey back to school? In this image from Georgian England it is a whole cake and apples. The days from Christmas thr...

Instead of a bean or coin in a cake, picking a paper from a hat to decide the king, and the women selected from a reticule (or bag) for qu...

Celebrating the New Year are a group of men solemnly watching the clock, then at 12:00, the bells in the neighborhood ring out and a cheer...

Bowls of calves foot jelly - like Saint Nicholas's belly.  Weeks spent preparing, such as the fruits for the "big fruit cake...

In a fiery game similar to Halloween's Snap-apple HERE , brandy and raisins in a shallow bowl were set afire. Then folks grabbed the f...

During four days in 1793 over 2500 turkeys were sent by passenger coach from Norwich to London for Christmas. They "pay better"...

A past post on The Thatched-House Tavern HERE described the social clubs which met there and it's cook Michael Willis, who wrote Cooker...

It's time to stir up the Christmas pudding. On the 25th Sunday after Trinity, the Sunday before Advent the pudding was started.  Every...

What a fun name.  The mini Seckel pears are at the farmers markets now, so I tried a recipe from the 1800s to preserve Seckel pears. Very ...

First.  Place the fire under the pot. Simple enough.  but.  In the 1820s a British naval officer, Basil Hall and two others were riding al...

12 activities in Amsterdam, Brussels, Leeds, Oxford, NYC, Washington DC, CA, CT, VA 2 new food museums in London and New York City

This young chap (look at the bottom of his shoes!) is carving large turnips in the British artist Edward Docker's work "Making La...

In this 1854 poem Peggy, the cook, starts the fire an hour before sunrise to fry the cakes (pancakes, hoecakes?). After breakfast and cle...

Were guns kept above the fireplace?  During an 1856 flood at Malvern, UK (some of us can relate) one gun kept on hooks on the kitchen chimn...

Suet (the fat around the kidney - generally beef) was clarified or rendered down - slowly cooked then strained - to make tallow "...f...

Instructions on how to butcher, cook and carve a spare rib of pork from an 1831 Cincinnati cookbook is below.  During this time, the city...

Unlike the previous post on medieval cats, HERE, the cats in these paintings are more active.  In fact, the first painting is filled with a...

Cats have always been clever creatures...the cats in the 3 images are staying near the food and people, and yet appear aloof. In the post on...