Culinary contribution and collaboration in early modern British recipe books

Join Dr Amanda Herbert, Associate Professor of Early Modern Americas at Durham University, for her talk 'Mountebanks, farm workers, and wet-nurses: culinary contribution and collaboration in early modern British recipe books'.

Handwritten recipe books, just like the ones at the Royal College of Physicians, show us how many people, and how many different kinds of people, made food and medicine for the premodern British home. In Britain and its colonies, food-workers included people who also did work in childcare, in agriculture, in housekeeping, and who sold food and medicine for profit. Some of these people worked for pay, and others were enslaved permanently to kitchens and homes. Although we might not normally think of these women and men as professional chefs, many of them contributed to, collaborated on, and did the labour of making food for British families in the premodern world. This talk will reveal just some of the lives and experiences of these food workers, many of whom who aren't typically captured in the historic record.

This talk was recorded in June 2025 as part of the 'Healing words' exhibition at the RCP Museum: https://history.rcp.ac.uk/exhibitions...