The early modern globalization of food and medicine was also a globalization of recipes. As plants, animals, and people travelled the planet, women and men began experimenting with recipes of all kinds. The Autumn 2025 issue of The Recipes Project explores the global dimensions of early modern recipe crafting, fashioning, and collecting. In this edition, our authors ask how global entanglements, transcultural encounters, colonialism, and exoticizing fantasies shaped early modern recipe creation around the world, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
In the early modern world, recipes could be (co-)produced by Indigenous or migrant practitioners; some makers and craftspeople might deliberately incorporate new ingredients, or indeed resist the introduction of global substances. Some recipes travelled across mercantile, colonial, military, diplomatic, and migration routes, while others were fashioned by ‘armchair’ practitioners to reflect their own ideas of foreign lands and crafts. By asking how early modern recipes could be globalized, this special issue seeks to shed new light on the influence of multiple knowledge traditions, on the roles of ‘forgotten’ actors, on the lived realities of global mobility and displacement, and on the formation of ideas about scientific and medical alterity.
Our authors have analyzed the ingredients of global recipes; they have parsed the role of colonialism and empire. They have examined translating, transmitting, and collecting, and they have considered the expression of authority and expertise. Throughout, they have kept close attention to constructions of race, culture, identity, and/or ethnicity.
In organizing the issue, we considered several frameworks. As is appropriate for an issue on global entanglements, the posts could – and can – be read along geographic regions: Central Asia (Ebert & Sudhan); North America (Astbury & O’Brien); Mesoamerica and the Caribbean (Pino, Schmidt & Quinn); the Mediterranean world (Böttiger); South and Southeast Asia (Vikram & Taha). They can also be read thematically, with Pino and Böttiger speaking to transmission and orality; Quinn and Schmidt addressing travelling naturalia; and nearly all of the authors thinking through the implications of early modern European expansion, invasion, and colonialism.
Inspired by all of these possibilities, we have organized the posts alphabetically, by authors’ last names, in the hope that this will encourage readers to read the posts in creative, insightful ways which engage with the themes of the issue. The Autumn 2025 edition encourages all of us to consider the flexibility, utility, and durability of recipes, particularly in the midst of challenge and change; it also urges us to reckon with the things that so often accompanied those changes in the early modern period, including desecration, destruction, and theft.
—Lavinia Gambini, Lucy Havard, and Amanda Herbert, Editors
Recipes for Animals: Husbandry and Animal Medicine in Early Modern England and Anglo-America, by Leah Astbury
Rhyming Recipes in the Early Modern Arab Mediterranean, by Leonie Böttiger
Bal-Po Stew: The Empire’s Recipe, by Lewis Ebert
“All Manner of Fluxes”: Plants and the Natalist Conquest of British Colonial America, by Fiona O’Brien
Ropa Vieja: A Colonial Strew of Global Threads, by Alessandra Pino
The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method, by Serin Quinn
The King of Fruits: Pineapple and Class Culture in British Cookbooks from 1661–1850, by Elizabeth Schmidt
Nun Chai: A Story from Trade Routes to Survival, by Garima Sudhan
Lacquer Fantasies: Japanning as a Colonial Global Recipe, by Nur’Ain Taha
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