Author: Joshua Schlachet

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

03/22/2024

A Roti by Any Other Name Would Taste Like Home: Food Culture in the Punjabi-Mexican Communities of the Early 20th Century United States

By Haritha Govind The South Asian diaspora has made its way throughout many parts of the world –bringing along cuisines, opening restaurants, and familiarizing the world with dishes like naan and lassi. These are immigrant stories that have a strong continuity even today. But what about Indian immigrant stories that…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

04/28/2022

One Hundred Delightful Tastes of Tofu: How Doable Was an Early Modern Japanese Recipe?

By Sora (Skye) Osuka Tofu Hyakuchin (豆腐百珍, One Hundred Delightful Tastes of Tofu Recipes), originally published in 1782, is often considered the first cookbook that only focuses on one ingredient and the beginning of the Hyakuchin-mono (百珍物, One Hundred Recipes of Delightful Tastes) series. Harada Nobuo, Eric Rath, and other…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

04/14/2022

Rice Bread in Sixteenth-Century Italy

By Lena Breda While scholars are broadening our understanding of food in early modern Italy, one curiously absent ingredient from such pictures is rice. Rice (or oryza sativa) is hypothesized to have been brought to Europe as early as 400 BCE [1], used more as medicine than as a culinary…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

05/27/2021

Cherries Galore in a Cesspit

By Merit Hondelink As an archaeobotanist, an archaeologist specialised in studying plant remains found in archaeological excavations, I aim to reconstruct and interpret the relationships between humans and plants in the past. Archaeological plant remains, also known as subfossil plant remains, help us to reconstruct the former landscape and inform…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

05/20/2021

A Roman Vegetarian Substitute for Fish Sauce

By Edith Evans Roman cookery has been one of my research interests since the 1980s; I’ve accumulated a large repertoire of ancient recipes and usually do at least one live demonstration a year. Most of the recipes include garum or liquamen – fish sauce – as a taste enhancer, providing…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

05/06/2021

Say Ohm: Japanese Electric Bread and the Joy of Panko

By Nathan Hopson In 1998, the New York Times introduced readers to an exotic new ingredient described as “a light, airy variety [of breadcrumb] worlds away from the acrid, herb-flecked, additive-laden bread crumbs in the supermarket,” with a texture “more like crushed cornflakes or potato chips” than its plebeian brethren (Fabricant…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

04/30/2020

Eating Through the Seasons: Food Education in Japan

By Alexis Agliano Sanborn Seasons have been celebrated in Japanese society for centuries through poetry and prose. During the Edo-period (1603-1868) this appreciation of nature codified in the creation of the saijiki, or, poetic seasonal almanacs. These almanacs, notes Columbia University Professor Haruno Shirane, “systematically categorize almost all aspects of…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

10/24/2019

Very Frugal Ways to Cook Rice—Famine Prevention and Common Knowledge in Edo Japan

By Joshua Schlachet If you’ve browsed The Recipes Project in the past several weeks, you may have raised an eyebrow at the unfamiliar black and white squiggles that decorate the top of our page (written, by the way, in a cursive form of premodern Japanese). As my October editorial duties…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

10/22/2019

Mesquite Atole – Kúi Wihog

By Jacqueline Soule Atole is a drink popular throughout Mexico, Central America, and the American Southwest. Atole is a usually a warm drink, generally based on corn, frequently sweetened somehow, and often prepared with cinnamon as well. Atole has countless various recipes for preparation, and every family has their own.…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

10/15/2019

Learning from a “Living Source” in Working with Historical Recipes: Reflections on the Burgundian Blacks Collaboratory

By Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen This week, we continue our series of cross-postings on a fascinating hands-on, collaborative research project into recipes for Burgundian Black, organized by Dr. Jenny Boulboullé. In today’s selection, we hear from Jessie Chen on her experiences of the project. This post is our second entry in…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

10/08/2019

What’s In an Ancient Egyptian Makeup Bag?

By Alana Martini, published as part of the Undergraduate Series I have been fascinated by the world of cosmetics for a very long time, and it appears that I am not the only one. Our love affair with cosmetics is almost as old as humanity itself. Large amounts of red…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

04/30/2019

Introducing Our New Co-Editor: Ryan Kashanipour

Interview by Lisa Smith As April draws to a close and the temperature is already pushing one hundred degrees here in the desert of Southern Arizona, it is my great pleasure to introduce my fellow new co-editor here at the Recipes Project (not to mention fellow Tucson local) Ryan Kashanipour.…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

04/25/2019

From Pest to Prescription

By Cadance Butler It is possible to find all sorts of fascinating treatments and remedies in the veterinary texts of late antiquity. While plants are the most common components of pharmacological remedies, minerals and animals were also incorporated with some frequency. Many of these cures appear to have been relatively…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

04/11/2019

Tales from the Archives: Drinkable Gold for the King of Siam

In my first months of co-editing duties here at The Recipes Project, one of my many delights has been the opportunity to dig back in our archives to rediscover posts I’ve loved over the years, to see them with fresh eyes. As a historian of Japan, I’ve looked forward to…

Joshua Schlachet · The Recipes Project

04/04/2019

“Daily Recipes for Home Cooking” (1924)

By Nathan Hopson This is the second in a planned series of posts on nutrition science and government-sanctioned recipes in imperial Japan. Imagine a national cookbook. What would that look like? What would it say about the values and ideology of the society in which it was produced and the…