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Thinking with pies
By Carys Brown @HistoryCarys The brandy is the first thing that hits me, followed by the creeping spiced sweetness of currants and raisins. Then, bafflingly, there emerges the equally spicy taste and texture of meat. All of this is encased in a crisp, short-crust-type pastry and topped with some fairly inept attempts at pastry decorations (see…
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From nose in a book to nose in the kitchen – musings on the place of historians in recipe recreation
by Elly Barnett – @eleanorrbarnett When I explain that I am researching the links between food and the European Reformations, I am usually met with premature praise for my (in reality non-existent) cooking skills. The obvious location in which to research food, they assume, is the kitchen. The cooking of historical recipes, moreover, has gained much public…
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The Late Medieval Christmas Feast
By Eleanor Russell This article forms part of Doing History in Public’s Christmas series, which this year looks into patterns of consumption at Christmastide. Like today, the most spectacular and anticipated part of the medieval Christmas was not the Mass, then mandatory, but Christmas feast, an event which offered not only an opportunity to celebrate…
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Festivity amid the fighting: Christmas on the British Home Front in World War Two.
by Elly Barnett – @eleanorrbarnett By Christmas 1940 almost all of Britain’s major cities had been hit by extensive bombing raids, amongst them the devastating London Blitz of September and the destruction of Coventry in November. 24,000 British civilians had died, and families were displaced as children were evacuated from cities and parents went to…
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The roots of vegetable politics
By Carys Brown (@HistoryCarys) Boris Johnson’s declaration last week that Brexit ‘can be good for carrots too’ caused a mixture of despair, mild amusement, and utter confusion. For those trying to get their heads around Britain’s Brexit-based future, this was hardly the ‘clarity’ they demanded. What few registered, however, was that Johnson had unwittingly tapped into a…
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