When we think of a classic British takeaway, we most commonly think of fish and chips. However, as Jessica Lambert explains in this blog post, the takeaway culture that exists today grew out of food influences from across the globe. Whilst nowadays we simply order our choice of exotic cuisine by tapping a few buttons on a screen, the wide variety of dishes at our fingertips grew out of increased migration to Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing Turkish kebabs and Chinese chow meins to our palates.

What does the sweet potato tell us about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? We may now associate this root vegetable with Thanksgivings or modern food trends, but the sweet potato had a considerable vogue in the early modern period, one that sheds light on the international nature of English foodways and the early rise of global consumption. In this blog post, Serin Quinn argues for the inclusion of the sweet potato, and other indigenous American foods, in discussions of the trade in luxury foods in pre-modern England, and for a revision of the narrative that American foods were met with fear and suspicion upon their arrival in Europe.