Histories of Global Recipes: A Workshop on Sources and Methods
Histories of Global Recipes: A Workshop on Sources and Methods
Thursday 19 October 2023
10:30 AM - 3:30 PM
IAS, Zeeman Building (Ground Floor)
A one-day workshop at the University of Warwick
Convened by Dr Ricardo Aguilar-González (IAS, UMSNH)
Sponsored by University of Warwick’s Institute for Advanced Study and Global History and Culture Centre.
About the workshop
European colonial expansionism emerging in 15th century connected places and peoples around the world (Hausberger, 2019), and allowed for the circulation of goods, knowledge and people. Global connections brought about the expanding interchange of edibles and indigenous peoples’ knowledges on crops, roots, drinks and animals, while at the same time settlers used African and indigenous forced labour to produce cheaper commodities to supply European and Mediterranean markets. Changes were reflected in many different spheres, from competing European monarchs attempting to invade indigenous lands, to colonisers anxious to reproduce their Mediterranean diet in the Americas (Earle, 2012), to indigenous rulers negotiating conquests through foodstuffs and kin making. Likewise, on a material level, these changes brought about the global circulation of medicines and dyes from indigenous Americans to the incorporation of new ingredients in recipes in the Americas, Europe and the Mediterranean world. While specialists have studied edibles circulation across the Atlantic Ocean and Southeast Asia (Machuca, 2018; Crosby, 2003), in this workshop participants will further explore how these goods were incorporated into recipes, how the global trade changed portions, promoted guild tensions, and how Mesoamerican taste was exported and introduced to the ‘Old World’.
10:30-11:15 Welcome coffee
Panel 1
11:15 – 13:00
Chair: Guido van Meersbergen
Serin Quinn (Department of History, University of Warwick) Xitomamolli to Salsa de Tomates: Tomatoes and the Incorporation of Indigenous American Knowledge and Practices in Early Modern Spain
Marta Manzanares Mileo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) Sharing Sweet Recipes: Guild Confectioners’ Books in Early Modern Barcelona
Commentators: Ilaria Berti and Ricardo Aguilar-Gonzalez
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
Panel 2
14:00-15:30
Chair: Rebecca Earle
Ilaria Berti (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville): “The Tragedy of the Servant Problem”: Cuban cooks and kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century
Ricardo Aguilar (IAS-University of Warwick, UMSNH): Indigenous Mesoamerican recipes in the early colonisation of the Americas using bilingual dictionaries
Commentators: Marta Manzanares Mileo and Serin Quinn
Contact: jose-ricardo.aguilar-gonzalez@warwick.ac.uk
Image: Description and medicinal use of five varieties of Mexican chillies (tlalchilli, tonalchilli, chillicoztli, tzinquahuyo, and tesochilli) originally penned by physician Francisco Hernández in the 1570s. In Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, seu, Plantarum animalium mineralium Mexicanorum historia, Ex typographeio Vitalis Mascardi, (Nardo Antonio Recchi ed., Roma, 1651), p. 136.
Biographies
Serin Quinn
Serin Quinn is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick, supervised by Rebecca Earle and Beat Kümin and funded by the AHRC/Midlands4Cities. Her thesis, titled "Love and Gold: The Reception of the Tomato in England Revisited, 1500-1800" explores the reception of foods from the Americas in early modern England, with the tomato as a case study. A recent article, titled “‘The Most Delicate Rootes’: Sweet Potatoes and the English Consumption of the ‘New World’ reassessed, c. 1580-1650” is to be published in the forthcoming edition of Food & History.
Marta Manzanares Mileo
Marta Manzanares Mileo holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where she examined the confectionery trade in early modern Barcelona. After completing a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, she is currently Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her current research project explores women’s contributions in shaping sugar-related trades and consumption across the Spanish Atlantic.
Ilaria Berti
Ilaria Berti has been a Marie Curie and María Zambrano postdoctoral researcher, both grants financed by the European Union. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain, where she teaches History of Consumption and History of the European Empires. She is also a member of the research project Historia de la Globalización: violencia, negociación e interculturalidad. Her research interests concern food, gender, imperial and colonial history. Her recent publications include The “Offensive” and “Abominable” Spanish Garlic. American and Spanish Empires in Their Fight for Cuba (circa 1840-1880) (2021) and the coedited volume American Globalization, 1492-1850. Trans-cultural Consumption in Latin America (Routledge 2021), while she also has a book in press, Colonial Recipes in the Nineteenth-Century British and Spanish Caribbean. Food Perceptions and Practice.
Ricardo Aguilar-González
Ricardo Aguilar-González is a historian of Latin America who focuses on the intersections between social history of colonialism with history of foods, drinks and bodies in Mexico and Guatemala. He completed his PhD at the Department of History under the tutelage of Prof Rebecca Earle at the University of Warwick with a thesis titled ‘Sustenance: A History of Foods, Drinks and Bodies in the Colonisation of Mesoamerica, 1470-1600’. He has published, along with art historian Angélica Afanador-Pujol, Don Antonio Huitziméngari: An Indigenous Nobleman’s Petition and Life in Sixteenth-Century Colonial Mexico (UNAM-UMSNH, 2019, in Spanish) and a 15-chapter edited volume (Tilling and Opening Pathways: Essays on Memory and Regional History in honour of Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, Morelia, UMSNH, 2022, in Spanish) on the intersection between social memory, and regional history.
References
Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2012).
Antonio Garrido Aranda (ed.), Cultura Alimentaria de España y América, La Val de Onsera (Huesca, 1995).
Alfred D. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Cosequences of 1492, Praeger, (Westport Connecticut, London, 2003).
Bern Hausberger, Historia minima de la globalización temprana, El Colegio de México, (Mexico City, 2019) (Originally published as Die Verknüpfung der Welt, 2015).
Paulina Machuca, El vino de cocos en la Nueva España. Historia de una transculturación en el siglo XVII, El Colegio de Michoacán (Zamora, Michoacán, 2018).
Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Ilaria Berti and Pedro Omar Svriz-Wucherer (eds.), American Globalization, 1492-1850: Transcultural Consumption in Spanish Latin America, Routledge (New York and London, 2022).