Healing words: summer lectures
Join us for an evening exploring (and tasting!) fascinating research into early modern recipe books from the culinary contributions to the properties of the medicinal plant ingredients.
The evening will begin with an introduction to the ‘Healing words’ exhibition with curator and archive manager Pamela Forde followed by two lectures. There will also be an exciting interlude for historic chocolate tasting including the chance to take home your own hot chocolate made to a recipe from one of the RCP books!
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Schedule
- 6pm – Introduction to the Healing words exhibition with welcome drink
- 6.30pm – Mountebanks, farm workers, and wet-nurses: Culinary contribution and collaboration in early modern British recipe books with Dr Amanda Herbert
- 7.15pm – Refreshments, chocolate tasting and create your own hot chocolate mix
- 7.45pm – Healing plants: historic medicines in the RCP Garden with Dr. Henry Oakeley
- 8.30pm - end
Mountebanks, farm workers, and wet-nurses: culinary contribution and collaboration in early modern British recipe books
With Dr Amanda Herbert
Handwritten recipe books, just like the ones at the Royal College of Physicians, show us how many people, and how many different kinds of people, made food and medicine for the premodern British home. In Britain and its colonies, food-workers included people who also did work in childcare, in agriculture, in housekeeping, and who sold food and medicine for profit. Some of these people worked for pay, and others were enslaved permanently to kitchens and homes. Although we might not normally think of these women and men as professional chefs, many of them contributed to, collaborated on, and did the labour of making food for British families in the premodern world. This talk will reveal just some of the lives and experiences of these food workers, many of whom who aren't typically captured in the historic record.
About the speaker
Amanda E. Herbert is Associate Professor of Early Modern Americas in the History Department at Durham University. She is an historian of the body: gender and sexuality; health and wellness; food, drink, and appetite. She holds the Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (Yale, 2014) winner of the Best Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She’s published articles in Gender & History, the Journal of British Studies, and Early American Studies, among others. She’s an editor for The Recipes Project, an e-journal devoted to the study of historical recipes. Her grant-funded collaborative projects have been supported by the AHRC, SSHRC, and the Mellon Foundation, and include the $1.5 million Folger Shakespeare Library Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures. She writes for all audiences, and has appeared in Time, Gastro Obscura, and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as the on the BBC and NPR.
Chocolate tasting
It is hard to imagine a world without chocolate, but cacao comes from the Americas, and Europeans didn't know it existed until 1492. During the drinks break, Dr Herbert will lead a delicious tasting session with early chocolate ingredients and discuss their history. You'll even get to make your own special blend of early modern drinking chocolate to take home.
Healing plants: historic medicines in the RCP Garden
With Dr. Henry Oakeley
Join Dr Henry Oakeley, one of the RCP Garden fellows, for an exploration of the plant ingredients used in our collection of handwritten recipe books and grown in our very own Medicinal Garden. Plants were the main components of many of these recipes, which included not only medicines but, food, cosmetics, cleaning products and more. From why rosemary was used in plague cures to why strawberries were once thought to treat jaundice, discover the theories and stories behind the plant ingredients used for centuries.
About the speaker
Dr. Henry Oakeley is a RCP fellow and expert on our medicinal Garden. Author of numerous publications including most recently as editor of ‘Modern Medicines from Plants: Botanical histories of some of modern medicine’s most important drugs’, Dr Oakeley has spent years investigating the use of plants as medicines, from earliest times to the present day.