Foodways

In the early modern British world, food took circuitous, diverse, and sometimes troubling pathways. It was transported around the globe. It was marketed, imagined, and eaten by rich and poor. It was made using exploitative and forced labor. At the center of this movement was the early modern kitchen: a place where the financial interests and means of homeowners were on display; a place for local and global produce; a place where free and enslaved cooks and servants worked, created, and innovated. Learn more about the twists and turns of early modern foodways.

British Manuscript Recipe Books

Pattern made up of illustrations of ships and compasses

The Early Modern Elite British Kitchen

Early modern elite British kitchens, provisioned by global trade networks, were spaces for both food and medicine.
Download and read more…

Globalization and the Spice Trade

Pattern made up of illustrations of peppers

Slide from "Critical Race Converations: We Are What You Eat"

Critical Race Conversations

“We Are What You Eat”: Conversations on Food and Race. To map out the histories of everyday foodstuffs—sugar, spice, coffee, tea—is to map out the histories of race and colonialism.
Watch the conversation…

Colonization, Sugar, and Enslavement

Illustration of person processing sugar cane

“De cierlycke voorsyndinge aller tafel-gerechten,” TX 885 C5 1664 Cage; “W. Hollar ad viuum deli. Londini” ART 254213 (size S); “London’s loue,” STC 13159; “The herball,” STC 11751 copy 1; “Nova Reperta,” ART Vol. f81 no.13; “Histoire naturelle et morale,” F2001 R6 1665 Cage; “America,” O165. Storiiies are built on V.a.619, ff. 41v-42r; “A true & exact history of the island of Barbadoes,” L2076; and a “Spice map” created by Michael Walkden. Unless otherwise noted, all images are from the collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Unless under non-Folger copyright, images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Language use changes over time, as do research interests. Please see the Folger’s Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Collection Description for the work our cataloguers and others are doing to redress outmoded, one-sided, and exclusionary descriptions of rare materials.