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Official blog of the Wellcome Library - collections of books, manuscripts, archives, films and pictures on the history of medicine from the earliest times to the present day.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'recipes'
Item of the month – December 2009
As the season of good cheer inexorably draws nearer, it is customary to be bombarded with ‘essential’ lists of what to wear, buy or cook. If you fancy jumping off the consumerist bandwagon but would still appreciate a little festive guidance, wh...
A Friday night curry
We are what we eat. This is most obviously true in the physical sense, but also culturally: our diet expresses our society and encodes a wide variety of cultural influences. Not only does our food say who we are now as a society; it also tells us o...
17th Century Recipe Book project completed
As we mentioned some time ago in a previous blog post, the Library has digitised 76 medical recipe books from its collections, and has now made available all the transcriptions of the recipe titles (transcriptions were created by Backstage Library Wo...
Cooking in the City
The Wellcome Library has recently acquired the "Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry 1732 & c." (MS.8687) started by Sarah Tully, who married Richard Hoare of the London banking family in 1732, and continued by other hands, presumably followin...
The Battle of the Haggis
Recent historical work casts doubt on the provenance of Scotland’s national dish, as reported on the BBC website on Monday 3rd August. Historian Catherine Brown has located a reference to haggis in Gervase Markham’s 1615 work The English Hus-Wif...
Search our recipes by title
We announced in April that the Library’s 17th century recipe books have been digitised in their entirety and mounted online via the Wellcome Library Archive and Manuscript Catalogue. Now we are in the process of making the recipe title transcriptio...
Item of the month - May 2009
Back in March we highlighted a work by William Blades – The Enemies of Books. This single parchment leaf, Western MS.46, has had to deal with a number of threats included in Blades’ list - fire, water, ignorance and bigotry, and bookbinders, but ...
Bon Appetit
The Wellcome Library is pleased to announce that its entire collection of 17th century receipt (recipe) books - 75 manuscripts in total - have been made available online. They are currently available as PDFs from our catalogue records. We have furthe...
Heston Blumenthal - do try this at home
Britain's most scientific chef Heston Blumenthal is back on tv this week, with his new Channel 4 series inspired by historic recipes. This week he recreated an amazing array of dishes, including mock turtle soup, Alice's 'Drink Me' potion from her Ad...
Kitchen sink dramas
Is it just me, or does recipe-swapping seem to be spreading across the media like a benign virus? Every weekend paper worth its salt has a recipe-exchange corner nowadays, while online you’re spoilt for choice, from the reassuring videos on What's ...
17th century recipe books online - call for testing
Please take a moment to test out our exciting new digitisation project. The Library’s first venture into full-text digitisation is underway with the photography of 17th century manuscripts from our collection of recipe ("receipt") books. These man...
