This is possibly not the usual Monday Methods post. There is very little theory in here, though some method, and quite a lot of practicality. It’s mostly about how we know things, or at least how we can know about them. Food History, for the most part, has a very pragmatic approach, because so very little about food was ever written down, or quantified, or even taken much notice of before about the 17th century. Most of my work focuses on the British Isles, and Ireland specifically, and I know very little about food history outside Europe - but the same principles apply.

One other note: my periodisation is a little odd in places, because food history doesn’t quite line up with others. “Medieval English food”, for example, runs right up to a change in the late sixteenth century from large households, which also provided for the poor in their own premises, to smaller households who expected the poor to be fed elsewhere, and events like the Columbian Exchange, which brought wheat to the New World and potatoes and tomatoes to the Old were seismic in food history in a way that’s not really as apparent in other areas.

Right. To the sources. There are some written sources that are directly about food, and those are both the easiest elements to work with, and the foundation of the field. The earliest I know of are some Mesopotamian recipes, written in Akkadian in around 1700 BCE, and there is a Roman text called De re coquinaria, attributed to Apicius. There are two cookbooks from Baghdad in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, and a scattering from various parts of Europe in the Middle Ages, and thereafter they start to be more frequent. In the Victorian era, there’s an explosion of cookery books, led by Mrs. Isabella Beeton. Obviously, for these places and eras, there’s an easier starting point with actual recipes. It’s important to remember, though, that only the elites in any pre-modern era wrote things down, and that food is one of the most common ways to indicate status and wealth in any society. So we have to look elsewhere for peasant or working class food.

And of course, if you’re looking for something pre-seventeenth-century for Ireland, Scandinavia, Finland, almost anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, or other outlying places, you’re completely out of luck. We also have no recipes from any part of the New World, and very few from Asia, although I believe there are a few from China that have not yet been translated into English.

For these areas, one tactic is to resort to written sources that don’t deal directly with food, but which touch on it indirectly. These can include law texts, household accounts, travel journals, letters, and commonplace books, and sometimes even oddments like graffitti or shopping lists.

Law texts are particularly useful for Medieval Irish food history, since they deal a lot with agriculture, the trespass of animals, and the comparative values of different grains, as well as in some cases prescribing the foods to which guests of a particular rank are entitled. In England, in somewhat later texts, they set out the things cooks are not allowed to do with food (baking bad meat into pies, for example), and thus show us what the cooks are supposed to be doing otherwise. In addition, there are texts such as guild charters which set out some of the requirements of professional cooks. European law texts provide similar information.

Household accounts, where we can find them, are a goldmine of information. They can tell us how much food was bought for how many people, what form it was bought in (grain, flour, or pre-baked bread, for example), what kind of households bought what food, and so on, as well as showing by the purchase of particular kitchen implements how the food was cooked. We sometimes even see things like how much the cook and other kitchen workers were paid, which allows a whole raft of other work crossing over into areas of social and domestic history. And we can sometimes see seasonal differences in pricing, or differences from year to year, which allow us to make some inferences about the availability of particular foodstuffs, or about the changing fortunes of the household.

Likewise, travel journals are helpful, and there are a surprising number of them out there. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing in the early 1700s, is a fine example of this kind of text, but there are plenty of others as well. Travellers remark on things that the locals find to be ordinary, and one of these is almost always food - often in tones and terms of distrust, so one has to take the details of ingredients and presentation with a grain or two of salt. Letters written while travelling are even more in need of interpretation, not least because a great many of them concern the transfer of money, or the need for money, and so there’s a certain performative aspect to their descriptions. Nonetheless, there’s information to be got from such works.

Commonplace books were a early modern way of recording personal information. They have a lot in common with the 21st century Bullet Journal, and they can also be viewed as an early form of social media. They began as the zibaldone in fifteenth century Italy, and were notable for details like cursive writing, vernacular language, and the sheer variety of stuff that was written into them, including recipes (for both food and medicine, the two not being all that well distinguished at times), lists, and accounts. They also included poetry, personal observations, sketches, and other oddments of stuff their owners wanted to record. In later eras, they were sometimes passed from one person to another so that other material could be added, and in some cases there are marginalia and inserted comments. All of this adds up to a fabulously rich resource for details of food and food culture, even if no single early commonplace book is devoted to such things. However, in later eras, into the nineteenth century, the commonplace book became more associated with the kitchen, the recording of recipes and kitchen accounts, household inventories, and other domestic details, and these become much more valuable as sources of food history.

The other oddments of stuff crop up now and again; they’re rarely the kind of thing you can stop and study as a body or type of text. Roman graffiti sometimes contains commentary on food - usually derogatory - and shopping lists from any era provide the same kind of information as commonplace books, albeit in very short and usually anonymous forms. In the later eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we also get other ephemera like menus and advertising posters, catalogues of kitchen equipment, and material from newspapers and magazines. Mrs Beeton’s books had their origin in the magazines her husband published, for example, and we can get some information from things as unlikely as the social diary entries of the early 20th century - details of which society figures were at what estate for dinner, and so forth. And one of the important sources for early Irish food history is a satirical poem, so there are bits to be had from literature as well.

The other area we can look at, which is usefully more egalitarian, is archaeology - particularly the growing areas of archaeozoology and archaeobotany. I will cheerfully admit that I know very little about the practices of either, but I am extremely fond of the output of both. Between all three areas, we can get a lot of information about things like the layout of kitchens, what actual implements were used in various eras, whether grave goods included food (or at least food containers), what plants were eaten through the remnants of seeds in middens and the cracks between flooring stones and tiles, what bones remain in the various waste disposals, and in rare cases, there are actual remnants of food - usually burnt - in pots, hearths, and campfires. We can also look at actual preserved period kitchens from various eras - the late medieval kitchens of Hampton Court, the Geogrian kitchen (in a medieval room!) in the Hospital of St Cross in Winchester, the Edwardian-era kitchens in many Irish Big Houses, and other examples. Storage rooms (larders, pantries) and specialist preparation rooms (bakeries, pastries, dairies, etc) provide further context.

I should also mention that notwithstanding the changes that I mentioned in connection with periodisation above, through most of human history, food only changes slowly. Food historians tend to fall firmly into the continuitist side of things (as opposed to catastrophist), understanding that change is gradual, and often goes back and forth a few times before it settles. Further, food derives from agriculture, which is an extraordinarily conservative practice - because in most historical periods, if you try something new and different, and it doesn’t work out, you starve. The overlap between food and agricultural history can be a bit fuzzy, and probably a quarter of the books I have that are, in my mind, about food, were written by people more interested in farming.

It’s also important to note that, as with many areas of pre-modern history, we’re looking more at qualitative than quantitative data. Many non-historians have the misapprehension that we have fairly detailed records of many eras of the past; records of what the Spartan senate decided, or population data from the medieval era, or information about how many people were in Viking raiding parties. None of this information exists, of course, and the situation is even worse in food history, where we can have an approximation of what was eaten, but not the slightest idea of how much. In the manner of chaos theory, a tiny bias in the survival rate of rye grains over oats, for instance (because rye is a harder grain) might make it look as though rye was much more used in a given area. This is a real example; the prevalence of rye in archaeobotanical results from digs in Viking sites in Dublin far outweighs the mentions of the grain in the law texts or other sources, and we don’t know if that’s an output of use patterns, the actual preservation-suitability of the grain, or purest accident, like someone spilling a bucket of rye in a muddy yard which just happens to be the dig site a thousand years later.

In other cases, we have well-preserved material, and no idea why - the bog butter of Ireland and Denmark being a prime example. Was the butter buried in bogs as a preservation technique? If so, it worked, some of it is pretty good form more than 1500 years later. Was it a sacrifice? Possibly; it’s found, like bog bodies and broken swords, in border areas. Was it hidden from raiders, tax collectors, or thieves and forgotten? Possibly; we see that behaviour with hoards of coins all the time. Or maybe it was a process like storing cheese in caves, meant to add a taste that was appreciated by the people who would eat it, and we’re just seeing a few leftover bits, preserved in the anaerobic environs of the peat bog.

Hopefully, this makes clear how fuzzy our knowledge of the past is, and how some areas such as Food History mean that we have to delve into interdisciplinary spaces between history and archaeology and literature, into material culture and hard science, and even into experimental archaeology.