With summer drawing to a close as I write this post, these recipes might be a little less immediately relevant. Still, it can’t hurt to bookmark it (the equivalent of what premodern writers did when jotting recipes down on the flyleaves of manuscripts?) for next season!
Recipe of the Week: Medieval Catnip
To make cats dance, if you are so inclined…
Roast it Like Coffee Beans: A Copyist’s Practical Tips for Ink-Making
An ink as dark as coffee.
The Diver’s Pearl Before Swine, Or, An Alchemist Quotes Jesus
When biblical metaphors meet the sacred art.
New Publication: ‘Rhyming Recipes’
For the Autumn 2025 issue of The Recipes Project, I got to contribute a post on “Rhyming Recipes in the Early Modern Arab Mediterranean”. I ask why some recipes were versified and how such genre-crossing activities transformed not just the format, but also the content of such texts. Highlights include a recipe for a green… Continue reading New Publication: ‘Rhyming Recipes’
Welcome!
Hi! My name is Leonie Böttiger (formerly Rau), and I am a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s graduate school and at BGSMCS at Freie Universität Berlin. This blog will accompany my dissertation project, titled “Tracing an Epistemic Genre: Premodern Arabic Recipe Collections as Resources of Knowledge”. Here, I… Continue reading Welcome!