Tag: food and drink

We have put over 20,000 of our digitised books online and, thanks to full-text searching in the Library catalogue, our digitisation programme is starting to bear fruit for researchers. To prove the point I sought inspiration from our collections on… Continue reading

Here is an entertaining guide to Our Daily Fare and How to Provide It, for World Book Day. This book is aimed at the average housewife stuck at home in 1893 and limited to a “small weekly household allowance” of… Continue reading

In 2015 the focus of  World Health Day – 7 April – is food safety. The Wellcome Library has a wealth of material on food (some of which is available digitally); here are some examples on food safety, from disease… Continue reading

Eggnog: the festive cocktail that either brings joy or strikes fear into the heart, depending on one’s tolerance for raw eggs. I happened across Leo Engel’s 1878 book American & Other Drinks while browsing our recent contributions to the UK… Continue reading

Whether its celebrity spotting in perfume campaigns or the cuteness of the John Lewis penguin, Christmas themed advertising is now almost as much a seasonal tradition as the Queen’s Christmas message. As this bookmark from the 1890s shows, Christmas advertising… Continue reading

Friday 9 March 2012, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 9.30 – 17.00 Friday 9 March 2012, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, 9.30 – 17.00 In association with the Wellcome Library, the Histories of Home Subject Specialist Network will be holding its 4thannual… Continue reading

As the latest issue of the Wellcome Trust’s Big Picture tackles the themes of Food and Diet, we thought we would set a culinary challenge for chef Zack Mila. Faced with the Library’s collection of 17th recipe manuscripts – and… Continue reading

The thirteenth British ‘National Curry Week’ is now upon us, a timely reminder of our long-standing love affair with exotic food. Last year we reflected on the many early recipes for curry to be found in the Wellcome Library’s books… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

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-Wife, which… Continue reading