Alexandria took part in a one-week curatorial research micro-internship in June 2022, hosted by the University of Oxford National Trust Partnership team and co-supervised by National Trust Senior National Curator, Rupert Goulding, and Assistant National Curator (Libraries), Nicola Thwaite.
In June, I completed an internship exploring the culinary collections within the National Trust. As someone who adores food and cooking, this was an incredibly fascinating project to be a part of, and I loved exploring the history of cookery in such an interactive way.
The aim of the project was to complete a database of the different cookbooks, ‘receipts’ (as recipes were often known) and other culinary texts and manuscripts and find patterns within the Trust’s collections.
I began by meeting Dr Rupert Goulding and Nicola Thwaite, the National Trust staff leading and supervising the project, who set out the aim of the database and the sort of information that they were hoping to find. In order to further the National Trust’s understanding of their culinary collections, they hoped to find more about which properties had more or less of these works, which time periods may be missing from the collections, and what the texts may tell us of the contextual history of cookery. I was incredibly excited to be a part of bringing such information to light! As a Theologian, this focus on looking beyond the text itself, to its contextual position and reception history, is something that I am incredibly familiar with, and it was fun to engage this skill in a different way.
I then met again with Nicola, who showed me the different websites from which to get the data. I was amazed at the number of items coming up, and the sophistication of these sites. It took a bit of time to get used to them, but once I had worked out the search mechanisms, I found the texts that I needed. There were hundreds! Fancy French cookbooks, household guides, and all manner of different historical recipes, spanning from the seventeenth to twentieth century. I was surprised at how many had also been uploaded digitally, and I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to explore these texts, which I otherwise would not have had!
Throughout collecting the data, and afterwards, when completing a report on my findings, I gained a new appreciation for the work of the National Trust in looking after these works. Coming across the first recipe book from the sixteen hundreds was very exciting, and to know not only that such a piece of our countries domestic history exists, but also that it is available for me to read today, was an eye-opening experience into the great benefit of heritage and preservation.
Alexandria Green (she/her) is a second-year Theology undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford.
Find out more about the National Trust Partnership here.
Find out more about the TORCH Heritage Programme here.
Creator: ©National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel | Credit: ©NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel
Copyright: ©National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel
