Free Folger Friday: Cooking in the Archives (2019)

Free Folger Friday: Cooking in the Archives, one of the Talks and Screenings at the Folger, was held in The Haskell Center for Education and Public Programs on Friday, February 1, 2018 at 6:00pm, alongside the Folger Theatre production of Nell Gwynn.

Your grandmother’s cookbook may be a family heirloom that has stood the test of time, but have you ever thought about what it would be like to use early modern recipe cards in your own kitchen? That’s exactly what Marissa Nicosia does. At this free, pre-show lecture Marissa discussed her work exploring early modern cuisine in the context of today’s culinary world.

Marissa Nicosia is an Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Abington where she teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, book history, and political theory. Marissa is insatiably curious about weird pamphlets, recipe manuscripts, and other rare books. Archival oddities, and modern responses to them, continue to fuel her investment in book history and manuscript studies. She has documented some of these materials on the group blog Unique at Penn, on her blog marginal notes, and twitter. Through the Andrew W. Mellon-Rare Book School Fellowship in Critical Bibliography, she has taken three courses at The Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Marissa was a contributing editor at the Appendix where she wrote about the bizarre futures of the Mistris Parliament plays and the challenges of roasting lobster. She is the lead writer and co-founder of the blog Cooking in the Archives.

This program was associated with Before Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Culture, a Mellon initiative in collaborative research at the Folger.