r/AskFoodHistorians

Today I have a feast planned and was wondering what cold cuts and cheeses are used in those times?

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/10/10/imperial-german-military-beverages/

After the amazing find of the 1910 field service manual of cocktail mixery (Bowlen und Pünsche für den Manöver- und Feldgebrauch der Deutschen Armee), I recently chanced on an 1887 publication called Des Soldaten Kochbüchlein (The Soldier’s Little Cookbook) that instructs the other ranks in the art of field cookery. The book was printed in Hildburghausen in the state of Sachsen-Meiningen, but since the troops of that state were integrated by convention with Prussian XI Corps, the customs described here apply to the Prussian military as well. It is certainly intended for all German troops whose equipment and training had been standardised at that point. The German army did not issue official cooking manuals, so it was produced commercially. The cheap, unillustrated monochrome print suggests that the target market was indeed enlisted draftees.

The recipes and details are fascinating, including legal advice on looting, and I am wondering whether it might be worth translating the whole thing for sheer nerd appeal, but for today, because this can be done quickly without much research, here is the section on drinks. For quick reference, the cooking vessels mentioned here are standardised: A canteen holds 1 litre, a drinking cu 250ml, and a cooking pot (Kochgeschirr) consists of a 3-litre bottom and a 1-litre top section. I am trying to find out more on these and suspect that the measures the book gives are approximations. The teaspoon and tablespoon appear to be non-standardised household items.

German soldier in pre-1909 uniform. The cooking kit and canteen are visible on his baggage.

K. Beverages

a) warm

1.Coffee

Have you cleaned your cooking pot? Have yo boiled a piece of soda in it and scrubbed it with fresh water? If you haven’t, the coffee is liable to taste like fatty dishwater. Now, as you will not always have as much water for cleaning as you need or might wish in the field, indeed, often might just be able to hurriedly scrub it with earth, grass, or straw, agree to cook as a group with comrades and use the cooking pot of one of you ONLY for coffee, as I suggested at the beginning of this little book.

Your coffee ration in peacetime is 15 grammes, which only makes one good brew of coffee (e.g. in the morning). The field service ration is 25 grammes, which brews a good coffee twice a day. — Grind the coffee very fine; Have patience with a bad coffee mill as there are many bad coffee mills. — Take two drinking cups = 1/2 litre water (hard) and boil it in the cooking pot. Pour the ground coffee into the strongly boiling water; remove the cooking pot from the fire and cover it firmly. After 1-2 minutes, stir the coffee with a clean spoon, then cover it firmly again and let it stand for another 3 minutes. When it has settled, drink it. — One cooking pot can be used to make coffee for 4-5 comrades as it will comfortably hold 8-10 drinking cups; Each then will receive 1/2 litre of coffee. If you want to drink more coffee, yo must make it thinner (Blümchenkaffee – flower coffee). In summer (heat), cook much thinner coffee because you want it to quench your thirst and carry some in your canteen; In winter, cook less and stronger coffee because yo want to invigorate your body (nerves); In winter, your canteen should hold “Schnaps” (liquor), or better yet, wine; In summer, you must not carry Schnaps in it, it is against regulation because otherwise, you can easily suffer heatstroke; In winter, Schnaps in the field (enjoyed in measure) is healthy and will be provided to you.

2.Tea

Black tea is preferred to green tea by many. Pekko (pekoe, i.e. from India) is fine, as is Souchong (lapsang souchong) or Congo (congou). — Take one tablespoon full in your cooking pot (which must be clean!), pour on two drinking cups full of strongly boiling water; Set the tea in a hot place, but not so close by the fire that it boils again because that must not happen. — After 3-4 minutes, pour it off. That is when it has a fine aroma (If you do not know what an aroma is, ask a comrade who does duty as a Bursche (officer’s servant). If you do not pour off the tea, it will be much stronger and loses its aroma; In the field, it is practical to drink strong tea and do without aroma. Generally, everything needs to be stronger in the field than when taking tea (in der Theegesellschaft) at home. After you have drunk your tea, pour boiling water over the tea leaves a second time; That is the second brew. It is almost as strong as the first; Fill your canteen with it. An old soldier told me: “Tea quenches thirst better than any other beverage; And he should know as he has a great deal of experience with it, having had to quench his thirst a good deal more often than you.”

2 tablespoons of tea leaves are needed to make an entire cooking pot full of tea, from which 10 drinking cups can be served.

3.Cocoa

Cocoa powder. Add one teaspoon full of cocoa powder (= 16 grammes) into the drinking cup; pour on boiling water; stir or whisk until the cocoa has dissolved completely; sweeten with sugar.

Cocoa bars. Take as much as you can cover with a coat button, pour a drinking cup full of water into the cooking pot, and boil up the cocoa several times until it has completely dissolved.

4.Chocolate

16 grammes to one drinking cup; Boil the chocolate for ten minutes over a strong fire in a thoroughly cleaned cooking pot. If it boils down too much, add hot water. Got milk? Then dissolve the chocolate in very little water; add the fresh milk, and boil all of it for 10 minutes.

5.Grog

Boil water in a thoroughly cleaned cooking pot; Place a few lumps of sugar in your drinking cup, and fill it not entirely full, but only to 3/4; Add 2-3 tablespoons of rum or arrack or cognac to the hot sugar-water; That is grog.

6.Glühwein

Pour 1 drinking cup full of red wine into the thoroughly cleaned cooking pot; Add 1 piece of cinnamon, 1-2 cloves, and sugar to the wine. Let it heat by the fire, but do not let it boil.

b) cold

1.Lemon lemonade (Citronenlimonade)

Fill cold water into the drinking cup; squeeze the juice of half a lemon into the water; add sugar. Keep the pressed-out lemon in your backpack; You can find good use for the lemon peel in all kinds of foods cooked in bivouac.

2.Lemonade of other fruit juices

Juices of cherries, raspberries, strawberries and currants preserved with sugar are suitable for this. Take 1 part juice to 6 parts water. The resulting lemonade is not weak. Preserved berries can also be used, e.g. blueberries, currants, strawberries, raspberries, cherries etc.

Take a drinking cup full of water, 3 spoonfuls of preserved fruit, a little sugar, stir it, and enjoy.

Aside from the profoundly condescending voice – the author is identified as an older woman giving maternal advice to soldiers – and the idiosyncratic punctuation, which I have tried to preserve as much as possible, this section shows us three things. First, though there are marked differences in the range and quality of drinks, the other ranks appreciated variety and alcoholic impact as much as their officers did. Second, the idea of what constitutes good coffee or proper tea has changed significantly since the 1880s. And third, though being a soldier in the Kaiser’s army was no bed of roses, the fighting men of the German Empire lived reasonably well by contemporary standards.

This is borne out both by other recipes in this book and general anecdotal evidence of the time. Especially rural labourers, but more generally almost everyone from a working class background, found that regular servings of meat and bread, actual coffee, tea, and cocoa, ample sugar, a warm bed and sturdy clothes compared favourably to what they came from. There were enough reasons to complain, from arrogant officers and senseless regulation to tyrannical NCOs enforcing discipline with humiliating punishments, but the standard of living was decent. The same was true in most Western European armies of the time; Late nineteenth-century soldiers ate better than their forebears had, and better than many of their contemporaries did.

The drinks themselves are also interesting. Coffee, obviously, plays the starring role. It is issued with rations, a standard part of the military diet, and some care goes into its preparation. It was, of course, the most popular of the Early Modern triad, a drink that had sparked riots in the previous century and that would still give the Communist rulers of the GDR headaches. By modern standards, 15 grammes of grounds to 500ml of water is relatively weak, but the method – fine grinding and long steeping – is designed to extract the maximum of flavor. Adding still more water will produce Blümchenkaffee (flower coffee), so known because you can see the flower motif at the bottom of the porcelain cup through it. This kind is fit to be carried in a canteen to drink during the day – a questionable pleasure to my mind, but apparently appreciated.

Tea, though not issued as rations, was also popular and gets a recipe for group cooking. There is even a degree of conoisseurship about the sorts of tea, with a preference for assertive flavors. The method and dosage is fairly close to modern gastronomy practice. If anything, a tablespoon of leaf to 500ml of water is on the strong side. Steeping it for over 3 minutes will make it strong and bitter, the kind of brew that much of working-class Britain ran on, and taking the second brew in the canteen is economical and practical, though probably not very enjoyable.

By contrast, cocoa (treated with the Dutch process) and chocolate (cocoa solids including the natural fat) are prepared as individual portions, presumably something not every soldier had, or enjoyed. The milk, ubiquitous today, is treated as optional. 1887 is before the modern dairy technology revolution, so not having ample fresh and safe milk available could not be taken for granted. The ratio of 16 grammes to a cup also matches modern recommendations for a mild drinking chocolate.

Grog and Glühwein, hot, sweet alcoholic treats similar to what officers drank, must have been welcome in wintertime, but the recipes are rather cursory. That may be because encouraging the troops to drink more alcohol was not high on the list of good ideas as far as their leadership was concerned. Interestingly, beer is not mentioned here, though it is mentioned elsewhere in the recipes both as an ingredient and a popular drink. Presumably it was not mixed or cooked in any way.

What I find most interesting is the mention of lemonade. Non-alcoholic cold beverages were known in the nineteenth century, but seeing them listed in a book aimed at common soldiers in the Prussian military is a little surprising. It is a salutary reminder that fashions could spread fast, poor people could read, and it is unwise to rely on stereotypes. The majority of the men no doubt drank beer or water in summer, but they knew what the alternative was. Some also packed lemon peel to add zest to a nice pot of stewed beef in the evening.

I live in Germany and am interested in Hungarian cuisine. Unfortunately, i‘ve never been to Hungary.

But everytime i google, or read through a cookbook, at least 90%, or closer to 95% of all recipes credibly labelled as some Hungarian classic approach contain one if not both paprika ingredients.

I am not aware of any other regional cuisine that where an ingredient has so much importance. Closest i can think of are creole cuisine which seems to be very specific about a certain combination of vegetables, or possibly japanese cuisine if you count shoyu, mirin, rice vinegar and miso as some sort of adaptable master template but that still misses the point.

How did paprika become so important either in hungarian cuisine or at least outward representation of hungarian cuisine?

I temporarily lost access to my account when my laptop died, but fortunately I'm back and here is "What I did Last Weekend"

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/10/04/a-culinary-grand-tour/

This weekend, like last year, I was invited to participate in a culinary history extravaganza by a dear friend in the Netherlands. This year’s theme was an eighteenth-century road trip through Western Europe. In Early Modern Europe, it was customary for wealthy young men to spend a year or more travelling to places that were considered central to a gentleman’s education. In Germany, this was known as a Kavaliersreise. To the English, the primary destination was Italy, and they called it the Grand Tour.

As every year, the gathering involved games and decorations, gifts and stories, but I was busy in the kitchen and will focus on the food here. It was a challenge and a delight, and illustrates nicely what historic food as inspiration can result in.

The journey, as most such real-life tours, begins in Paris. Rich young Englishmen stopped to buy clothes and accessories, study dance and fencing, and try to be admitted to court or at least invited by one of the great aristocratic families. We opted for a potage of pumpkin after a recipe in La Varenne’s Cuisinier Francois. Though dating to 1651, the book remained influential for a long time, and its recipes are repeated in many later cookbooks. The recipe we chose exemplifies his style: rich, but simple, with a focus on the quality of individual ingredients. Pumpkin is boiled in milk with onions and nutmeg, then pureed and served over toasted sops. There was little to add to the recipe except for decoration, and it started the meal in a very satisfying manner.

https://preview.redd.it/lwhooc89wmuh1.jpg?width=426&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=67ffd1df50c769395cfe293a921f43e54ec227a7

The second stop was Geneva. This was where you prepared for the ordeal of the Alpine passes, but the city also held special appeal to many English travellers as the home of John Calvin. Many attended schools here, studying some theology, but also fencing and horsemanship. It was where the German world intersected with the French, and the dish we chose is a cheese tart from the recipebook of Maria Schellhammer Die wohl-unterwiesene Köchin. In it, modern French influences are combined with traditional dishes whose origins trace right back to the 1400s, both treated with an attention to detail that tells of intimate familiarity with the inner workings of a large kitchen.

https://preview.redd.it/yt4498ndwmuh1.jpg?width=757&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba6073d7c63d0566ad519ec781900c8ea4ea010a

The tart was based on a flaky butter shortcrust which had become the standard base for pies and tarts by 1700. The filling is simply cheese curds, grated hard cheese, egg, saffron, mace, and nutmeg. Here, the choice of cheese makes all the difference, and the pecorino we went with made for a savory, deep umami richness. It was complemented well by a spicy plum sauce – Early Modern Germany way renowned for fruit-based sauces – and pickled black walnuts.

The third course saw us safely across the Alps to our first stop in the peninsula: Bologna. Today, the sausage named after it has become an object of ridicule, a synonym for the unserious: baloney. In 1700, though, it was a culinary novelty celebrated and copied across Europe. The recipe is first documented in 17th-century regulations, and the original is still truly delicious.

Here, we deviated from history in a more material way. Proper Bolognese mortadella is a cooked and cured sausage, aged in cold smoke and served in slices. We served it fresh from the cauldron, in the way that would have been familiar to contemporaries as saucisses à la francaise. The unmistakable mix of spices and rich, sweet wine that makes historic mortadella still was a winning formula. The sausages were served with bread, an agliata sauce, and fresh figs.

https://preview.redd.it/7pc6964hwmuh1.jpg?width=426&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac0304ac7c10ee777f4f03c5f6e64e5a1620a88c

After a pause for games and tart lemonade to cleanse the palate, the main courses began with the passage to Rome. A rich beef roast, served with marrow toast, cardoons, and a sweet-spicy sauce royale as described in the Scalco Moderno by Latini was the centrepiece of or feast. There was little finicky artistry to it, just the skill or or gracious host with a barbecue grill that came very close to approximating a spit-roasting. A bed of fennel and a garnish of grapes added complementing flavors and amplified the richness of it all. Rome, of course, was the heart of the global Catholic church, a concentration of wealth unrivalled in Italy and to English visitors in equal parts fascinating and frightening.

https://preview.redd.it/92yhjp8lwmuh1.jpg?width=426&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9c89835447fe2f64018f8aa381087dc687ce9ca7

The next course was to take us to the southernmost extent of our tour, Naples, but logistics compelled us to swap it out with the Venetian spread of tuna in an oregano crust, saffron rice, and mushrooms. Again, this is based on Latini. but only loosely, and mainly depended on the quality of the fish and the residual heat of the barbecue grill. It was excellent, but at this point most of us were quite full.

https://preview.redd.it/6p426qdowmuh1.jpg?width=1542&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a560d8e34b3c9d01a32983a853ae621c5f80ab09

With this finished, we proceeded to what was to have been the previous course – Naples. Many travellers reported on the local specialties – pasta, seafood frittura, and pizza, lemonades and ices – but few dared sample them and most recoiled in philistine disgust. In honour of this sentiment, we created this course as an in-joke, combining from the pages of Latini’s Scalco Moderno (written in Naples): fried chicken pieces in a cinnamon-flavored breading, maccheroni cooked in milk with a rich sprinkling of parmeggiano cheese, and his famous “Spanish” sauce of cooked, reduced tomatoes. Yes, that is chicken nuggets with ketchup and mac and cheese.

https://preview.redd.it/bf11tkyswmuh1.jpg?width=757&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=75b9148725b1a1182955911def34ea2052253179

At this point, mundane reality in the shape of building work around Amsterdam railway station forced us to curtail the proceedings. Some guests had to leave early, and instead of a planned three separate dessert courses (Vienna, Dresden, and the happy return to Britain), we served it all in one grand dessert buffet. There was ‘snake’, a coiled cake filled with a paste of dried fruit and almonds, again from Schellhammer’s cookbook. These kinds of cakes were popular all over Europe if we can trust our cookbooks. We accompanied it with a custard of lemons topped with pineapple pieces which would have represented an incredible indulgence at the time.

https://preview.redd.it/boro957xwmuh1.jpg?width=426&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a8ba0a0288a8f746e68a67148efc5aadc61cc32

The following course, now served simultaneously, was hohlhippen sugar wafers, with ices. Ice was a fashionable novelty in the eighteenth century, and we cold rely on many sources to gather a selection, though we mainly depended on the Art de bien faire les glaces d’office, an extensive 1768 treatise. In the end, everyone was able to enjoy plum, lemon, and pineapple sorbets, red wine ice, and peach and vanilla ice cream. Finally, cheese and crackers ended the meal in modern, but very pleasant style.

https://preview.redd.it/iuhb9d11xmuh1.jpg?width=1542&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b47f8a2cb9109fe0e490bb6db816112ed20ac2b

I hope to be able to write some more about specific recipes, but for today, this must be all. My newly broken laptop and an expanding work schedule fore me to limit my posts in the immediate future, which I greatly regret.

It seems that soup had a massive cultural moment in 1990s New York.
Why did soup become so popular? Was it a quintessential yuppie lifestyle trend that died with it? What defined those soups that is uniquely 90s, and why did it eventually burn out?

The 90s saw the publication of James Peterson's comprehensive Splendid Soups (still highly regarded), Barbara Kafka's Soup: A Way of Life, and Arthur Schwartz's Soup Suppers, all heavily associated with the New York food scene. The Daily Soup Cookbook might be the closest we get to 90s Manhattan soup restaurant-style recipes. Vegetarian soup books from that decade include titles from the Moosewood Collective, Nava Atlas, and Solomon Jay. Again, all heavily associated with the New York scene.

Al Yeganeh, the real-life inspiration for Seinfeld’s "Soup Nazi", withdrew from a lucrative St. Martin's Press book deal because he refused to let them mention the sitcom on the cover, leaving his recipes unpublished. Decades later, Larry Thomas, the actor who played him, wrote a biography, Confessions of a Soup Nazi, which included soup recipes.

I'm interested to know if this trend was deeply tied to a specific 90s urban lifestyle or if it was restaurant-driven. What caused it to fade? And what defined the soups of that decade from others?

EDIT:
Thanks everyone for all the replies! It seems like most people remember this trend as purely restaurant-driven: a fast, high-volume alternative to compete with standard takeouts. This very specific, office-worker target market probably explains why some posters don't remember it at all.

Besides Al Yeganeh's Soup Kitchen International, people here have mentioned Daily Soup, Hale & Hearty, B&H, and Fifth Avenue Epicure. Given the plethora of cookbooks published at the time, I really expected to find that domestic cooking played a much bigger role in the trend and for it to have a bigger impact. Soups can be so much more than a quick desk lunch, but it is fascinating to see how fondly it is remembered by those who experienced it.

Metalurgy and the ability to make pots and pans I am sure have been around for thousands of years... but I suspect they were not nearly as common like they are now (though if my assumption is wrong please correct me). So what have been the more traditional ways of cooking for common people before the widespread use of metal pots and pans?

I've been look up the origins of the baguette and the timeline seems to fall apart under the popular story as part of my project of creating an interactive food world.

What I can find:

- The word "baguette" for a bread seems to appear only around 1920. Jim Chevallier points to Le Figaro of 4 August 1920 putting "baguettes" in quotation marks, and a Seine regulation that same month that first names it as a bread (with a price ceiling of 35 centimes).

- Long loaves were clearly older: American visitors in the 1850s–1880s wrote about Paris loaves five to eight feet long.

- August Zang's Viennese bakery (1838/39) brought steam ovens to Paris, but I can't find any period source for the claim that he invented the baguette.

- The law of 28 March 1919 banned employing bakers between 10 pm and 4 am. The usual story is that this pushed bakers toward a thinner loaf that bakes faster. Chevallier calls it plausible but unproven, since the press of the time barely mentioned it.

So what actually drove the shift to the thin loaf in the 1920s? Is there any evidence from bakers' trade papers, union records or the bakeries themselves that the night-work law changed the shape, or did the thin loaf take over for other reasons (fashion, price rules, ovens, wheat)? Sources welcome, including French ones.

I'm making a free interactive food book with a Paris bakery around 1900 in it, and I want its story to be right: interactive food world

Thank you!!

What would an Italian Roman think of German diets? And would I eat much local food? What are the differences?

Would the sea food I have access to be salty enough or do I need to buy salt?

So I want to start by disclaiming that by coffee shop, I don't mean the places that have proliferated since the 1970s where a barista makes espresso behind a counter. I mean the old-school diner-like establishments that historically called themselves coffee shops or cafes. Here's an example.

So I know diners developed on the east coast, and for most of the 20th century the term diner referred to prefabricated dining cars like you see in New Jersey. At roughly the same time though, you get establishments that, like diners, have counter stools, booths, and serve coffee along with short order food like burgers and pancakes.

For most of the last century, most people on both coasts understood that coffee shops and diners were not the same thing. The structure of the building was seemingly the primary deciding factor. Even today, i have run into many folks who grew up on the east coast who insist that a coffee shop is not a diner.

The history of the diner is fairly well-established, but I can find almost no historical information on where coffee shops as we know them today came from. Why did coffee shops pop up in places like Chicago and Los Angeles starting in the 1920s (e.g. Lou Mitchell's, The Pantry)? Why did they take the physical form that they did? What would have made them different from other restaurants at the time? And at what point did people stop taking the difference between diners and coffee shops so seriously and start conflating the two?

The rationing in WW2 is widely credited with the downfall of British food, but they weren't the only country where food was rationed and there were arguably more catastrophic shortages in history, including outright famines that didn't destroy an entire culinary culture. Going by that reasoning the Holodomor should've killed Ukranian food, and the Great Leap Foward should've destroyed Chinese food, but that didn't happen. What made WW2 uniquely damaging in British food?

I don't trust anyone, including myself. I have been working under the assumption that mirepoix (onions, celery, carrot) morphed into the Cajun trinity (onions, celery, bell pepper) as growing carrot in the Gulf Coast of what is now Louisiana and adjoining areas is due to the difficulty of growing carrot with high water tables. Did I read that or make it up?

Any discussion of the difference between mirepoix and soffrito would also be gratefully received. Google is loaded with AI and sources I don't find credible.

The earliest Chinese mention I know is Gao Lian's 遵生八笺 (1591), where 番椒 is an ornamental pot plant in Zhejiang. The first clear record of people eating it seems to be a 1721 Guizhou gazetteer (cited in Brian Dott, The Chile Pepper in China). By the 1800s it is everywhere in Sichuan cooking.

What is known about the route in between? Was it river trade up the Yangtze, migrants from Huguang during the resettlement of Sichuan, or overland from Guizhou where it was used in place of salt? Any sources welcome.

I'm asking because I'm mapping the chilli's route for a small food-history site (https://tasteofworlds.pages.dev.)

What is “Telme”? A Kurdish tradition of curdling fresh milk with fig latex — and what I found researching it
I recently came across a Kurdish reference to a traditional food called Telme (تِلْمَه).
Someone described it to me this way:
“Our ancestors used to drip fig latex into milk. The milk would curdle and become like yogurt.”
That made me curious, so I tried to investigate whether this was actually a traditional Kurdish practice.
Here is what I found:
• In an oral-history archive from Afrin, Kurdish shepherds describe making Telme from fresh milk using a plant-based curdling agent. The milk reportedly curdles within only a few minutes, and Telme is eaten fresh, more like a fresh curd/soft cheese than fermented yogurt.
• In the same account, the interviewer asks whether Telme is made when figs are available, and the answer is yes.
• However, the source does not explicitly prove that the plant material mentioned there is the white latex from the fig tree.
• This is interesting because modern food-science research has shown that fresh fig latex (Ficus carica) can coagulate milk. Fig latex contains proteolytic enzymes, including ficin, which can act as a plant-based milk coagulant.
So the pieces seem to fit:
Fresh milk + plant coagulant + fig season → Telme
But I don’t want to overstate the evidence. I have not yet found a historical Kurdish source explicitly saying:
“Telme is made by adding fresh fig latex directly to milk.”
That is the part I would like to verify.
Questions for Kurdish speakers / people from Afrin
Have you heard of Telme / تِلْمَه?
If so:
What is the word for it in your Kurdish dialect?
Is it traditionally made with fig latex (the white sap from an unripe fig/stem)?
What is the Kurdish name of the plant/coagulant used?
Is Telme still made today in Afrin or elsewhere in Kurdistan?
Do you have a family recipe, old video, book, or oral tradition describing how it was made?
I’m particularly interested in first-hand Kurdish knowledge, because I don’t want to accidentally turn a plausible interpretation into a historical fact.
I’d be very interested to hear from Kurdish speakers, especially people from Afrin.

Hello fellow historians,

Im currently in my masters and writing an essay on "Food as a gateway to history" (not the exact title, im writing in german).

The plan is to focus on popular culture and the impact shows such as "Tasting History" by Max Miller or the paleo diet trend might have on the way history is accessed by non-historians.

Please let me know if you have any literature recommendations.

Thanks in Advance!

Hello! I'm a university student currently conducting a research project on how people grieve and how food/feasts/ceremonies, and the meanings behind them affect the grieving process cross-culturally. I'm seeking insights into cross-cultural perspectives on mortuary/grieving rituals or practices, which dishes/meals are prepared (if any), and the cultural and symbolic meanings behind them! I would be greatly interested in anyone who wants to share their knowledge or wishes to delve deeper into this topic, and wants to share any personal experiences or insights with me as well! I'm also happy to speak with people privately if they have more they would like to discuss or share, and I do have an Activity Analysis regarding this topic, where participants would cook a cultural meal/cook a meal to/or associated with their lost loved one and document it, if any would be interested in participating. This can also not be limited to just people; it can include pets as well. I'm also looking at the impacts of cultural erasure and would especially love any insights from African, Ukrainian, Indigenous and Palestinian peoples.