Colonial Recipes, Then and Now

CORE (Colonial Recipes, Then and Now) investigates how domestic colonial food cultures in the Portuguese empire (1450-1600) reflect the mobility, agency, labour, and knowledge of women and enslaved cooks; and how colonial recipes can create space for more nuanced conversations around colonial heritage.

The project takes a global history approach to the empire, examining the extent to which the mobility of people, foods, labour, and knowledge between key port cities shaped colonial food cultures.

By focusing on domestic spaces, it places women and enslaved cooks, who did the labour of food preparation, centre stage.

In this way, the project revalorises domestic spaces as sites of global exchange, which have been largely excluded from studies of global history, as well as insisting on the importance of gender to understand the complexities of the relations between mobility, food, and empire.

By spotlighting colonial recipes, CORE will spark new scholarly conversations about the insights these texts offer into: subaltern mobility, creativity, and adaptability; the intersecting production of gender, race, and class; and colonial households as the centre of social provisioning and wider infrastructures of empire, examining how new colonial cuisines intersect with colonial regimes of trade, agricultural production, and domestic slavery.

It makes three historiographical interventions, namely it: (1) responds to calls to write a global history of the early modern Portuguese empire; (2) brings the new imperial history further into dialogue with a history of the Portuguese empire by showing how food illuminates colonial politics, especially negotiations around gender, race, and class; and (3) contributes to public debate around the production of heritage about the colonial past, using colonial recipes to interrogate the multiple valences and contradictions of the empire, and its legacies in the present.