ONE OF THE MANY thrilling things about being a food history geek is that recipes refresh the parts other scholarship cannot reach. Not only does the archival spadework of historical research — inventories, tax accounts, guild edicts — whizz along much faster when one encounters a new way with aubergines, but recipes can provide evidence for otherwise insoluble conundrums.
Domestic science gets sexy when it can square up to big macho questions such as the consequences of the 1492 Alhambra Decree for the economies of the western Mediterranean.
