Large-scale conservation of perishable foodstuffs in the Low Countries, 1600-1800

Introduction

In the early modern period, large-scale food conservation practices such as fermenting, smoking, and pickling were crucial for globalizing trade and increasing food security, and thus for economic and demographic growth in Europe’s cultural trading hubs.

Research Context

In addition, recent research indicates that domestic and trade practices like food conservation were key to the development of natural philosophical and chemical knowledge and vice versa. Yet we still know very little about how knowledge on early modern food conservation was produced, adapted, and circulated across these domains.

Research Questions

How can we retrieve and understand embodied, practical historical knowledge through the history of early modern food conservation?

1. How did embodied, practical knowledge of food conservation develop in conjunction with formalised, scholarly knowledge?
2. Who were the people who produced and circulated these two types of knowledge to ensure food supply before the industrial revolution?

Project Overview

PRESERVARE (‘to preserve’) answers these questions through case studies on:

1. Fermenting
2. Smoking
3. Brining, curing, and pickling.

It employs a theoretical framework rooted in the history of science, and a ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach that combines classical historical source interpretation with digital information extraction, archaeological data analysis, and physical reconstructions of early modern large-scale food conservation practices.

Significance of the Research

Addressing these questions is urgently needed for the development of the history of knowledge, and is possible now because of recent developments in digitisation and information extraction, and theoretical and methodological advances in historical research.

Conclusion

The project provides a history of early modern food conservation in the Low Countries in a global context, plus a theoretical and methodological framework for the historical study of dispersed epistemic domains and the retrieval and analysis of embodied, practical historical knowledge.