Biography

I am a historian of food and material cultures, with a focus on British domestic practices, kitchens and cooking between c. 1600-1850. I first encountered food as a scholarly subject in the early 1990s, when I was lucky enough to study at the University of Pennsylvania, with some great food folklorists, and food (and its consumption) has been woven through my research ever since. Through the study of the material cultures of food – from recipe books to kitchen pots and pans – I’ve also researched second-hand economies, heritage presentations of food sites, and domestic medical knowledge and dietetics in the early modern non-elite household.

My most recent publications have been

The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 (Bloomsbury, 2016)

‘Getting down from the table: foodways and material culture in early modern Europe’, in Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2017)

‘Bargain hunt? Selling second-hand, c.1600-present’, in Jon Stobart and Vicki Howard (eds), The Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing (Routledge, 2019).

I am currently working on the first scholarly biography of the seventeenth-century domestic writer Hannah Wolley; and on a jointly written study, with Jon Stobart, Secondhand Cultures in England, 1600-1900 (McGill University Press, forthcoming 2022).