Vandaag op het programma: vergaderingen, een leesgroep, voorbereidingen voor een collega, mails beantwoorden en afscheid van een vertrekkende collega.

In @preservare.bsky.social onderzoeken mijn team en ik hoe kennis over voedselconserveringstechnologie zich ontwikkelde in de 17e en 18e eeuw, in huishoudens, bedrijven, en de academische wereld. Meer weten? Bezoek www.preservare.eu. Je kan je daar ook inschrijven voor onze nieuwsbrief.

17:42 (18:42 Amsterdam time) I’m in Belfast! Unpacking and then dinner with my host, @leoniehannan.bsky.social. I’m signing off for today. Hope you enjoyed this #ADayInTheLife!

16:11 About to leave. I don’t like flying, but taking trains and boats to Belfast would have turned this into a week-long trip. Would have been nice, but I didn’t have time for that unfortunately. Luckily I have a journal article to peer review to distract me during the flight.

15:05 Time to answer emails and do some admin while waiting to board. On my desktop is a photo of the view from my apartment in Cassis, where I was a fellow at the Camargo Foundation for 3 months in 2023. I still miss it sometimes.

Tomorrow, I will talk about the history of this form of food substitution, the reconstruction I made of it, and of course we will taste it!

Soy sauce is normally made of soy beans of course, but those were rare in Europe and the fermentation process was not well understood. So they made h a substitute that has little to do with soy sauce, although it does look and taste a bit like it. Made with dark German beer: Braunschweiger Mumme

I will be talking about 18th C Dutch people with ties to the colonies substituting food stuffs they remembered and loved but could not buy in the Netherlands, specifically soy sauce.

13:54 So I’m on my way to a workshop about food substitutes in the 18th C. People have historically substituted foods out of necessity (intolerance, unavailability) and out of convictions or ideals (religious rules, concerns about human and animal welfare).

12:30 Quick lunch while I prep a meeting for a new project. Can’t say much about it yet but it is about a strange object we found in a book. Stranger even than that book with the frog in it - for a great article on that, see iris.unive.it/retrieve/e42...