Organized in 2012, the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) is an international group of scholars and enthusiasts who are committed to improving free online access to historical archives and quality contextual information. We see the importance of linking hundreds of texts in repositories that may be thousands of miles apart, as well as creating a space for dialogue about the ideas and research generated around these texts.

This long-term project looks to include scholars, students and the general public in the preservation, transcription and analysis of recipes written in English from circa 1550-1800. Eventually, we would like to expand our project to include recipes written in other languages written during the same time period. The ultimate goal is an accessible and searchable corpus of recipe books currently in manuscript. By enabling users to search by ingredient, date, process, person, disease, and type, we will be able to learn a lot about how early modern people interacted with each other and with their environments.

Working in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Early Modern Manuscripts Online project and Zooniverse’s Shakespeare’s World project, EMROC members lead students on a growing number of US, Canadian, and European campuses to create tagged transcriptions of early modern English recipe texts. Since 2015, EMROC has hosted an annual transcribathon attracting hundreds of participants from all around the world.