Paper short abstract:

STS scholars have brought out how tasting is a way of knowing and used for making objects. The presentation investigates how food archaeologists cook ancient receipts in front of tourists: tasting in a hybrid space. It, thus, sheds light on the relations between knowing, making and engaging.

Paper long abstract:

Taste is usually defined as a sense of the human body. Through tasting, so the assumption goes, people know about and make sense of the world they are embedded in.

Rather than taking this as a given, STS scholar such as Genevieve Teil (2001) and Jeremy Brice (2015) have studied ethnographically how tasting is done in practice. Their work brings out how, through tasting, wine experts know the quality of wine and producers make wine. Following their approach, the presentation will add to these cases, the example of tasting in a hybrid space.

It is based on ethnographic fieldwork that happened between 2009 and 2011. During this time, I observed, next to many other sites and situations, also what happened in the kitchens in Hampton Court Palace. This is a historic monument near London in which, once a month, experimental food archaeologists cook meals based on the receipts of Henry VIII in front of an interested public.

Drawing on ethnographic materials, the presentation will bring out how the goings-on in this place do tasting and what tasting does in them. My main argument will be that in this set of goings-on knowing, making and various other ways of engaging not only co-exist. They feed into each other as well.

Through the case of tasting, the presentation, thus, sheds light on the intricate relations between knowing, making and other ways of engaging in the world in hybrids spaces between craft and research, and contributes to our joint discussions about them.