New Day Cafe: The Smells of History

samanthab for New Day Cafe

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Monday July 04, 2022 · 7:30 AM PDT

2022/07/04 · 07:30

Welcome to the New Day Cafe! This is an open thread.

The Guardian has a piece on a project to recreate the smells of history.

A nose for history: academics recreate lost smells from the past https://t.co/ATxHKO8kRM
— The Guardian (@guardian) July 2, 2022

From the piece,

“Dung, snuff, fish and old leather: these may turn out to be the ingredients required for time travel. Academics who are restoring the lost smells of European history want aromas like these to be introduced to a wide range of museums and tourist landmarks.

Working under the banner Odeuropa, a group of chemists and historians have spent more than two years isolating and reproducing key scents associated with significant moments and locations. Smell, they argue, has been unfairly ignored in academic attempts to understand the past, especially considering its impact on daily life…

The consortium of experts involved in the project has its headquarters in Amsterdam, but there are research bases in Germany, Italy, France and Slovenia, as well as at UCL and Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.”

While some of the smells will undoubtedly be kind of icky, they also plan on reduplicating more enticing scents, like that of culinary traditions and older types of incense.

Some videos of historical European cooking:

YouTube Video

The team has a website you can check out here: odeuropa.eu

***N.B. If you are a historian who comes to shit on a community diary topic as unimportant, this time I will tell you what I think of your self-satisfaction. ***

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New Day Cafe: The Smells of History

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