Public History MA student Holly Benison has created a cooking show as part of her master’s thesis project. A short excerpt can be found below with the full article by Alyssa Tremblay, “A Recipe for Research: Carleton Student Creates Canadian Culinary History Cooking Show,” available online.
From green corn patties to preserved apples, public history student Holly Benison is teaching people around the world how to cook like a 19th-century Canadian immigrant through her YouTube video series, “The Backwoods Kitchen.”
Half cooking show and half history lesson, the series is actually part of Benison’s master’s thesis project at Carleton University.
Instead of writing a traditional paper, she’s studying women’s work and culinary history in the mid-1800s by creating educational videos in which she recreates recipes and techniques from the 1854 book The Female Emigrant’s Guide by Upper Canada author and naturalist Catherine Parr Trail.